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Health & Fitness

Attleboro High School MCAS

An honest look at Attleboro's High School MCAS results.

So today I wanted to finish off my series that looks at Attleboro’s public schools MCAS results.

So far I’ve held a discussion about what a success should be in regard to MCAS, which also went into why we shouldn’t be using the state average as our reference and how we should be setting specific, annual goals to address the issues.  Here is the link to that article:

http://attleboro.patch.com/blog_posts/attleboro-mcas-what-is-the-expecta...

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I then wrote about the MCAS results from the cities’ 3rd and 4th graders, which also showed trending of how we have done over the past few years, ultimately coming to the conclusion that the many losses of our principals has negatively impacted our kids.  Here is the link to that article:

http://attleboro.patch.com/blog_posts/attleboro-mcas-elementary

Find out what's happening in Attleborowith free, real-time updates from Patch.

And then last week I wrote about the three middle schools, finding how one of them is woefully behind the other two in most areas.  Here is the link to that article:

http://attleboro.patch.com/blog_posts/attleboro-mcas-middle-schools

So now it’s time to take a hard look at the high school results…

One new area that the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) tracks is the district’s (and school’s) progress toward narrowing proficiency gaps for each of the sub-groups.  Sub-groups such as All students, High Needs (which is students from certain other groups, but only used once), Low Income, Students with disabilities, and White. 

There are numerous other sub-groups that are not tracked for the high school since there are not enough students in this category.  The sub-groups that are not being tracked are English Language Learners (ELL), Asian, African American/Black and Hispanic/Latino; (which seems interesting since you would think that if the three middle schools had these groups that the High School would too).  Hmm………

It seems that whether or not a sub-group is being tracked for progressing to close the gap is based on different criteria than what is used to determine if the sub-group scores are tracked, since these other sub-groups are being tracked for score.

Anyway, in this area the High School did pretty well, meeting the 75% requirement (of students progressing) for 4 out of 5 sub-groups.  The sub-group that the High School failed to meet is the Students with disabilities sub-group, which had 73% progressing.

So let’s take a look at the 10th grade results (which in this case is also the aggregate since only 10th grade takes the test)…

 

2012

Grade 10

School

ELA

MATH

Science

High School

96.2

90.4

87.6

 

 

 

 

2011

Grade 10

School

ELA

MATH

Science

High School

95.8

89.6

85.3

Personally I am very happy with a 96.2% proficient/advanced score for ELA and a 90.4% in Math.  And the fact that both scores have been slightly increased as compared to last year’s 10th grade is a good thing.

For reference I thought it would be interesting to compare these results to what the 8th grade received, in order to show the gains being made over the two year gap:

 

School

ELA

MATH

Science

Brennan

96.5

85.2

81.5

Coelho

90.1

80.8

70.2

Wamsutta

97.7

85.8

81.3

Average

94.77

83.93

77.67

Wow, some really impressive gains over those two years.  Really makes me wonder what the causes could be.  I mean, a point and a half increase in ELA is about what I would expect, but the increase of 6.5% in Math and especially the 10% gain in Science/Technology are real standouts.  I think it’s still fair to ask if having 87.6% of our students being proficient or advanced in Science and Technology is acceptible, but it’s definitely a number that is workable…

So in order to see if we can get any real information out of all of this we’re going to need to take a hard look at the sub-group data.

ELA

 

2012  -  10th GRADE  -  ELA  -  SUBGROUPS

SPED

Low Income

White

Hispanic

ELL

Asian

Black

82.4

93.3

96.9

94.6

79.5

92

95.2

Well, one thing that stands out to me is how the Special Needs sub-group is slightly ahead of the ELL (English Language Learners) sub-group, while for the middle schools and the elementary schools this wasn’t the case.  For example, the middle school average for the special needs sub-group was 71.8% in English Language Arts (ELA) as compared to 81.8% for the ELL sub-group.  That’s a 10% difference which has reversed to a positive 2.9% difference for the special needs students.  Of course this is not apples to apples since I’m comparing the middle school students from last year to the 10th grade students from last year, but historically the results have been changing at around an equal amount, so maybe this is a fair comparison…

Does make me wonder what the added supports are for the special needs students, as this does seem to be a very positive area for the High School…

In regard to the other sub-groups, Low Income is at 93.3%, White is 96.9%, Hispanic/Latino is at 94.6%, Asian is at 92% and African American/Black is at 95.2%.  These seem like great results to me!

