State Downgrades McAuliffe Charter School to Level 2

Posted by Susan Petroni 

MCAS results came out last week and the state has downgraded the Christa McAulliffe Regional Charter Public School to Level 2.

This means that none of the middle schools in Framingham are Level 1. Cameron and Walsh Middle are Level 2 and Fuller Middle is a Level 3.

"The greatest areas in need of improvement are with our “high needs” population of students -- those who are identified with learning disabilities, 504 plans, or who are English Language Learners," wrote McAuliffe Executive Director Kristin Harrison in a letter to parents, explaining the MCAS results and the change in level.  

"In all three subject areas, there is a considerable gap in performance between our “high needs” subgroup and the “non-high needs” subgroup. We can make sense of this and attribute this to the fact that our “high needs” subgroup includes students who face a substantially greater challenge to learn than those who do not have identified disabilities or those who are not learning the English Language while also grappling with complex math problems, geology lessons, and writing 5-paragraph essays," wrote Harrison. "However, there is no excuse for us allowing this underperformance to take place at McAuliffe as we are responsible for guiding all of our scholars to learn and make strides toward becoming critical thinkers, strong readers and writers, and mathematicians."

"The 2013 results indicate that we most struggled to meet the learning needs of our “high needs” students in mathematics. And, because we did not make enough progress toward our goals, we’re currently classified as a Level 2 school," wrote Harrison. "The label is just that -- a label. What matters is that school leaders, teachers, and the Education Committee of the Board of Trustees use these results in order to improve our special education program so that all of our scholars make great progress in their learning this year."

• Hired two instructional coaches

MCAS results also showed that in 

• English Language Arts, the school maintained comparable performance to 2012 with 83% of the student body performing at Advanced or Proficient. The average Student Growth Percentile was 58.5 which indicates strong growth in the target range of 40-60.