Smarter Balanced Is Not a Spread, but There Is One!
Weston / 6.2 / 15.4 / 40.2 / 38.2 / 78.4 / 8.3 / 21.6 / 32.3 / 37.8 / 70
Westport / 4.1 / 10.8 / 36.2 / 48.9 / 85.1 / 9 / 18.2 / 28.7 / 44.1 / 72.8
Wilton / 9.6 / 16.8 / 41.7 / 31.9 / 73.6 / 13.6 / 29.2 / 31.3 / 26 / 57.3
Waterbury / 48 / 25.9 / 19.5 / 6.5 / 26.1 / 62.2 / 24.5 / 10.6 / 2.7 / 13.3
Waterford / 12.2 / 21.8 / 39.8 / 26.2 / 66 / 25.3 / 33.1 / 24.8 / 16.7 / 41.6
“SMARTER BALANCED” IS NOT A SPREAD, BUT THERE IS ONE!
About Weston has done a review of the results of the Smarter Balanced English and Math results published on the State Board of Education website and offers this snapshot – for the selected “W” school systems ranging from the “WWW” Fairfield County communities to Waterbury (a big city) and Waterford (in Eastern CT).
These system-wide numbers in English seem to have the following meaning – there are magnitudes of “failure” in cities (@10-1 ratio Waterbury to Westport), but a ratio of closer to 3-1 (Westport to Waterbury) in successful results. For math, this comparison is @6-1 (“failure”) and @5-1 (“successful”).
No doubt those more invested in these numbers than I will be reviewing these same data sets. Also available are grade results, but for the purposes of a small town like Weston, these may vary depending on the “strength” of a particular grade. For example, if there are @2500 total students in 12 grades, not including K, that makes @200 individuals per class. It doesn’t take much to skew results!
The CTNEWSJUNKIE has said this: “The statewide test scores for the new Smarter Balanced Consortium Assessment exam show that 55.4 percent of Connecticut’s students are meeting or exceeding the ‘achievement level’ in English, and 39.1 percent are meeting or exceeding the achievement level in math.
“State education officials, who refused to release the draft scores to the news media last week, said they expected the scores to be low. They also threatened local superintendents, who were given access to the information, not to give it to anyone until today. And this week, leading up to the release of the data, state officials said the English scores exceeded expectations and the ‘Math scores met the state’s expectations.’”
However, the math scores — which show fewer than half of the students meeting or exceeding the achievement level — also prompted Education Commissioner Dianne Wentzell to convene a group of educators to identify best practices and intensify support for math teachers…” Story in full at CTNEWSJUNKIE.
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NOTE: The table above was drawn from original data but is not an official analysis. All numbers are percentages: ENGLISH first: Column one is %not meeting standards, column two the %closer but still failing, column three %passing, column four %exceeding standards, column five merges Columns 3&4; MATH: same drill, for columns 6-10.
According to the Washington Post, a 95% participation rate is required to make this SBAC reliable. Did CT measure up? Well, depending how you do the math (and CT needs work on that), according to the POST, our numbers may not pass muster for accuracy – but who’s counting?
In addition, thanks to a nifty list from “What Wait” blog, it looks as if the local Three WWW’s (Westport, Weston and Wilton) had below 95% - 27.1, 57.1 and 94.6 respectively for their high schools for the SBAC MATH tests.
msw/8-29-15