MATH

 

2012  -  10th GRADE  -  MATH  -  SUBGROUPS

SPED

Low Income

White

Hispanic

ELL

Asian

Black

64.6

85.5

91

91

63.6

87

88.1

There are some obvious concerns here.  First I think its notable how across the board all sub-groups are lagging in Math as compared to ELA.  Maybe this is the norm and at the high school level Math could be considered more difficult than ELA.  A similar gap was seen at the middle school level with some sub-groups seeing upwards of a 10 – 15 point decrease in Math, as compared to ELA. 

So one fair question is whether the gap at the high school is similar to the middle…

Here are some spreadsheets showing the difference between ELA and Math for the 10th grade and for the middle schools averaged:

 

2012  -  10th GRADE  -  ELA to Math  -  SUBGROUPS

SPED

Low Income

White

Hispanic

ELL

Asian

Black

17.8

7.8

5.9

3.6

15.9

5

7.1

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2012  -  Middle Schools  -  ELA to Math  -  SUBGROUPS

SPED

Low Income

White

Hispanic

ELL

Asian

Black

9.1

7.2

4.1

8.2

6.3

2.5

12.3

I think there are also some fair take aways from this data.  For two of the sub-groups that are most at-risk it appears as though when they go to the high school there is a decrease in achievement.  The Special Needs sub-group went from a 9.1% difference between ELA and Math (Math being lower) to a 17.8% difference in high school and for the English Language Learners the difference went from only a 6.3% to an almost 16% difference.  I think these are some concerning numbers.  What the numbers really point to is that the gains in English Language Arts are much more than the gains in Math.  Maybe this is due to the difficulty of the high Math subject (Algebra, Geometry, Calculus, etc.) for these sub-groups, or possibly the ELA staff are beyond exceptional.  More specific data, that I don’t have access to, would be needed to determine this…

Science

For Science and Technology, since it is only taken in 5th, 8th and 10th grades, I thought it would be very useful to analyze it individually (rather than aggregating the 5th and 8th grade data).  Below are the sub-group results:

 

2012  -  SCIENCE/TECHNOLOGY  -  SUBGROUPS

 

 

 

SPED

Low Income

ELL

 

 

 

5th

8th

10th

5th

8th

10th

5th

8th

10th

 

 

 

58.3

52.5

69.1

72.6

71.4

82.1

66.9

N/A

55.8

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2012  -  SCIENCE/TECHNOLOGY  -  SUBGROUPS

White

Hispanic

Asian

Black

5th

8th

10th

5th

8th

10th

5th

8th

10th

5th

8th

10th

82.8

79.0

88.9

72.0

70.9

80.6

N/A

N/A

82.0

N/A

N/A

88.9

As a reminder, the result blocks with “N/A” indicate that there were not enough students in that sub-group for the data to be tracked.

So first, looking solely at the 10th grade results, I am a bit disappointed.  The racial sub-group data is a bit disappointing, with the Hispanic/Latino sub-group getting an 80.6% proficient or advanced score and the Asian sub-group getting 82%.  Overall I’ve already discussed the relatively low Science and Technology scores, and these results seem to concur.

But looking at the high needs sub-groups my concerns are even more.  Only 69.1% met the requirement for the Special Needs sub-group and even worse, only 55.8% met it for the English Language learners.  This is much too low in my opinion.

Now interestingly you can see how the results seem to go down between 5th and 8th and then do go up in High School for most of the sub-groups.  I think that is a positive that needs to be looked at. 

The High School students are seeing a jump between 8th and 10th grades and in some cases these jumps are huge.  The Special Needs sub-group saw a 16.6% increase and the Low Income sub-group saw a 10.7% increase.  Similar increases were seen for the White and Hispanic sub-groups as well.  The one disappointment as far as trending is in the English Language Learners sub-group, which saw an 11.1% decrease from 5th grade to 10th (no 8th grade data this past year).

