By Eileen Oldfield, Staff Writer
Ahead of this year’s round of standardized tests for local students, school administrators are setting targets for students as well as trying to ensure students can reach those targets.
”We strive for excellence for all students,” Barbara Popp, the district’s director of curriculum and instructional assessment, said during Tuesday’s Board of Education meeting. “That does not just mean proficient because proficient is not good enough.”
The district principals, along with Ms. Popp and Director of Special Services Audrey Press, presented the district’s academic goals and action plan for the 2009-10 school year during the meeting, listing the district’s testing goals and methods to be used to attain the goals.
In addition to the state and federal reporting needs, district officials use the data from the tests to analyze weaknesses throughout the district across various content areas and address the problem areas, according to Ms. Popp. Typically, the district receives the test results, distributes the results to the various departments and schools, and they analyze the results to identify various groups’ needs.
”I get the test results, and the principals get the test results, and we sort out where they need to go,” Ms. Popp said. “From those test results, we develop a data notebook and ask ourselves many questions.”
While analyzing the results, the administrators hunt for long- and short-term goals and develop ways of attaining the goals and ensuring students’ grasp of the information taught in class.
Like any year, the district principals hope to increase the test scores, but in many cases, it’s not just improving on last year’s scores.
”If you look at our language arts scores, they are on par with other schools like us,” Manville High School Principal Donald Woodring said during his report. “Our math scores are a little lower. Our goal is not to meet any schools like us. Our goal is to be the best we can be.”
Last year, 77 percent of students scored proficient or advanced proficient on the language arts portion of the High School Proficiency Examination. Students in special education scored a 42 percent proficient or advanced proficient on the same exam.
The school hopes to increase both scores by 20 percent for 97 percent proficient or advanced proficient and 62 percent of special education students scoring proficient or advanced proficient.
The school hopes to see the same 20 percent increase in its math scores, which were 70 percent proficient or advanced proficient and 26 percent proficient or advanced proficient in the special education population in last year’s testing.
Students at Alexander Batcho School missed only two of the school’s testing goals in 2008-09, Principal James Brunn said. This year, he hopes to see 72 percent of special education students receive proficient or advanced proficient and 85 percent of students receiving proficient or advanced proficient on the sixth-grade language arts exam. On the eighth-grade math exams, goals are set at 61 percent of special education students reaching proficient or advanced proficient and 80 percent of students scoring proficient or advanced proficient.
”We’re trying to go from the 40th percentile to the 80th percentile (in the special education scores), but you have to remember we’re talking about five or six students,” Dr. Brunn said.
”The information that you see here, if you don’t apply it and don’t involve the teachers, it’s just data,” he added.
Though changes in the third- and fourth-grade standardized tests allowed districts to reset their progress toward standardized test benchmarks, Roosevelt Principal Michael Magliacano and Weston Principal Don Frank were concerned with the subgroups that did not reach testing benchmarks. Some of the concerns stem from language barriers where the students do not regularly speak English at home and run into translation problems when taking the tests, Mr. Magliacano said.
Goals for Roosevelt School include 82 percent of all students and 82 percent of the economically disadvantaged subgroups receiving proficient or advanced proficient on the grade five language arts exam. On the grade four math exam, the school hopes to see 73 percent of both groups pass the test.
The goal at Weston is a 20 percent increase in math and language arts scores on the grade three tests, with the economically disadvantaged subgroup being a particular concern.
”Our numbers tell us we pretty much need to do some retooling and then some attacking,” Mr. Frank said.
The district has several programs in place to help students with schoolwork, including teachers addressing student needs in class, additional instruction during the school day and after-school instruction. The district added more structure to the after-school instruction this year and increased parental involvement to ensure students don’t skip the club, Ms. Popp said. Since the after-school instruction is by invitation only, students who need help in an area are recommended for the instruction.
”Even if the student scored 200 (on the test), you don’t want to leave it,” Ms. Popp said. “You want it to get better and not go back.”
Though the focus is on testing, officials said they are not “teaching to the test” or replacing parental involvement in education.
”The district is providing about five-and-a-half hours of additional instruction a week through grant funding,” District Superintendent Johanna Ruberto said. “And it’s not homework help. We’re not taking the place of a parent’s responsibility to monitor a student’s work.”
