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Guest Interview with
Dr. Darren Pascavage
Dr.
Darren Pascavage is currently serving as Headmaster & VP for Academic
Affairs at Holy Spirit Preparatory School in Atlanta, GA,
and has extensive experience in the areas of program planning and student
assessment.
ISC: How can schools become less narrowly isolated in a traditional
disciplines approach to teaching and learning and become more focused on
addressing some of the challenges that the 21st century brings?
DP: Importantly, each school needs to define this for themselves,
based in large part on the school’s unique mission and upon the
market that the school wishes to serve. Some schools will find
success focusing on traditional disciplines and will perhaps address them
using technology, while other schools will create or adopt new forms of
organization that will differ sharply from the isolated, departmentalized
view of academics now found in many schools.
ISC: What particular difficulties, in relation to programmatic
sustainability, do Southeastern schools face that are
different from those in other geographic locations?
DP: Anecdotally, I would observe that the explosion of growth in the
Southeast has come from transplants from the Northeast, Midwest,
and West. Such parents bring with them different expectations as far
as what schools do, how schools relate to parents and students, and the
kinds of experiences that students can expect to have in school. In
the Catholic school world, for example, there are sharp differences between
parochial schools (common in other parts of the country) and independent
schools (less evident elsewhere but found throughout the southeast) such
that parents are sometimes taken aback when, for example, what they
perceive to be “Catholic school” tuition exceeds $10,000 per
annum compared to the parochial tuition they are used to.
ISC: How have standardized test scores been misused or
misinterpreted?
DP: I have observed, especially in working with boards in using test
scores to evaluate overall program efficacy, that the kinds of normal
fluctuations sometimes seen in school data can mislead school leaders into
thinking that important gains (or losses) in student achievement have been
the result of personnel, curricular, or resource changes. Typically,
a change in personnel, curriculum, or resources (such as textbooks) takes
at least three years to observe, which is why I prefer to use longitudinal
monitoring of scores rather than single-year “snapshots” which
tell me very little about what is, or is not, working in a school. It
is not uncommon for a three- or four-point swing in, say, first grade
National Percentile Rank in a single testing year (which is perfectly
within the normal bounds of fluctuation expected of most nationally-normed tests) to be misinterpreted as evidence of a
significant improvement (or decline) for that grade level. Three
consecutive years of such changes, in the same test area and in the same
grade level, would be evidence of an important change, but a single year of
such observed changes tells us very little.
ISC: In your opinion, are there any dangers to being too
results-oriented?
DP: Clearly, if the focus on results ignores the process by which those
results are to be achieved, one may be dismayed by what occurs. I
often comment that the easiest way for a given school to increase its
average standardized test scores is to annually expel students who earn the
lowest 20% of scores in a given class. This will yield the intended
result (increase in test score average) but is typically not the kind of
thing that boards are likely to support. Usually the dangers of being
too focused on results are more subtle, but nonetheless the risks are
present and must be considered.
Thanks to Dr. Pascavage for the interview!
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