South Royalton
Statewide, students from more affluent families — identified by the fact that they did not qualify for free or reduced lunch — outperformed, on average, those from poorer families in the computerized Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium test, which students took in the spring. The discrepancy was true in all grades tested — third through eighth, and 11th — and in both subjects tested, English language arts and math.
There were some students from poorer families, however, who bucked the overall trend by performing just as well or better than their more affluent peers, said Vermont Education Secretary Rebecca Holcombe.
“There are schools finding strategies that are successful,” Holcombe said in a phone interview on Friday. “Other schools could even learn something.”
Sussing out practices that shrink the impact of family income on educational achievement is one of the things Holcombe and the state’s educators hope to do using the test data.
Once they identify which practices are effective, they plan to share them with schools across the state, she said.
In the Upper Valley, the gap between students who live in poverty and those who do not was borne out in most schools’ scores, but not all.
For example, 11th-graders at South Royalton School who qualified for free or reduced lunch outperformed — by a wide margin — 11th-graders who did not on the language arts test. Among poorer students, 85 tested proficient, while just 57 percent of the more affluent students demonstrated proficiency.
The more affluent 11th-graders in the South Royalton School outperformed their peers on the math test, although the gap was relatively narrow — 38 percent to 31 percent.
In general, Vermont students scored better in English language arts than math.
To explain the relatively strong performance of South Royalton’s poorer students, Principal Dean Stearns pointed to an emphasis on writing in teachers’ professional development and in the school’s curricula for grades six to 12. The program integrates writing into coursework in other subjects such as social studies, Stearns said.
Last year’s 11th-graders — this year’s seniors — are the first cohort to experience this increased emphasis on writing beginning in sixth grade, Stearns said.
“I see a lot more engagement in classrooms when I walk through,” Stearns said.
Even so, it remains to be seen whether the scores are an anomaly or whether they will continue into the future, Stearns said.
Scores from this spring are considered the first to accurately reflect students’ performance statewide, Holcombe said. The spring of 2015 was the first time the SBAC tests were administered at all Vermont schools, replacing the language arts and math tests by the New England Common Assessment Program.
Due to the technical challenges of adjusting to an online test, Holcombe said, scores from the first year of the SBAC test weren’t reflective of students’ abilities. By this spring, most of those glitches were ironed out, making the scores more accurate, she said.
The scores will not be used to hold schools accountable through the federal Every Child Succeeds Act — which replaced No Child Left Behind last December — until the 2017-2018 school year.
Rather than focusing on the federal labeling of schools as failing or not, Holcombe said she encourages the state’s educators to use test scores and other available information about students’ skills to determine how instruction could be improved.
In terms of bridging the income-based performance gap among students, Stearns said the key is developing relationships between school staff and students who may not have consistent adult support in their lives. It means having staff members check in with students, asking such questions as, “What did you do this past weekend?” Stearns said.
“When they feel valued that way, (they) tend to be more engaged,” he said.
While South Royalton seemed to buck the statewide trend with its 11th grade scores, younger students from less-well-off families tended to score significantly lower on tests.
In third grade, 73 percent of students who didn’t qualify for free or reduced lunch were proficient in English language arts, while just 18 percent of students in poverty showed proficiency. In seventh grade, 35 percent of more affluent students demonstrated proficiency in English language arts and just 15 percent of lower income students did.
The school now has a new social and emotional curriculum in place, which may help reduce the gap between students from different income levels in the lower grades, Stearns said.
He also noted that the test provides a “snapshot” of students’ abilities on a given day. It doesn’t include information about students’ frame of mind when they took the test, he said.
Overall, Stearns cautioned against using the Smarter Balanced tests as a primary indicator of a school’s success.
“As a standalone piece it has limited use to us,” he said.
To get a broader picture of students’ abilities, teachers use more frequent benchmark testing and progress monitoring, which allows them to determine when there are gaps in students’ knowledge, he said.
One bright spot in the Upper Valley’s scores are the SBAC results for White River School, where a majority of students demonstrated proficiency in both English and math in all grades and economic levels for which information was available. Due to privacy concerns, test scores are not publicly available for groups with fewer than 11 students.
“Despite the poverty rates in our school, our students still perform well on state tests,” said Principal Sheila Powers. “It really comes … back to excellent teaching.”
For Powers, excellent teaching means collaboration among school staff, beginning by ensuring that all students have breakfast and proper clothing. Then, teachers need to have an understanding of what the standards are for each grade level and the tools they need to assess students’ abilities. In addition, teachers need time to look at the data, identify gaps and craft instruction plans to address them.
The statewide assessment results are less useful to educators than the more frequent local assessments, she said.
“The teachers are really interested in knowing how our students are performing,” Powers said. “They’re not waiting for state assessments because those are too late.”
One factor aiding in White River’s success is low staff turnover, Powers said.
In some categories, Windsor Schools also had scores that indicate students living in poverty performed just as well or better than students who are not.
For example, students who qualified for free and reduced lunch scored better than those who did not in fourth-grade math, 29 percent compared with 17 percent.
Because Windsor generally has a high poverty rate — 48 percent of Windsor students qualify for free or reduced lunch this year; the statewide average is 40 percent — teachers and administrators recognize there are barriers to academic success that need to be addressed, said Windsor Principal Tiffany Cassano.
Such challenges include delays in language acquisition, low rates of exposure to literacy activities and difficult home environments, Cassano said.
“(We) recognize the importance of … supporting the whole child, not just academically but socially,” she said.
One way the school addresses those barriers is by having a flexible schedule so students can focus on specific skills they may not have mastered yet. In addition, the school offers an after-school tutorial program in both literacy and math.
The school also has a social skills curriculum, which is integrated into the instruction of other subjects and includes skills such as how to manage frustration.
Some students are in the Windsor school from preschool through 12th grade, which provides students with consistency, Cassano said. For example, a new math curriculum, introduced last year, begins in preschool and continues through 12th grade, she said.
Windsor had relatively high math scores in eighth and 11th grade — 62 percent proficient in eighth grade overall and 50 percent proficient in 11th grade overall. Both scores were above the statewide averages of 44 percent proficient in eighth grade and 38 percent proficient in 11th grade.
Cassano partially credited this success to encouraging students to take the tests seriously.
“(The) school administration and our junior class advisers regularly communicated to parents and students how important the scores are,” she wrote in an email.
Statewide, more than half of the students who took the tests scored proficient or above on the English language arts test. In math — except for grade three — fewer than half of the students who took the test scored in the proficient range.
The difference in students’ abilities in the two subjects is something Holcombe aims to address through professional development with teachers in the future, she said.
While improvement efforts are underway, expecting to see a difference in test scores in the near future would be premature, she said.
“Schools are like ocean liners,” she said. “It takes a mile to turn them around.”
Vermont statewide and school by school SBAC results can be found online at http://education.vermont.gov/data-and-reporting/educational-performance/english-language-arts-and-math.
Staff Writer Nora Doyle-Burr can be reached at ndoyleburr@vnews.com or 603-727-3213.
