Spotlight on Oak Grove Educators and Students Share Their Experience with i-Ready

Seeing the Impact, Gaining Confidence

How one Silicon Valley district empowered teachers and accelerated student growth

Amy Boles is Director of Educational Services for Oak Grove School District (OGSD), where over 70% of students are Latino, Asian, or Pacific Islander and nearly one quarter are English Learners.

“Our students reflect a great diversity of backgrounds and needs. We’re always working to understand what they’ve come in with and where they can go next,” she says.

Amid economic disparities, budget pressures, and decreasing enrollments, OGSD is striving to invest wisely and fulfill its mission of equipping every child to achieve their maximum potential.

“Our challenge is helping one teacher differentiate instruction for 25–35 students.”

—Amy Boles, Director of Educational Services for Oak Grove School District

READ HER DISTRICT’S STORY

Why the district chose iReady

In 2014, Oak Grove was adjusting to new learning standards, a new state assessment system, and revised state funding formulas.

Superintendent José L. Manzo told the adoption team: “Whatever tool we choose, it must give teachers continuous and ongoing feedback regarding the impact of their instruction.”

They chose iReady, citing its ability to pinpoint students’ placement across domains and then build out an appropriate learning progression, its coverage of K–8, and its overall ease of use.

We asked OGSD students: “What is iReady?”

What happened after implementation

The goal during OGSD’s multiyear implementation has been getting solid data and helping teachers to use that data to inform instruction. In the beginning, OGSD leaders knew that teachers would need to see iReady work inside their own classrooms, with their own students, to believe in it.

So they gave teachers space to explore and integrate iReady at their own pace, and soon, crops of “early adopters” surfaced. Says Boles, “One of the exciting benefits that came through was that teachers began training themselves and one another. They were taking ownership.”

 

Percentage of Students with Passing SBAC Scores

Grades 3–8
Bar graph representing the percentage of students with passing SBAC scores within Grades 3 through 8.

Oak Grove sees results

  • Since adopting iReady, Oak Grove’s proficiency rates as measured by the SBAC have increased 8 percentage points in Mathematics and 7 percentage points in ELA.
  • Year 3’s third graders, who had used iReady for the largest portion of their schooling, delivered the biggest grade-level improvement yet: their SBAC results reflected an increase of 13 and 10 percentage points in Mathematics and ELA, respectively, for Grade 3 since adoption of the program.
  • A performance gap between OGSD and other districts in Santa Clara County has begun to close in both subjects: a 14-point spread in Mathematics has narrowed to 10 points.