Big Gains Made, but Most Still Strug­gle to Meet Benchmarks

by Mary Lord and Laura McGif­fert Slover

If every cloud has its sil­ver lin­ing, then the stun­ning gains on the lat­est DC Com­pre­hen­sive Assess­ment Sys­tem test – or DC-CAS – are pure Tiffany in the Dis­trict of Colum­bia, the nation’s low­est per­form­ing “state.”

The nation’s low­est per­form­ing “state.” The test, required by the Fed­eral No Child Left Behind Act, was first admin­is­tered in the spring of 2006. It seeks to mea­sure how well stu­dents in grades three through eight, as well as high school sopho­mores, have mas­tered the core con­cepts in Eng­lish and math­e­mat­ics that they are expected to learn each year.

Between the spring of 2007 and 2008, the per­cent­age of pupils in both pub­lic and pub­lic char­ter schools that per­formed at or above grade level in read­ing and math increased sig­nif­i­cantly at both the ele­men­tary and sec­ondary lev­els. The per­cent­age scor­ing pro­fi­cient or above in math jumped an aver­age of 10 per­cent. Aver­age read­ing scores improved 7.3 per­cent. As the State Board of Edu­ca­tion heard at its July 16 meet­ing, these are the biggest gains DC has seen in many, many years.

Mayor Adrian Fenty, schools Chan­cel­lor Michelle Rhee and State Super­in­ten­dent of Edu­ca­tion Deb­o­rah Gist right­fully cel­e­brated what the mayor called a “mile­stone achieve­ment.” Indeed, although the jour­ney is far from over (too many stu­dents still fall below the bar, and the gap between rich and poor, black and white, stub­bornly per­sists), the upward trend is what counts: Over­all, DC schools clearly are head­ing in the right direction.

The gains are even more impres­sive at the indi­vid­ual school level. While some lost ground, a num­ber of Dis­trict of Colum­bia Pub­lic Schools (DCPS) schools dou­bled or even tripled the pro­por­tion of stu­dents reach­ing or exceed­ing grade level bench­marks. Hend­ley Ele­men­tary School surged from 14 per­cent of stu­dents per­form­ing at or above the pro­fi­cient level in math to 45 per­cent, while Shaw Mid­dle School boosted read­ing profi ciency from 20 per­cent to 39 per­cent, and Stevens Ele­men­tary saw math scores jump from roughly 26 per­cent to 45 percent.

Pub­lic char­ter schools showed wide­spread gains as well. Thur­good Mar­shall Acad­emy, a law-themed high school in South­east, zoomed from 42.6 per­cent in read­ing profi ciency to over 70 per­cent. E. L. Haynes, an inno­v­a­tive Colum­bia Heights ele­men­tary school with a large, eco­nom­i­cally dis­ad­van­taged stu­dent pop­u­la­tion, saw math profi ciency rise from 47.8 per­cent to 67 percent.

So why did scores advance so much? State edu­ca­tion offi­cials will be drilling down into the data to look for answers as to why some schools suc­ceeded while oth­ers stalled out or even lost ground. Experts, how­ever, point to sev­eral broad fac­tors that may have con­tributed to this year’s suc­cesses, which mir­ror strong gains in Bal­ti­more, Prince George’s County and other urban school districts.

Con­sis­tency over Time
When the DC-CAS was first intro­duced in 2005–2006, it was hailed by experts such as Michael Casserly, exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Coun­cil of the Great City Schools, as a chal­leng­ing test. Not only was the con­tent dif­fi­cult, so was the grad­ing, since the Board of Edu­ca­tion adopted rig­or­ous per­for­mance stan­dards (i.e., cut scores). As a result, the first year the test was admin­is­tered, achieve­ment scores were quite low. The pub­lic was dis­mayed, and many asked whether the tests were too hard. Yet rather than lower the bar, edu­ca­tion offi­cials held the course, main­tain­ing
the same chal­leng­ing assess­ment sys­tem and the high per­for­mance stan­dards. This “if you build it, they will come” approach paid off this year – show­ing that stu­dents can achieve at high lev­els if much is expected of them. This is con­sis­tent with results in other states that have expe­ri­enced a third or fourth year “bump.”

