| Schools Forced to Make Due with Less
Sometimes local reporting gets to the heart of an issue. Evan Brandt, the intrepid Pottstown Mercury journalist, wrote a compelling article on education funding that gets right to the point. Here is an excerpt of his full piece, which you can read here.
There’s a dirty little secret about standardized test scores that we don’t talk about so much – they’re too slow to help the students who take them.
“Those assessments happen in mid-January to mid-February,” explained Ryan Oxenford, director of curriculum and educational programs for the Pottstown School District. “But we don’t get the results until August, so those students are long gone.”
Those results are not telling you how students are doing today, but how they were doing eight months ago. That information is little help to a classroom teacher trying to help students achieve the academic growth the nation demands and those tests are supposed to measure. How is a third-grade math teacher who sees data indicating Johnny is struggling with multiplication supposed to use that data to help Johnny when Johnny has now moved on to fourth grade and long division?
In the fight for fair school funding in Pennsylvania, Pottstown Schools Superintendent Stephen Rodriguez has been outspoken about how adequate funding would help pay for the programs, the tools Pottstown needs to help its under-performing students grow academically. With “level-up” funding from the state – not the full adequacy needed, but an increase nonetheless – over the last two years, and federal funds meant to mitigate learning losses due to COVID, Pottstown did just that.
The district purchased new tools, ensured teachers knew how to use them, and trained teacher coaches to provide the support necessary to make sure the new programs worked. They did.
Pottstown is using a tool called “Link It,” which uses [a] benchmarking strategy, but is also aligned with the PSSA tests, so that progress measured and weak points addressed will also help improve PSSA scores.
“We built our entire school calendar to support this process. We start at the beginning of the year, to find out where each student is and then in a few weeks, we can assess progress, and that coincides with parents’ night, so we can involve the parents in talking about their student, and what areas need work,” Oxenford explained.
The teachers work with the teacher coaches to prepare and plan lessons for focusing on areas where more work is needed, so they can plan instruction for the next eight weeks when the next assessment occurs, Oxenford said.
“It’s a much faster cycle than the PSSA. Now we can assess progress and address areas where more work is needed every couple of weeks; it’s a faster cycle and very objective,” Oxenford said.
“So by November, we already know what needs work with each student. And in February, we get another update. The system provides better data faster, which helps us make better decisions, and it has created consistency within the organization,” he explained.
Sadly, just as Pottstown is finding success with just a fraction of the resources fair state funding would provide, it is at risk. The expiration of the COVID-era federal funding and the absence of a coherent and consistent plan to ramp state funding up to the level fair funding calls for, the school district found itself with a $9 million budget gap when the 2025-2026 budget was first presented in February.
After much deliberation, the school board voted to adopt a budget that closed that gap, partially by raising taxes for the first time in five years by 5.8%, and partially by making cuts. Among those cuts were some of the teacher coaches Oxenford said were “highly instrumental in making these changes,” which led to the success of the data-based teaching methodology.
“We used to have eight, now we have four,” he said. The coaches “take care of the people who take care of our students. We had a lot of good momentum going, and now we’re going to have to make due with less.”
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