Hanna Jadin is the Founding Dean of Students at Milwaukee Excellence Charter School, which opened its doors in the 2016–2017 school year.
The school serves 240 students in sixth and seventh grade and is located in 53206 — an area featured in the documentary MILWAUKEE 53206 as the highest incarcerated zip code in the country.
The school operates in the site of what used to be the lowest performing elementary school in the city. And that’s why their mascot is the phoenix, a symbol of that school rising from the ashes.
Milwaukee Excellence is located just nine minutes from the highest performing school in Wisconsin.
In fact, school leaders and staff often use the hashtag #9minutes as a reminder of Milwaukee Excellence’s unrelenting mission to close that student achievement gap.
At the outset, Milwaukee Excellence’s first classes of sixth and seventh graders were scoring, on average, at a second-grade level in math and third-grade level in reading. Only 20% were scoring above the 50th percentile on their MAP assessments.
These low scores were symptomatic of a much deeper problem: student behavior issues, which were so rampant that academics weren’t getting the focus they needed.
In the past year, Jadin and Maurice Thomas, Founder and Executive Director (respectively), embarked on a data-driven mission to change the school conversation from a discussion of detentions, send-outs, and suspensions to a dialogue about real academic results and achievement.
“A good day in our first year of school was based solely on behavioral data, like the number of students on in-class separation, the number of send-outs, and so on. We wanted to shift the focus from behaviors to academics — not only for our kids but also for their families,” explains Jadin.
As a first step, Thomas and Jadin detailed a meticulous seven-step process for using data to inform academic and cultural changes, and they were very disciplined about following this process for every initiative they launched:
Schoolrunner, SchoolMint’s student behavior data management platform, partnered with Thomas and Jadin on steps 1, 2, and 7 by providing a software on which they could gather and analyze their school’s data.
But where the creativity, courage, and sheer genius came in is on steps 3 through 6: what the team at Milwaukee did — and continues to do — with that data.
Below are just a few examples of how the team at Milwaukee Excellence used their data to enact real cultural and academic change at their school.
The Milwaukee Excellence leadership team compiled a data pack that they distribute staff-wide on a weekly basis. This “Order of the Phoenix” publication shows weekly exit ticket scores (by teacher and school-wide), special education data, and math and reading intervention quiz results.
For the math and reading intervention quizzes, Jadin and Thomas use MAP data to group kids by MAP scores and to assign them to teachers who give targeted instruction and assessments on a weekly basis.
According to Jadin, making all stakeholders aware of their individual and schoolwide weekly data and achievement has made their staff feel more invested in the results.
On a daily basis, Jadin makes a school-wide announcement of Student of the Day, which she determines based on real-time GPA as well as the number of daily affirmations (or merits).
In this daily announcement, Jadin also announces the class with the highest GPA. This daily public recognition has inspired friendly competition throughout the school and even drove one of their advisories to increase their GPA from 1.55 to 2.6 in one week.
Every Friday, Milwaukee Excellence hosts a staff-wide data sharing session in which teachers discuss their data, what went well, and what didn’t. They then brainstorm how to improve next week.
According to seventh-grade math teacher Andrew Faber, “These data-sharing sessions are really helpful because I share an intervention period with another teacher where we administer a common assessment. Every Friday, we sit down and review the past week’s assessment data so that we know what topics our kids have mastered or what we need to review next week. That way, I don’t have to sit there on Sunday and try to remember what I did last week and guess what might work next.”
Formerly, Milwaukee Excellence’s incentives for school events (e.g., field trips, dances, etc.) had been behavior-based, but including an academic element has been a strong incentive for students to improve their GPA.
For example, the school hosts a Reading Royalty Lunch with specific subject GPA requirements, and they distribute “swag” (e.g., sweatshirts and t-shirts) for students who hit certain Honors requirements.
Additionally, school dances and field trips have specific GPA and behavior requirements. For example, a “Welcome Back and Boogie” dance required zero send-outs, zero uniform violations, and 96% attendance.
Generally, their learning excursions — which are monthly events that have historically included a trip to Skateland, college visits, and the Black Panther premier — require 96% attendance, a 2.5 GPA, no more than three after-school detentions, a “yes” confirmation vote from every staff member, and a rigorous application.
To hold students to these strict guidelines, Jadin partners with Schoolrunner to gather and analyze this data on an up-to-the-minute basis. As she notes, kids scramble to get their academics and behavior up to snuff so as not to miss these coveted events!
Every Friday, all students participate in a reflective writing exercise in which they’re encouraged to think about their week’s work and come up with goals for improvement. Kids look at their Slips for the week, which detail the week’s behavioral and academic data, down to the specific assessment level, including real-time GPA. They then fill out a Google Form that goes to Thomas and Jadin.
“This reflection and goal-setting exercise has empowered students to use their own data to take control of their learning,” says Jadin.
To place more focus on academic results, the Milwaukee Excellence leadership team began to enforce a 2.5 GPA minimum for extracurricular activities (sports, music, etc.). Jadin or another member of the leadership team attends these after-school activities with a clipboard listing up-to-the-minute GPAs.
As a result of this strict enforcement, students who love their extracurriculars have an extra incentive to bump up their GPAs.
Jadin shared a story of one student, D.J., who showed up at his sports game shortly after this minimum GPA rule was enacted and was dismayed to find that Jadin had a clipboard with all the kids’ GPAs.
He had a 1.67, so he had to watch his team play and lose the game. D.J. took the loss personally, blaming himself for it. He then raised his GPA from 1.67 to 2.57 in time for the next game to make sure he could play for his team.
When students started at Milwaukee Excellence, most of them didn’t really understand what a GPA was, how it’s calculated, how to change it — and, most importantly, what it meant for their future.
Jadin set out to increase students’ awareness and understanding of this crucial measure of success.
Every student has a chromebook and uses Schoolrunner to log in and view their GPAs in real-time, and they can even drill down to the assignment level and see how their performance on each specific assessment impacted their overall GPA.
According to Jadin, you often see students running around the school with their chromebooks open, talking to different teachers about grades they just saw pop up on their portal.
Jadin also regularly cross-references students’ MAP scores and GPAs in the corresponding subjects, and teachers use that data to have discussions with kids about the correlation.
Jadin publicizes the average GPAs for well-known colleges, and they constantly reference these stats.
“If we can get our kids this focused on their GPAs in sixth grade, what’s it going to be like in high school? It’s our goal to increase their awareness early,” Jadin explains.
Milwaukee Excellence Charter School hasn’t even wrapped up their second year, and they’re already seeing the fruits of their labor.
As a direct result of the disciplined process they use in enacting school-wide initiatives, Jadin and her team:
What’s the common theme for all of these innovative ideas? Smart use of data.
Stay tuned for next month’s blog to learn other ways that Jadin and the Milwaukee Excellence team are taking data-driven learning to the next level.
If you’re interested in achieving similarly spectacular results in student achievement at your charter school, learn more about Schoolrunner by SchoolMint at our website here.