New Orrington Principal - Controversial Past or Fake News?

A deep dive into the claims against the new Orrington Principal, most of which I argue are less than convincing

I don’t usually like to write about Principals or folks at a level below Superintendent or School Board but this landed on my desk and I can’t not write on this. Here’s the story: Orrington hires a new Principal, Dr. Alison Schoeffmann.

• Dr. Turner’s Letter

• District 65 appoints new principals at Nichols and Orrington (Evanston Roundtable)

The District sent me a comment (before any of my readers! Come on people, you guys need to step it up on the tip line)

It is our desire to be as transparent and forthcoming as possible with the community and also set Dr. Schoeffman and the Orrington community up for success and a strong start in this new chapter.  As stated in Dr. Turner's letter, we did our homework and spoke with leaders in both districts during her tenure and Dr. Schoeffmann was never fired or asked to resign and there is no basis to these online claims. Both districts shared that she operated with the utmost integrity.

Anyway, let’s talk about this.

Timeline & Facts

First, as the Roundtable mentioned, the underlying story was covered in some right wing news rag. I request you ignore this because it’s just a distraction from the facts.

Here’s the best timeline of the controversy that I can construct;

Winnetka - District 36

• 2013: Dr. Schoeffman joined Winnetka District 36 as the director of curriculum, instruction, and assessment.

• 2013-2015: Introduction of a new mathematics and reading curriculum

• December 2015: She resigned from Winnetka District 36, according to a source this was related to allegedly concealing student performance data. According to District 65 her resignation was unrelated and she was not asked to quit or resign.

River Forest - District 90

• March 21, 2016: Dr. Schoeffman was hired by River Forest District 90 as the director of curriculum and instruction, starting on July 1.

• 2016-2019: Introduction of a new mathematics and reading curriculum, at a cost of $375,000.¹ During this time, the Illinois State Board of Education's classification of all three River Forest K-8 schools changed from "Exemplary" to "Commendable”

• Summer 2021: Promoted to Assistant Superintendent of Instruction.

According to stories, in both D36 and D90, the curriculum that Dr. Schoeffman implemented (and the District leadership agreed to) was:

• Reading: Lucy Calkins and Heinemann

• Math: TERC’s Investigations Curriculum

One thing that I’ve learned reporting on curriculum is that no matter what you’re writing about, you can find studies saying whatever you want. All the research is evidence-based, but half the studies are dubious anecdata and/or sponsored by one vendor or another. ²

After I wrote about District 65’s new curriculum I got a bunch of emails - half said it sucks³ and the other half said that it is great and ties in nicely to math instruction.

My personal opinion is that unless the curriculum is really bad, it matters about 10% and the quality of teaching is the other 90%. Even if you had the perfect curriculum, it’s not just going to jump into every kid’s head.

So What’s the Scandal?

Just like the story last week on the new principal at Lincoln - the stories mostly come back to a single blog post. In this story, the authors claim that as the District implemented new math curriculum and witnessed a decrease in test scores. The Administration described this drop as “generally fine". However, Parent Coffee did their own review and alleged that the District was committing something of an error of omission.⁴

This table below is their fundamental claim:

I’m not sure I agree with Parent Coffee that this is a “cover up.” This touches on something that absolutely makes the data scientist in me nuts: cherry picking arguments from weird opaque metrics.

• The metric is: medians of a weird growth metric (SGP) that compares the student’s growth to a national set - I would imagine that national set changes every year, which is going to introduce all sorts of weird volatility into your year over year comparisons.

• The test scores did go down for 4th grade (15 points!) but only 1 point for 5th grade and 6 points for 3rd grade (including an increase from 2012-14!). I wouldn’t say this is a uniform drop.

• They cherry picked which things are red and which are yellow. Like, why not make red 10+ pts below target? or 5 points? The coloring is misleading and causes you to miss the drop that happened in the control group - 6th grade.

• Should you be looking at this table horizontally or as cohorts (ie diagonally)? If you look at it as cohorts, the kids who started in 3rd grade (52) finished 5th grade with a higher score (56)!

• The benchmark is “High-Performing” - we’re not talking about the kids not being able to do math here - everyone is still near or above average.⁵ I wouldn’t describe this as a “failing curriculum.”

• You have no idea what the alignment is between the STAR test and a change in curriculum. It’s probably takes a few years for staff to optimize the lesson plans against the test.

I look at this and say, “yeah this seems generally fine and we should wait and see” - obviously a drop in test scores is interesting and worth a deep dive, but I’m not convinced I would fire a head of curriculum over this or call out a scandal.

It’s pretty similar to the allegations from District 90.

I’m not arguing that there isn’t a problem in education right now - there are tons of them and I’ve written about them here. Things like grade inflation, weakening of standards, abandoning grading systems, etc are all real things. I just don’t think this case exemplifies that - it’s not clear to me how you can separate the signal from the noise.

To further make my point, let me show an example of what I think a convincing case looks like when using a weird metric. This is from my story the other day (stay tuned, more charts like this coming!) using 5Essentials data.

Take the first metric, “Principal-Teacher Trust” - between 2020 and 2022 it dropped about 8 points - I wouldn’t write a story on this⁶ - it could easily be statistical noise for all the reasons I mentioned above. But between 2022 and 2023, it dropped a whopping 31 points. That is newsworthy and a significant indicator of a real underlying change (and in fact, there was).

I don’t look at either of these cases (D36 or D90) regarding Dr. Schoeffman and see a scandal. Again, if these results showed up on my desk, I probably wouldn’t publish this story unless there was more to it. I especially wouldn’t push a random staffer under the bus for doing their job - as a journalist, the buck stops with those who have actual power, the School Board and Superintendent. By focusing the reporting on her, you’re letting those with power off the hook.

Welcome back to Evanston, Dr.Schoeffman.

1. What a deal! District 65 just spent over $1.1 million bucks on new reading curriculum.

2. Consider this: I was working on a story involving Restorative Practices in Discipline and reading some of the top papers in the field. This paper for instance has 836 citations and is one of the top studies advocating for restorative practices (ie peace circles). The study consists of 412 students … in two schools … in one town .. yet is treated as a key result in educational science. This is bad science.

3. Part of the “Wit and Wisdom Industrial Complex”

4. They also claim the Superintendent apologized to them but provide no evidence of such

5. "Lake Woebegone Winnetka, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average."

6. “School Trust Drops 8 Points - Principal failing Teachers”