Schools making the grade
By LEE PROCIDA
Cherry Hill Sun
12/13/2007

Testing report helps district identify what it can do better

The Cherry Hill Public School District released its Annual Testing Report for 2006 and 2007 last week with a presentation and a 68-page booklet filled with charts and statistics.

Rather than serving as a determination of whether Cherry Hill schools are getting better or worse, though, officials say it is merely another piece in the puzzle of how to better educate students.

“The bottom line is how to identify what we can do better,” said Susan Bastnagel, public information officer for the district.

Bastnagel said the district uses the report each year to see how the curriculum is reaching its goals, and with these results, it will adjust the curriculum to perform better, on an individual and a group level.

Valerie Sadwin, coordinator of assessments and standards, noted the myriad factors that influence scores changing each year and that comparing each grade and each year is difficult since each grade has a different test with a different group of students taking it.

“It is a lot of numbers, so what we try to do is not look at differences like from this year to last year, but we try to understand that there will be fluctuations,” she said. “We’re looking at a completely different group of kids each year, so it’s hard to isolate the causal reasons.”

Nevertheless, she said as more data is gathered each year, the district will start tracking individual classes of students, or cohorts, passing through the school system and see how the group has changed to gain more usable information.

The school district uses these statistics and other methods to modify instruction to best serve its students.

“Data-driven instruction provides an important way of looking at programs and individual student performance,” said Maureen Reusche, assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction, in the press release accompanied with the report. “Through this process, teachers think about how they will work with their students and, then, make instructional decisions.”

The report compares many different test scores and breaks those scores down by grades, ethnic groups and special education students.

The most extensive results are from the various state tests – the High School Proficiency Assessment, the Grade Eight Proficiency Assessment and the New Jersey Assessment of Skills and Knowledge – with the SAT’s and advanced placement test scores included for high school students. Scores are compared to state averages and averages from Cherry Hill’s socioeconomic group.

Socioeconomic groups, as a way to compare districts with similar abilities, are labeled “A” through “J,” with “A” designating Abbott school districts and “J” the most wealthy districts.

On this scale, Cherry Hill is a GH, moved down from an I in 2004, so the report compares Cherry Hill scores to its current District Factor Group GH and to DFG I averages – what the report calls “our past benchmark for excellence.”

The state tests are graded partially proficient, proficient and advanced proficient, and overall, Cherry Hill had significantly more students with proficient grades on the state tests than state averages in all grades, better percentages than GH district averages and slightly less proficient students than DFG I averages in nearly all grades.

Highlights in the report include Cherry Hill East High School matching last year’s scores on the state test in math and language arts, with 94 and 97 percent of students passing, respectively, both the school’s highest performance since the test started in 2002.

Also on the HSPA, West had 93 percent proficient scores in language arts, but dropped from 87 to 83 percent in mathematics.

The latter figure matched GH schools, but language arts was lower than the GH average, while East was higher than GH averages in both categories.

As for ethnic groups in the high schools, more black students were proficient in the HSPA in language arts than ever before with 92 percent of 62 students, reducing the gap between whites to only 3 percentage points, whereas in 2002 it was 17 points.

More Hispanic students were proficient in the language arts section than ever as well, with 82 percent of 38 students, but the gap between whites remained at 13 percentage points.

Also, fewer special education students were proficient on both NJASK math and language section tests than last year, but percentages remain significantly higher than 2003 levels.

Other significant figures for high school students were increases in SAT participation after the district paid for students to take the tests, with 100 percent of students taking the test at East, the most ever there, and 88 percent taking it at West, the most there since 1995.

East scores were at a historical low, while West’s went up from the previous year, and both were low compared to most previous years before the SAT incorporated a new writing section in 2006.

More students took advanced placement tests than ever at the two schools, too, but scores were historically low for each.

In middle school, GEPA scores fluctuated among Beck, Carusi and Rosa schools with an average of 87 percent of students scoring proficient on the test – above 84 percent in DFG GH but two points below DFG I.

The biggest jump among middle schools was an 11-point increase to 32 percent in advanced proficient Beck students on the GEPA science section, although the 21 percent number from last year was at 36 percent the year before that, its highest ever.

Grades five, six and seven started taking the NJASK tests last year. Grades six and seven school average in proficient students increased or stayed the same from 2006, while the grade five average decreased overall. Still, four fifth-grade school classes had 100 percent proficient students.

In grade four, NJASK averages were above or equal to DFG I averages, which was the only grade in Cherry Hill to do so. And in grade three, which started taking the test in 2004, 97 percent of students scored proficient in mathematics, above DFG I, while 92 percent were proficient in language arts, above GH but below I.

The complete report can be found by going to the school district Web site at http://www.cherryhill.k12.nj.us/news/news.