The Mississippi Department of Education released Mississippi Assessment Program results for the 2015-16 school year.
Students take Mississippi Assessment Program (MAP) tests for third- through eighth-grade English language arts, third- through eighth-grade math, English II and Algebra I. The English II test is administered to 10th grade students and Algebra I can be administered to eighth grade and up.
Students are graded into five performance levels based on their test scores. MDE splits the scores into five levels, with Level 1 the lowest-performing and Level 5 the highest.
Locally, each school district’s students performed differently on the test, though the districts have indicated they’re waiting for more detailed data from the state to review how well individual students performed.
Columbus Municipal School District
Columbus Municipal School District Superintendent Philip Hickman said there’s more to his district’s results than the test results alone. He said it’s better to look at students’ results as they progress through the district, rather than the test scores in a vacuum.
For example, he said it gives a more whole picture for the district to compare a fourth grade student’s results to the prior year.
Considering those metrics, Hickman said, CMSD has progressed from when 50-60 percent of its students were scoring in the Level 1 range.
“If you look at every score, we’re improving all the way through,” Hickman said. “Nobody expected that we’d go from a majority of kids at Level 1 to a majority at Level 5 — if we could do that we’d be millionaires because we’d have solutions to the world’s problems.”
On most tests for 2015-16, a majority of CMSD students scored in the Level 2 (Basic) or Level 3 (Passing) proficiency range. The percentage of students who received Level 1 scores fluctuated between 10 and 15 percent for most of the tests. It was significantly lower for some, such as the Algebra I test, where only 5.6 percent of students scored in the Level 1 range.
Hickman looked at what he called “forward heroic progress” and said the district’s students are improving. However, he said progress can be hard to see without context because of CMSD’s low starting point.
“Most people average a year’s growth for a student,” he said. “We have to average two to three years per student. That’s heroic progress.
“Another year or two of this and we will have a majority of our kids on or above grade level,” Hickman said. “It’s showing why we’re being looked at from the state as far as the new models we’re implementing.”
CMSD has invested in technology, professional development and has adopted a new, more engaging instructional model and curriculum.
Hickman said the district’s biggest challenge, moving forward, will be finding ways to rally the community around student achievement.
For now, he said, CMSD will focus on continuing to grow.
“We’re bringing the bottom half of our kids up,” he said. “We’re progressing with the kids. We all know it’s not good enough because we have a long haul to go. It’s really about having the stamina to continue to press forward and continue to grow and grow our kids.”
Lowndes County School District
Lowndes County School District Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum and Instruction Robin Ballard said the district outpaced the average state performance at each level.
In all of the tests, a majority of LCSD students fell into the Level 3 (Passing) or Level 4 (Proficient) ranges. About 10 percent of the district’s students reached Level 5 in the tests. For most of the tests, fewer than seven percent of students fell into the Level 1 range.
The MAP test is the third test the state has used in three years. Ballard said changing tests typically leads to a decrease in scores, but the district has maintained or improved performance.
“It’s a whole different ballgame,” she said. “We want to be above the rest, and we think we are. We see that going on in the classroom all the time. It’s nice to have some confirmation of that effort. We know that if our state will remain with the same test, we can continue to see improvement.”
Ballard credited LCSD’s strong performance to initiatives the district has put in place such as a technology initiative that let’s kindergarten through fourth grade students use iPads and fifth through twelfth grade students use MacBooks.
She noted that the district also reviews results for neighboring districts and will reach out to them for professional development, if it notices districts performing well in certain areas.
“The best professional development is getting teachers out of our schools and into other schools while there’s students there,” Ballard said. “It’s just action research at it’s best.”
Still, Ballard said it’s hard to review the data on a deeper level because the state hasn’t sent more in-depth results yet. Once those are in, she said LCSD can use them to better get a grasp on how students performed on segments of the test, as well as teacher performance.
“We’ll get results that will break down results by the content standards, and then we can look at which content standards that the students had trouble with and which they did well with,” she said.
Starkville-Oktibbeha Consolidated School District
The Starkville-Oktibbeha Consolidated School District is generally pleased with its results, Assistant Superintendent for Personnel and Secondary Curriculum and Instruction David Baggett said.
Most of SOCSD’s students scored in the Level 3 or Level 4 proficiency ranges, and around seven to 10 percent reached Level 5 on most test. However, the percentage of students scoring Level 1 fluctuated from about 10 to 15 percent from test to test.
For the past few years, Starkville School District has made a focus on strengthening the performance of its bottom 25 percent of students. Baggett said the state hasn’t released growth data yet to show which students the district will need to focus on, but that will continue to be a focus for the consolidated school district.
“We’re extremely proud of students and teachers and the work they did in preparing for the new test,” Baggett said. “This is the third test in three years we’ve had to adjust to. This is baseline data.”
Baggett told The Dispatch that SOCSD is working with the state to resolve an issue with students MDE previously said passed the Algebra I test that the new results say failed the test. As such, he said some of the district’s numbers are not final.
“We found discrepancies in the numbers they’ve sent us,” Baggett said. “We know we have students that passed the test. MDE told us in December they passed but now they’re saying they didn’t.”
Baggett declined to say how many students the error affected until the district can review the matter with MDE. He did, however, say it’s “more than just one or two.”
Baggett said the district is awaiting more in-depth results from MDE to get a better idea students’ and teachers’ strengths and weaknesses.
Alex Holloway was formerly a reporter with The Dispatch.
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