Regarding how this district should be improving teaching, here’re some excerpts from an article I’d urge you to read:
“A new paper from Maroun and Tienken sets out to determine whether a state’s big standardized test measures student learning, teacher effectiveness, or something else. The answer, it turns out, is something else.
“The tests are not measuring how much students learned or can learn,” says Tienken. “They are predominately measuring the family and community capital of the student.”
In other words, one could, with a high degree of accuracy, predict the results of the annual test of student learning and teacher effectiveness without actually giving students a single test.”
“The Pernicious Predictability of State-Mandated Tests of Academic Achievement in the United States,” focuses on standardized state math tests in New Jersey, finding the same result and offering an explanation for the effect.
What conclusions can we draw from this addition to the research on the subject of test scores?
First, we can once again recognize that the standardized tests used to make definitive statements about student learning and teacher effectiveness, to assess the quality of administrators, to declare a school “failing,” to pinpoint student academic weaknesses and strength - these tests are in fact simply reflecting the demographics of the students’ families.
Second, if policy makers must insist that the big standardized test scores must be used for this wide variety of policy purposes, research like this suggests that the best way to improve test scores for students from less resource-filled backgrounds might be to provide them with wider and deeper experiences aimed at building background knowledge, rather than bombarding them with test prep exercises and workbooks.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/petergreene/2024/02/10/research-shows-what-state-standardized-tests-actually-measure/
Give teachers the freedom to teach and stop micromanaging them!