Achievement Gap Committee

What's going on with the District's Achievement Gap Committee? Have they made recommendations or issued a report?

Still Making Progress

The Cheltenham School District continues to make progress in raising achievement and closing achievement gaps. The number of students enrolled in the advanced placement high school classes grew from 321 in 2008 to 807 in 2011. The advanced placement classes are best at preparing students for college. The number of African Americans that enrolled in advanced placement classes grew from 20 in 2008 to 191 in 2011. That's progress for all.

In addition, the PSSA scores are getting stronger as the push for equity continues. African Americans have stopped the decline and well over half are proficient in reading and math in all grades. In fact, at the elementary school level the gap is gone with over 80% of the students who are proficient or above. That's progress. The excellence for all agenda is advancing.

Questions for Parent-Teacher Conferences

Here are three questions to ask teachers during parent teacher conferences:

• Ask the teachers to describe your child's strengths and weaknesses.

• Ask to see examples of your child's work.

• Ask the teacher for his or her plan to improve your child's academic achievement.

District Moves Toward Equity

Cheltenham High School (CHS) moved toward equity and gained recognition as one of the best high schools in American by Newsweek magazine based on the increased number of students that are taking and passing advanced placement tests. CAAA has advocated for open access to advanced placement and honors based on student selection and fulfilling prerequisite classes. Opening access based on student motivation offers excellence for all.

CAAA Goals foor 2010-2011

CAAA established the following goals for the current year:

• partnering with the UPG to discuss race relations;
• increasing the involvement of parents in parent organizations such as PTO, UPG and CAAA;
• obtaining the full Achievement Gap Report from the School District; and
• assessing the over identification of African American students in special education.

Please contact us at woalex@aol.com for further information.

Request a Restorative Practices Conference

Several parents have requested restorative practices conferences to address discipline incidents at CHS and Cedarbrook. The parents and children had favorable results. Consider requesting a restorative practice conference the next time your child has a discpline incident. Restorative practices work. Check out the core principles and practices of restorative justice at http://www.iirp.org/pdf/beth06_davey7.pdf

Positive 2008-2009 PSSA Results

CHS showed siginficant improvement in test results for 11th grade students from the state standardized test results known as the PSSA . Over 72% of all 11th grade students were proficient or advanced in math and 82% of students were proficient or advanced in reading. African Americans continue to lag behind, but made the biggest improvements with math scores of 55% and reading of 67% proficent or advanced. Congratulations to the school district, students and parents for the positive improvements.