The Timberlane school board purchased a $184,000 program without being given any data whatsoever from its trial period. The trial had been going on since Jan. 2016 using actual Timberlane student data. Negative teacher feedback was also not given the board.
Less than a month before the board’s vote to purchase, Debra Armfield, Executive Director of Curriculum, Assessment & Professional Learning K-12 emailed Dr. Metzler concerning Achieve 3000:
“I’m a bit concerned that we don’t have great supporting data for the adoption, but I trust you on this. I know you have a handle on how the board feels about things, so you know best whether or not they will balk at an annual contractual obligation of $107k. We could pull about 20K out annually and put it in the grant, making the annual cost closer to $87K. Let me know when you have time to strategize.”
She also revealed in that August 23, 2016 email that the funds for the Achieve 3000 program “…were designated for math, but math went through last year.”
You can see her entire email here: armfiled-email-poor-supporting-data (The financial terms Ms. Armfield mentions ultimately changed with the board rushing headlong to pay for all three years of the program upfront.)
One conscientious teacher tried to alert the administration to serious drawbacks of the program; namely, out-of-date material and poor coverage of contemporary topical issues in this teacher’s field. redacted-teacher-search-results
All this information is from my Right to Know request of Oct. 16, 2016 which is available at the SAU office for anyone to inspect. I have since asked to see all testing data by grade level from trial to now. School Board Chairman, Peter Bealo, replied that this information will not be forthcoming to me because it cannot be separated from identifiable student information. I know this to be false.
Here are the student results from Jan.2016 to May 2016 I obtained through my Oct. 16 Right to Know request. You can see it is aggregated by grade level (6,7,8) and completely without individual student data. It is hard to know how well the program is working because of the great variability in the number of students taking the test from month to month. trial-test-results
Why would Mr. Bealo not want this information made public or provided to the board? No data. No accountability, but let’s roll the program into our elementary schools anyway. The more data we can collect on our children, the better…. for whom?
Further to my posting about Achieve 3000 yesterday, I have since discovered that by signing a formal quote, our district agreed to a boilerplate contract on Achieve 3000’s website. I have no evidence anyone actually read the terms of service before signing it, nor do I have evidence to the contrary. You can read the terms of service agreement here: Terms of Service Achieve 3000
Some school districts require vendors to sign a detailed contract of their own specifying their own terms and ethical restrictions. You will find section 18 of the Monroe County School District’s contract with Achieve 3000 of particular interest. Timberlane provided me with nothing like this and we in Timberlane can only marvel, sadly, at the professionalism of Monroe. (Thank you to a reader for this!) Interestingly, you will also see that the documentation from Monroe shows comments from its legal review that states the personal relationship disclosure is not complete. (Their board gets to see legal comments? !).monroe-country-school-district-achieve-3000-contract
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