McKinley’s 2022 School Performance Framework Rating

Posted September 9, 2022

Dear McKinley-Thatcher Families,

I am writing to let you know that the Colorado Department of Education (CDE) has issued preliminary school ratings on the 2022 “Transitional School Performance Framework” (SPF). This signals the state’s post-pandemic return to testing and accountability. After more than a decade, based on the Spring 2022 decision by the Board of Education and recommendations of the Reimagine SPF Committee, Denver Public Schools is no longer using its own version of the SPF and instead using the CDE SPF. The CDE SPF relies almost exclusively on assessment data from CMAS, PSAT, SAT, and ACCESS test scores.  

McKinley-Thatcher DID NOT RECEIVE A RATING on this year’s SPF due to insufficient data.  This means that, due to our small school size, we did not have enough students take the CMAS assessment in 2021 and 2022 to accurately compare our growth scores. However, our McT students did very well on the CMAS assessment, despite the pandemic and all of the interrupted learning of the past two years. In Literacy (grades 3-5), our students scored in the 78th percentile across the state. This means that, overall, our students scored higher than 78% of other students taking the same test – that is amazing! In Mathematics (grades 3-5), our students scored in the 65th percentile across the state. We are so proud of our students and staff for all of their hard work during these very challenging years!  We met the state’s expectations in both of these content areas for the 2021-22 school year.     

It is important to know that this year’s Transitional SPF includes far fewer students in its growth calculations than in typical years. This is because the pandemic led to a modified state testing schedule and low participation rates across DPS in the spring of 2021. Based on these factors, Denver Public Schools has reservations about the comprehensive nature of the student growth data used in the 2022 Transitional SPF ratings. The district is advising that accountability ratings should be interpreted with caution and that families should consider additional academic and non-academic information when assessing the quality of a school. In 2023 and beyond, when more students participate in testing, future SPFs will provide more reliable and representative data regarding performance for schools and districts.

DPS will use 2022 SPF data to help us improve school quality, ensure that we have more supports in place to drive student achievement at individual schools, and bolster our efforts districtwide to improve participation in state tests. However, since many students did not take the tests statewide, this data is not an accurate representation of the entire student body at most of our schools, and DPS will not use this information for accountability purposes. We will focus our efforts on making sure all of our students are prepared to participate this school year.

Please click here to see the preliminary Transitional 2022 SPF report that CDE has created for our school. Please let us know if you would like to access these documents in another language as we can provide you with an interpreter and/or translated documents. 

Please let me know if you have any questions about these results and how we are using them to make our school even better. For more information about the SPF, families may visit spf.dpsk12.org.

Best,

Ms. Sonia Geerdes (she/her)
Principal
Sonia_Geerdes@dpsk12.net