Sun Prairie Chooses a New Mascot!

Curt the Cardinal forced to retire! (gasp)

They say in sports that what you are defines who you are.  Recognizing both the overabundance of "Cardinals" as state sports mascots, and their own special skill set, district administration appears to be working out a plan to establish a new team mascot and logo for Sun Prairie sports.

What does this district excel in?  Why cherry picking, of course.  And thus it seems clear that we are destined to become the Sun Prairie Cherry Pickers.  Complete with a new mascot: Cherry Chip!

We have only our elected school board members -- and we need FOUR of those--- who have the power to stop the cherry picking and return Curt the Cardinal to his rightful throne.  Do we have a majority of 4 board members who can and will step up, with their big boy (and girl) pants and publicly vow to end the cherry picking and right this listing district?

And while we're at it, why don't we change the Mission Statement to clearly reflect that we require ---DESERVE--- to have all the facts regarding the data used to make decisions.  All data is filtered to some extent (MLB for example, filters baseball stats to include those with only a certain number of at bats.  Otherwise, the guy that had a hit in his only at bat would win the batting title).  But the difference is, that MLB clearly discloses how data has been filtered...and why.

The Sun Prairie school district, on the other hand, filters data until the result proves the case that it wants to make.  Our most recent example had Athletics Director Jim McClowry filtering hockey fee data for the Big 8 Conference.  For hockey, the big 8 includes 8 teams, 3 of which are Madison teams, which all have the same fees and is a perennially cash-strapped district.  Then there's Janesville, which has been hit harder by the recession than most other locales.  Way to make your average hockey fee soar through the roof, Jim!  If one looks at similar sized (to Sun Prairie) school districts, quite the different picture emerges.  Of course that picture doesn't allow Mr. McClowry to tax the hockey players of this community in order to support his plan to add freshman boys and girls soccer teams this year.

Hmm...isn't it supposed to be a plan supported and approved by the SCHOOL BOARD?  It seems clear that McClowry is NOT a hockey fan.

Remember what Donnie Osmond used to sing.... "One bad apple won't spoil the whole darn bunch..."

Can We Correlate WKCE Scores to ANYTHING?

It's time somebody looked (at least in the public eye) at some of the demographics and policy/practices and how they may or may not relate to achievement (in terms of WKCE scores).

First a very brief less in the art of correlation.  We can take any two pieces of information and mathematically determine whether or not there is a pattern...a correlation.   The mathematical tool is the correlation coefficient. It provides a number ranging from -1 (perfect inverse correlation, as X increases, Y decreases) to +1 (perfect correlation, as X increases/decreases, so does Y).  Then, all we need to do is apply some statistics based on the size of our data set to determine whether or not the correlation is significant (statistically speaking).  For this exercise we looked at the 95% level of confidence, which means that there would be 5% or less chance that the correlation observed resulted from chance alone.

Batting First:  Class Size

We had the benefit of the Elementary Task Force having provided the public with data on K-5 class sizes for all 16 Dane Co. school districts.  The correlation is a negative one, -0.356, meaning that as class size increases, WKCE scores actually IMPROVE.  The interesting thing is that if one removes Madison from the data set, the correlation suddenly becomes significant (-0.615), although not hugely so.   To be statistically significant with this small sample size (16), a correlation above 0.497 is required.  But every picture tells a story, and this one is interesting.   Note that for this exercise we focused on WKCE scores at grade 4, which is the only elementary grade at which all five subject areas are tested.

We can see that Sun Prairie, with an average class size of 20.3 kids in grades K-5, resides in the quadrant associated with lower WKCE scores, but also lower class sizes.  Granted, we'll stipulate that the range in class sizes is small to begin with (18-23), but look who resides in that cherry quadrant( higher class sizes, and best WKCE scores):  Waunakee, Middleton, Oregin, McFarland.  These are the schools that are whipping our butt in WKCE performance, yet their class sizes, on average, are larger than ours.


Batting Second:  District Diversity

We hear it all the time...unfortunately most of it is discussed in hushed tones.  Face it folks, this country...and this community with it...has become much more diverse.  We need to talk about it more and better embrace that which comes with diversity.  Not being shy, we correlated district diversity to district-wide WKCE rank for the 16 Dane County districts.  We found a correlation (0.486)just slightly below one significant at the 95% level.  Once again, however, if we take Madison out of the equation, the correlation changes substantially, dropping to 0.286.  This of course, also highlights one of the considerations with the correlation coefficient.  You have to look at the data!  One outlier data point can skew the resulting correlation.  Madison clearly is an outlier here.  But that's not surprising for a district that has nearly 4 times the enrollment of the next largest Dane Co. district.


So...we couldn't see a correlation between diversity and WKCE scores.  Slight, but insignificant.  Do the schools with lower diversity fare better on school testing? Certainly Waunakee, our overall number-1 ranked district for WKCE scores also haves the lowest diversity with "white" students comprising over 90% of the population.  But what about Middleton, with a diversity of over 20% and yet a WKCE rank of 2 out of 16?


Batting Third:  District Socioeconomics (Poverty)

Socio-economic Status.  We most often hear it expressed as the percentage of kids eligible for free or reduced price lunches. It means poverty, folks.  And over the past 3 years of this "blip" in the economy, the numbers have soared all across the state.  Interestingly enough, this is where we found the highest correlation to WKCE scores.  Imagine that...it might be that kids who just don't get enough to eat don't fare well in their learning.  We couldn't possibly imagine that just living in a home that struggles monthly to pay the mortgage or make rent might have some bearing on learning.  Could we?

The correlation here, 0.768, is definitely statistically significant.  And it remains pretty much the same (0.74) even if one excludes Madison. What's interesting about this data, however, is there seems to be a direct correlation from Waunakee to Sun Prairie, but from there, things fall to pieces.  First the correlation takes a downward turn, and then it rises meteorically for the districts with the lowest WKCE scores...and highest poverty levels.


The CleanUp spot
Sorry folks, all batters got left on base.  We looked at average teacher...excuse us..."professional educator"...salary and average years of teaching experience and we got bupkis.  The plots look like a shotgun blast.  Zero correlation.  We hoped to have something to wow you fro the Braun spot, but that's not the case.

All in all, some interesting data.  Wouldn't it be nice to see this from the board and hear them discuss it instead of that snoozefest "Monitoring Report" document?  Hell, this district could wrestle the Cherry-Picking title away from Door Co. what with the way our administration cherry picks the data to show the community.  If data supports what they want to do, we'll see it.  If it doesn't, it will never see the light of day.