D.C. students reach new heights in annual standardized tests
By Emma Brown, Updated: Tuesday, July 30, 1:03 PM E-mail the writer
Students in the District's traditional public schools scored higher than ever before on the city's annual math and reading tests this year, and they also posted the largest single-year gain since 2008, according to results released Tuesday by Mayor Vincent C. Gray.
The city's public charter schools, which had slightly higher average scores than the traditional system, made their most significant gains since 2009. For the first time, more than half of charter students scored proficient or advanced in reading on the tests, known as the D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System.
More news about education
D.C. students reach new heights in annual standardized testing
Emma Brown 1:03 PM ET
2013 exams show largest single-year gain since 2008; traditional public schools achieve highest scores yet.
Rand Paul wants more school choice for poor, minority students
Lyndsey Layton JUL 29
Possible GOP presidential hopeful pushing charters and vouchers in effort to connect with minorities.
Stolen laptop contained 2,000 Fairfax student health records
T. Rees Shapiro JUL 29
Thief broke into a school nurse's car, taking health department laptop and briefcase that had paper records.
Gray administration officials hailed the results as evidence that the city's sweeping overhaul of public education since 2007 — including the advent of mayoral control of the schools and the rapid growth of charters — is working.
"We're beginning to see the systematic changes that we've all worked hard for and hoped for, for so many years," Gray (D) said in announcing the results before a celebratory crowd at Kelly Miller Middle School in Northeast Washington, where math and reading scores jumped 14 percentage points this year.
Citywide proficiency rates are still far too low, Gray said — the newly released numbers showed overall traditional school proficiency of 48.4 percent across subjects. But, he said, "these results show that what we are doing is working."
"I don't think there's any doubt we're on the right path," Gray added. "We just need to stay the course."
Gray has intensified that stay-the-course message since June, when D.C. Council member David A. Catania (I-At Large) introduced a suite of legislative proposals to overhaul the schools. Catania has argued that student achievement has stagnated at unacceptably low levels.
D.C. Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson said the improvement is the result of the years of work, including the city's overhaul of teacher evaluations, introduction of new curricula, and successful experiments with longer school days and teacher visits to student homes to build positive relationships with parents.
"We have a long way to go, but as the old commercial goes, we've come a long way, baby," Henderson said Tuesday.
The D.C. CAS is administered each spring to students in grades three through eight and in grade 10. The tests offer a snapshot of student learning that officials use to judge schools, teachers and principals.
In traditional schools, 49.5 percent of students scored proficient or advanced in math on the 2013 exams, an increase of more than three percentage points from the year before. The proficiency rate in reading, which had been flat for several years, rose four points to 47.4 percent.
Those gains represent the school system's largest overall improvement since 2008, when scores jumped under then-Chancellor Michelle Rhee. Persistent allegations of cheating cast suspicion on those earlier gains, prompting officials to tighten security by controlling access to test booklets, increasing the number of outside monitors and forbidding teachers from administering exams to their own students.
Critics of standardized testing say the focus on raising scores can lead to a narrower curriculum and a classroom focus on testing well instead of learning.
Bob Schaeffer of FairTest, which is critical of the increasing role of standardized tests in public education, cautioned against reading too much into single-year gains, arguing that scores tend to fluctuate.
More news about education
D.C. students reach new heights in annual standardized testing
Emma Brown 1:03 PM ET
2013 exams show largest single-year gain since 2008; traditional public schools achieve highest scores yet.
Rand Paul wants more school choice for poor, minority students
Lyndsey Layton JUL 29
Possible GOP presidential hopeful pushing charters and vouchers in effort to connect with minorities.
Stolen laptop contained 2,000 Fairfax student health records
T. Rees Shapiro JUL 29
Thief broke into a school nurse's car, taking health department laptop and briefcase that had paper records.
"Rather than jumping to conclusions about the meaning of this year's score gains, DC parents, educators, policy makers and media would be better served by a truly independent, external audit of public school standardized exam performance over the past five years," Schaeffer said in an e-mail. "In addition, the exclusive focus on test scores as the measure of educational quality should be replaced with the use of multiple performance measures including rates of graduation, college attendance, post-school employment, criminal justice system involvement, etc."
Monica Warren-Jones, a parent and Ward 6 representative to the State Board of Education, said she is thrilled by the results and looks forward to when there is no achievement gap between poor children and their more affluent peers.
"But many parents still want to know that their children are getting a full-bodied education that includes access to arts opportunities, to unique learning opportunities," Warren-Jones said.
Charter school students showed similar improvement in 2013, with 58.6 percent scoring proficient or above in math and 53 percent scoring that high in reading — gains of nearly four percentage points in both subjects from the year before.
In all cases, the single-year growth is based on 2012 proficiency rates that were recalculated after city officials determined that adults in 11 schools cheated on that year's tests. With the suspect scores removed, the 2012 scores dropped slightly — about one-tenth of a percentage point for the traditional schools and about three-tenths of a percentage point for charter schools — accounting for a fraction of this year's growth.
Citywide, each subgroup of students — including poor economically disadvantaged children — made progress. While the achievement gap narrowed slightly, it remained stubbornly large: 92 percent of white students were proficient in reading, for example, compared with 52 percent of Hispanic students, 44 percent of black students and 42 percent of poor children.
Students also made gains at every grade level, with those in eighth grade posting some of the highest scores and most significant improvements. Math proficiency rates jumped nearly eight percentage points, to 65 percent, and reading proficiency climbed more than six percentage points, to 55 percent.
Citywide, proficiency rates also rose on science and composition exams.
In the audience for Gray's announcement was Prince George's County Executive Rushern L. Baker III (D), who recently overhauled his county's school leadership as part of an effort to take control of a long-struggling public school system. Baker's vision is similar in some ways to District's approach to education — he said he was inspired, in part, by conversations with Gray about the District's mayoral control. The newly hired Prince George's schools leader answers directly to Baker.
Gray welcomed Baker and told him from the stage that he has "done the right thing."
"All government needs to be invested in improving public education," Baker said at the event. "It's something you have proven today."
Ward Five Council on Education
--
WardFive@googlegroups.com is open to WardFive residents for community discussion and information sharing.
To post to this group, send email to wardfive@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to wardfive+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/wardfive?hl=en
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "WardFive" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to wardfive+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
0 comments:
Post a Comment