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Latest Charles City School District statewide test scores show mixed results

Latest Charles City School District statewide test scores show mixed results

By Mary Pieper, Special to the Charles City Press, and By Bob Steenson, bsteenson@charlescitypress.com

Charles City School District grade levels made progress in a number of areas on the Iowa Statewide Assessment of Student Progress and slipped in others, according to the results of the annual test.

The district, in a statement, said the ISASP results show the district is recovering from COVID-19 setbacks that many school districts across the state experienced.

Iowa public school students in certain grades take the assessment each year, and the scores from spring 2022 were recently released by the state. There were no tests given in the 2019-20 school year because the COVID-19 pandemic closed most schools in the spring that school year.

Latest Charles City School District statewide test scores show mixed resultsThe strongest gains were made by the fifth grade classes in science, the results show, more than doubling the number of students proficient from 27.5% in the 2018-19 school year to 61.8% proficient last year. The fifth grade classes also made strong gains in ELA, moving from 49.2% proficient in 2018-19 to 66.3% last year.

The eighth-grade classes, on the other hand, dropped proficiency level in all three subject areas when comparing last year’s class to the eighth-grade class the year before. All the 2021-22 eighth-grade class scores were up from the 2018-29 class, however.

It’s important to note that these results are not tracking the progress of the same students each year when comparing classes, but rather are comparing the students who were in a particular grade level each year. For example, the fifth-grade students who took the tests in the 2018-19 school year would have been in eighth grade in the 2021-21 school year.

Jennifer Schilling, the district’s new director of academic services, said moving forward the district needs to focus on how students do as they move from grade level to grade level, with less emphasis on how one year’s eighth-grade class, for example, compares to a different year’s eighth-grade class.

That’s possible with ELA and math, where students are tested every year in grades three to 11, but less so in science, where students are only tested in fifth, eighth and 10th grades.

“When looking at literacy and math grade level cohorts from grades four through 11 there was growth in eight of the 16 categories – eight cohorts in literacy and eight in mathematics for the total of 16, she said.

The group of students who moved from sixth to seventh grade, for example, notched an 8 percentage point growth in math and a 5 percentage point growth in ELA, she said.

The school district announced the test results and issued a statement earlier this month. The Press withheld reporting on it at that time because there were some discrepancies in the numbers that the district had reported and those that were released by the state.

Commenting this week, Justin DeVore, director of communications, said he had copied a line of numbers for the 2020-21 results incorrectly from the huge state spreadsheets that contain the information from all 329 school districts.

Like most school districts, Charles City School District’s  ISASP scores dipped in the 2020-21 school year due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. This year’s scores are more in line with the district’s pre-pandemic levels — even outpacing those scores, in some instances, according to Schilling.

The Charles City district’s strategic plan features “robust tactics to continue growth around the district’s focus area of engagement,” the school district said in its statement released with the test results. “This includes focus on teacher collaboration, alignment to standards and career pathways that leverage learning outside of the classroom.”

When discussing the scores with the school board during its regular meeting earlier this month, Schilling noted not every group of students that moved up a grade level saw growth in their scores. She said this may be due to the curriculum being more rigorous in the higher grade level, as well as lingering effects from the pandemic.

“While we celebrate this progress, we also know we have more work to do,” she said. “As we move forward, we will remain focused on fulfilling our vision of developing learners who are competent, compassionate, problem solvers.”

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