Preliminary state indicator results for the Buckeye Local Schools District is a mix of bad news and good news that will pose many “why” questions from administrators.
First the good news. “The big celebration here is that Edgewood Senior High School has achieved an excellent rating,” said Louise Casagrande, the district’s director of curriculum instruction in a report to the board of education Tuesday evening.
The school met all of its 10th and 11th grade indicators in the preliminary report, dated June 27. For the 11th grade, proficiency scores ranged from 88.4 percent for science to 92.4 percent for reading.
The school achieved a performance index score of 102.2 percent. “That’s just amazing,” Casagrande said.
She and the board congratulated the school’s principal, Karl Williamson, who faced down the data and worked with the school’s teachers to raise the test scores.
The bad news was in the elementary and junior high buildings, which received effective ratings across the board.
Kingsville and Pierpont each met six of 12 indicators; North Kingsville nailed nine, and Ridgeview met eight. Braden met five of eight.
Districtwide, the preliminary results show 24 out of 30 indicators met, for an effective rating. Students did well in reading, with 100 percent of indicators met, and math, with 75 percent met. Science and social studies gave students the most problems, with only 50 percent of indicators met.
Grade 5 presented some of the most disappointing numbers across all four buildings. At Ridgeview and Pierpont, fifth-graders failed to climb above the 75 percent score in any of the four subject areas. Kingsville hit only one of them; North Kingsville managed to hit two of them, science and reading.
Braden eighth-graders also struggled to make the 75-percent mark. Only the reading score, 75.6 percent, was above the cutoff for effective. Social studies, in particular, gave Braden students trouble. They scored 47 percent on the test.
Dennis DeGennaro, an American history teacher at Braden, addressed the board during public comment period. He said he does not have a problem with being held accountable for students’ performance on the test, but at the same time resents the fact the state uses just one test as a measuring standard for how well educators do their jobs.
DeGennaro said that as a history teacher, he feels it’s important to not only teach facts, but also concepts that can’t be measured on a test. “You teach history so you don’t repeat the mistakes of the past,” he said.
He downloads questions from prior year’s exams and uses them to prepare students. However, he said it’s unfair that the state has questions on the test that cover subjects that’s not covered in the classroom until after the tests are given.
“To me, this idea of having a state test is a politician’s way of being accountable,” DeGennaro told the board. He urged them question the way legislators hold districts accountable.
“We elected them, we voted them in, we can vote them out,” he told the board. “Why aren’t school districts in the state up in arms about this?”
Superintendent Nancy Williams and Casagrande said the data will be reviewed and studied by administrators during the coming months as they try to develop strategies for raising the scores next year.
“Data is supposed to drive questions, so we have a lot questions,” Casagrande said.
Things won’t get any easier in the years to come, however, as the Adequate Yearly Progress floor, a statewide accountability goal that is part of No Child Left Behind, will rise annually until it is at 100 percent. A district that misses the AYP for three consecutive years and misses it in more than one student subgroup in the current year cannot be rated higher than continuous improvement.
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