Famil­iar­ity with Con­tent
As teach­ers get more famil­iar with their sub­ject mat­ter, they get bet­ter at teach­ing it. The DC aca­d­e­mic stan­dards were new just a year before the DC-CAS was intro­duced, so by now they have had more expe­ri­ence with the con­tent and have likely adapted their teach­ing. Some may call this “teach­ing to the test,” but really it’s a mat­ter of teach­ers “teach­ing to the stan­dards.” Since the tests reflect the stan­dards, bet­ter teach­ing of the con­tent will have direct pay­off in improved test scores.

Famil­iar­ity with Test
As stu­dents get more famil­iar with the test for­mat, they get more com­fort­able tak­ing the test. One impor­tant fea­ture of the DC-CAS is its empha­sis on “con­structed response” ques­tions. These are ques­tions that require stu­dents to for­mu­late their own answer – not just fill in a bub­ble – so they are con­sid­ered to be more reflec­tive of impor­tant crit­i­cal think­ing and prob­lem solv­ing skills. Typ­i­cally, these kinds of test items are chal­leng­ing for stu­dents, espe­cially if they are not expe­ri­enced at tak­ing them. This year, after sev­eral years of tak­ing the test, stu­dents could have antic­i­pated these ques­tions and been more pre­pared for them.

Track­ing Progress through­out the Year
In school year 2006–2007, a reg­u­lar assess­ment pro­gram was intro­duced, which included quar­terly base­line or “for­ma­tive” tests that were closely aligned to the spring DCCAS. Teach­ers could use the results to pin­point which stu­dents needed extra help and to tar­get instruc­tion on improv­ing what­ever weak­nesses were revealed. Th is past school year, the Office of the State Super­in­ten­dent of Edu­ca­tion (OSSE) worked closely with DCPS and char­ter schools to improve these for­ma­tive assess­ments – bet­ter align­ing them with the stan­dards and the spring tests, and includ­ing con­structed response items for the first time.

Spe­cial Pro­grams
Many schools insti­tuted tutor­ing pro­grams, after-school com­mu­nity part­ner­ships, Sat­ur­day acad­e­mies and other extra learn­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties. These prob­a­bly helped improve achieve­ment as well.

Focus on Data-Driven Deci­sion Mak­ing
At every level of the sys­tem, edu­ca­tors focused on data. DCPS Chan­cel­lor Rhee helped spur a new cul­ture of data-driven decision-making by under­scor­ing the impor­tance of assess­ments as a tool in tai­lor­ing instruc­tion and deter­min­ing class­room prac­tice. Many suc­cess­ful char­ter schools also use data to improve instruc­tion and pin­point strug­glers before they fail. Sim­i­larly, State Super­in­ten­dent Gist will be dig­ging into the DC-CAS assess­ment data over the next few months to iden­tify what pro­grams and prac­tices are hav­ing an impact so that they can be repli­cated and sup­ported. In addi­tion, the OSSE is about to launch its efforts around devel­op­ing the Statewide Lon­gi­tu­di­nal Edu­ca­tion Data (SLED) Ware­house, which will help track indi­vid­ual stu­dent per­for­mance so that improve­ment strate­gies can be tar­geted toward stu­dents’ needs. Stay tuned!

Ulti­mately, the results speak for them­selves – and teach­ers and stu­dents should be proud of the work they have done this year. Even so, it is not time to pop the cham­pagne just yet. Despite this year’s dra­matic improve­ment, sig­nif­i­cant achieve­ment gaps between eth­nic and income groups per­sist and almost two-thirds of our stu­dents still fall short of the bench­marks. A case in point is Ana­cos­tia High School, which saw its 10th grade read­ing pro­fi­ciency soar from roughly 6 per­cent to 21 per­cent, which is great – but that still means 4 in 5 stu­dents fall below grade level. More­over, some schools lost ground while oth­ers barely budged. Th e per­va­sive low achieve­ment shows that while we are on the right track, there is still much ground to cover for our stu­dents to really get the edu­ca­tion they need and deserve.

Still, good news is good news. Indeed, in many ways, the upward trend line is more impor­tant than the annual tick up or down of each indi­vid­ual school. As the old Asian adage holds, the jour­ney of 1,000 miles begins with the first step. The lat­est foot­prints sug­gest the District’s pub­lic and pub­lic char­ter schools are headed in a good direction.

For school-by-school results, please visit the Office of the State Super­in­ten­dent for Education’s spe­cial web­site www.nclb.osse.dc.gov.