What this data does show me is that the numbers of the high needs sub-groups that are having difficulties are greatly outweighed by the other sub-groups.  Since the aggregate result for this grade was 87.6, and as you can see only the White and Black sub-groups scored above that, that means there must be a lot of students in these two sub-groups in order to compensate.  I guess what this means is that our Science and Technology data appears much better than it actually is.  The gap between the Special Needs and English Language Learners sub-groups and the other students is crazy (like 20% – 25%).

Summary

So when you first look at the aggregate (averaged) data for all students things look pretty good at the High School.  It’s when you really break out the numbers that the concerns arise.  The Special Needs sub-group is lagging much more than I would have expected, and the same can be said for the English Language Learners sub-group.

One of the biggest concerns that I have is how the High School is rated as being in only 31% of all state schools with a similar grade span.  That means that the state ranks Attleboro’s High School worse that 69% of other High Schools with grades 9 through 12.  What really interests me on this is how they calculate the school’s ranking.  Is only the MCAS results used, or is graduation rate, drop out rate, advanced placement test results and/or some other criteria used in this calculation.  Whatever it is I think it’s safe to say that none of us feel it is acceptible for the High School to be down at 31%!

I also must relate how I’m still confused how the state doesn’t rate the ELL sub-group (which would have been failing to meet the progress requirements, along with the Special Needs sub-group), although the ELL sub-group was rated when you look at just the 10th grade data.  But once again, only the 10th grade takes the test?  So why would this sub-group be tracked for 10th grade, but not for the aggregate, which is made up of only the 10th grade?

So, according to the DESE data the High School only failed the progress requirement (which means tracking the same students from year to year and 75% of them doing better than the year before) for one sub-group, Special Needs, which ranks the High School as a Level 1 school.  It would take a second sub-group failing to meet the requirement (such as English Language Learners) to be classified as Level 2.

Pros and Cons

As I did for the Elementary and the Middle School levels, here are the Pros and Cons of the High School MCAS data:

PROS

-         The 10th grade aggregate ELA data showed 96.2% of students receiving grades of proficient or advanced, an increase of 0.4% as compared to last year.

-         The 10th grade aggregate data showed 90.4% of students receiving grades of proficient or advanced, an increase of 0.8% as compared to last year.

-         The 10th grade aggregate Science score showed a 2.3% increase, as compared to last year.

-         The Low Income sub-group ELA data showed 93.3% of students receiving grades of proficient or advanced.

CONS

-         The 10th grade ELL sub-group ELA data showed only 79.5% of students receiving grades of proficient or advanced.

-         The 10th grade Special Needs sub-group Math data showed only 64.6% of students receiving grades of proficient or advanced.

-         The 10th grade ELL sub-group Math data showed only 63.6% of students receiving grades of proficient or advanced.

-         The 10th grade Special Needs sub-group Science and Technology data showed only 61.9% of students receiving grades of proficient or advanced.

-         The 10th grade ELL sub-group Science and Technology data showed only 55.8% of students receiving grades of proficient or advanced.

-         The High School failed to meet the 75% of students progressing requirement for the Special Needs sub-group.

-         The High School is ranked by the state at only 31%, as compared to other Massachusetts High Schools with a similar grade span.

Seems very obvious where the main issues are for the High School.  It’s the Special Needs and English Language Learners sub-groups where the focus needs to be.  Generally Science also needs to be given more importance, but we know that’s a district issue and not just an issue for the High School.

Once again this year’s annual district goals, along with the High School’s Whole School Improvement goals, needs to address this issues very specifically.  Acceptible, realistic goals need to be set for the aggregate, as well as all of the sub-groups, and there must be accountability.  In addition, the reforms that will be put in place to help close these gaps must be explained and agreed to by the School Committee.

Hopefully this is what this Committee, which has not yet lived through the goal setting process, will ensure is done.

Thanks for reading!

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