- The oldest Time Capsule Project DISD middle schools (Quintanilla 2005 & Greiner 2009) now have the highest 3-year average SEI* scores of all 31 DISD middle schools!
- The 5 middle schools with newer Time Capsule Projects have achieved an average 3-year SEI gain of 6.7 points per school!
- The 24 middle schools with no Time Capsule Project suffered an average 3-year SEI loss of 0.7 points during the same years.
- Sunset, with the oldest high school Time Capsule Project, has now changed one of the worst DISD graduation rates a decade ago into the highest of all 22 non-magnet high schools! (Calculated as the balance between 9th grade size and number of diplomas given within 4 years without corrections allowed in state calculations.)
- See charts & details in October 2016 blogs at www.StudentMotivation.org.
Annual goal-focused letter writing is now recommended for all grades in Time Capsule Project schools. It is also recommended that the request for parents to write a letter about their dreams for their child come directly from the student in a personal letter. This was first done in May 2016 with the result that the old 30% parental response rate almost tripled! As many as 85% of parents responded with a potentially priceless letter to their child.
The third Quintanilla 10-year reunion will be this year, scheduled as planned before Career Day. The 8th grade class of 2007 will return to pick up their 2007 letters in time for volunteers to be secured for Career Day. Eighth grade students were told a decade ago to be prepared to give such talks. They speak with current students on Career Day about life after middle school, their employment and preparation for it, and what they would do differently if they could be 13 once again. Is it easy to understand why the SEI is rising?
* “School Effectiveness Indices (SEI’s) are Dallas ISD's value-added measure of the academic performance of a school's students. The SEI model is an alternative to evaluating school performance with absolute measures such as passing rates. SEIs are a fairer method for determining a school's effect on student performance because they take into consideration known factors over which school personnel have no control, such as socio-economic status, language proficiency, and gender.”From https://mydata.dallasisd.org/SL/SD/SEI/Default.jsp with 18 years SEI data by school.
