One full wall in the second floor office of Derby Superintendent of Schools Stephen Tracy is covered with dozens of printouts.
Each page is filled with charts and scores outlining student progress in various grade levels and subjects.
It’s Tracy’s daily reminder of the academic challenges — and success stories — in the small school district he became leader of two years ago.
After the release of the latest CMT and CAPT scores last month, Tracy and the board of education staff are celebrating some small victories — and researching what went wrong last year.
Tracy will present his review of the test scores at the Board of Education meeting tonight (Tuesday).
“The seventh and eighth grade results are our biggest concern,” Tracy said last week, in an interview in his office.
Concerns
The concern is that students in the seventh and eighth grades did worse on state achievement tests in 2010 than they did on the tests in 2009.
Tracy compares “cohort” groups, meaning he looks at how the sixth graders of 2009 performed on tests as seventh graders in 2010.
He says it’s the best way to see if the same group of students is making any progress.
The most recent test results show that, across the board, student achievement dropped in both seventh and eighth grade levels in all subjects — math, reading and writing.
In other words, fewer middle school students hit state benchmarks on the tests in 2010 than in 2009.
“The middle school principal and I have already begun talking about this,” Tracy said. “We need to understand why this group seems to have slipped in the last year.”
Middle School Results
The results in seventh grade reading are the most concerning, Tracy said.
Under the No Child Left Behind act, all students in Connecticut are expected to hit the “proficient” benchmarks on all tests by 2014.
Only 56.4 percent of the Derby seventh grade students met proficient standards in 2010.
“That’s 45 percent who are not reading at a level you would hope for,” Tracy said. “It’s almost half, and in less than 12 months these kids will be in high school.”
Other Results
In the high school, performance improved in 2010 in all areas except for writing.
The CAPT scores don’t reflect cohort groups because students only take the CAPT exams one time in high school. There is no way to compare how the same students did on the exams each year.
In writing, there was a 10.4 percent decrease in the percentage of students who met proficient levels.
In 2009, 87.6 percent of the high school students reached proficient levels on the writing CAPT.
In 2010, only 77.2 percent did.
Reading proficiency increased by 17.8 percent.
Even with improvement on the tests, the students are still not performing at the same level as the state averages.
“It’s encouraging because it is improvement,” Tracy said. “Over the last few years, we’ve gained on the state. We’ve narrowed that gap in terms of proficiency. The bad news is we’re still way behind.”
View Tracy’s breakdowns in the document below. Article continues after document.
Action Plan
Tracy outlined two long-term goals in order to turn the scores around.
1. Get every child reading well by third grade.
2. Improve engagement and motivation of students.
“We’ve got to make sure every child can read,” Tracy said.
To that end, the district has poured all of its professional development funding into a new early literacy program where a consultant from New Haven will meet with kindergarten, first and second grade teachers once a week to help them target and fix reading problems.
Tracy wants to address motivation in an effort to get students to perform better without any extra budget money.
Read about the district’s failed attempt to get the funding it wanted during the past budget cycle.
“The challenge is how do you take a small, diverse, under-performing, underfunded school system and make it dramatically better in terms of student outcomes without spending a lot of money,” Tracy said.
“And the answer is that you have to redefine what you refer to as resources,” Tracy continued. “If you broaden the definition to include the intellectual capacities of our children, particularly those kids that are not engaged, then in reality we have a huge resource in front of us that we tend to see as a problem instead of an opportunity.”
Tracy said he is also working to try to get grant money to help the district track its data more effectively.
Since the district lost its assistant superintendent to budget cuts in 2008, Tracy said it’s been hard to effectively determine which areas students need to improve in enough time to help those students get better.
“Without the capacity to ask and answer those questions quickly, we’re flying blind,” Tracy said.
