Melissa Bailey Photo
From left: English-language learning supervisor Pedro Mendia Landa, Hill Central Principal Glen Worthy, & Superintendent Mayo.
New Haven thought it found a new way to get little kids to read — and three years later, newly released test scores showed the idea working.
The intervention program was among the reasons given at a press conference Wednesday for citywide gains on the high-stakes Connecticut Mastery Test, which public school students in grades 3 to 8 take every March.
Results released Wednesday show the public school district showed gains in nearly every area of the test, which covers math, reading, writing for all the grades, as well as science in 5th and 8th grades.
School officials called the results “a strong indication that New Haven’s School Change reforms are succeeding.”
“I think it’s time for celebration,” said schools Superintendent Reggie Mayo (at right in photo above). “I’m pleased — not satisfied, but pleased — with our results.”
The good news was told in the numbers — test scores rose, and the gap with the state narrowed. District scores on the CMT rose 1.8 percentage points in math; 3.5 points in reading; 3.9 points in writing; and 3.8 in science. The district now stands 16.8 percentage points behind the state in math; 24.1 points behind in reading; and 18.1 points behind in writing. That’s all based on the percentage of kids scoring “proficient” on the tests.
Pinning down which results came from the one-year-old school reform drive, versus from longstanding efforts to educate kids, is a trickier political question in an election year.
Mayor John DeStefano (pictured) and Mayo invited seven principals to the event at Wilbur Cross High School, representing the schools that posted the highest gains on the CMTs and the Connecticut Academic Performance Tests for sophomores, the results of which were released Tuesday. The seven schools were Fair Haven School, Truman, Wexler-Grant, Celentano, Co-op High, Metropolitan Business Academy, Wilbur Cross and Hyde Leadership Academy.
The schools that have received the most intensive planning under the school reform drive—seven pilot “transformation schools”—were not among that group. Three of the school were picked due to a history of low performance, and have the longest way to go.
Click here to see the school-by-school scores by grade, and here to see those scores divided by “cohort,” in other words, comparing this year’s 4th grade to last year’s 3rd grade. Click here to visit the state website, where you can access the data yourself.
Mayo pointed to the 3rd grade as this year’s M.I.P. The number of 3rd graders scoring “proficient” or better on the reading, math and writing tests combined grew from 41.3 to 49.9 percent. That’s up from 36.7 percent in 2008.
“We’re especially pleased with those 3rd grade scores,” Mayo said. “This year we begin to show some breakthrough in grade 3. That’s monumental, and it’s beginning to set the foundation” for the future..
In a separate interview, Mayo said the district has long had difficulty with 3rd grade performance, which lagged behind other grades in years past. He attributed this year’s improvement to new reading programs introduced in first and second grades, which are “beginning to pay off.”
The Modified Reading Recovery Intervention was rolled out in 2008 as part of a greater focus on early education, said Trisha D’Amore, the district’s reading supervisor. Students who are struggling in reading get small-group instruction from trained tutors, with only three students per teacher, she said. The program was piloted in the 1st and 2nd grades. D’Amore said this year’s 3rd grade was the first to benefit from that instruction.
Fair Haven School led the district in 3rd grade reading gains, rising from 33.8 to 76.3 percent “proficient.” That’s a major improvement over 2008, when 21.3 percent scored “proficient” on the tests. The number of 3rd graders scoring “at goal,” which is meant to be a measure that they can read on grade level, rose from 20.6 to 62.7 percent this year.
Other top gains came from Hill Central Music Academy, where Principal Glen Worthy (at center in photo at the top of this story) has quietly restructured the school this year with a federal “turnaround” grant, showed early signs of progress. Third-graders rose from 14.3 to 23.4 percent “proficient” in reading. The number of 3rd graders reading “at goal” remained at the bottom of the district, rising from 5.7 to 6.4 percent.
Overall, Hill Central showed an average gain of 12.7 percent points in reading proficiency per grade level. Math and writing results rose by a few percentage points, too.
Besides getting rid of half of the staff, Hill Central restructured the school to a “distributed leadership” model, said Imma Cannelli, assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction. She said one person is now supervising English-language learners at the school, which has many Spanish-speakers, and the school is focusing on differentiated instruction for kids at varying levels of proficiency.
East Rock Global Magnet School also posted major gains in 3rd grade reading, rising from 34.8 to 57.1 percent proficiency.
Wexler/Grant School, which has been tapped for a “turnaround” next year based on years of low performance, boosted 3rd grade reading from 28.2 to 35.1 percent proficient. The number of 3rd graders scoring “at goal,” however, fell from 12.8 to 8.1 percent. The school posted an average of 10-point gains in math proficiency per grade level, and 5 points in reading. Writing proficiency fell from 50.0 to 44.4 percent.
The Transformation Schools
As part of the school reform effort, schools have been graded into three tiers based largely on test scores, and are being managed differently according to how they fare. Based on those tiers, the city is phasing in “transformation plans” at seven to eight schools per year. The tests released this week are used as the most significant measure of success at the first seven schools that piloted transformations this year.
Those seven schools proved a mixed bag of results on the tests.
Davis Street Arts and Academics School, one of the city’s top-performing elementary schools, continued to push the bar higher. Third grade reading rose from 72.3 to 83.3 percent proficiency, and from 48.9 to 53.7 percent “at goal.” Davis Street was tapped as top-ranking “Tier I”. As a result, Principal Lola Nathan was given more autonomy to run her school this year.
Davis posted an average of 5.3 percentage points improvement in proficiency in the four subjects.
Edgewood School, the city’s other pilot Tier I, posted an average 3.7 points proficiency gain across the subjects.
John C. Daniels, a middle-ranking Tier II school, fell four percentage points in “at goal,” and climbed one percentage point in proficiency, taking all grades and subjects combined.
At Domus Academy, the city’s new charter experiment for troubled middle-schoolers, showed some progress in reading with a difficult population. Twenty-two kids took the reading test, with 63.6 scoring “proficient” and 59.1 “at goal.” None of 22 students scored “at goal” in math, but 36.4 percent scored “proficient.” All 36 kids took the writing test. None scored “at goal”; 5.6 percent scored proficient. The test results are difficult to compare with last year, since so few students took the test.
School reform czar Garth Harries said more students took the tests this year compared to last year, when the school was called Urban Youth Middle School. (Urban Youth’s scores aren’t available online because the state considered them a program, not a stand-alone high school.)
“There’s certainly a long, long way to go,” said Harries, but he applauded the school for “substantial gains, particularly in reading.”
Barnard Environmental Studies Magnet School, a “Tier III improvement school,” showed gains in many areas, but an overall decline in proficiency, from 55.7 to 54.5 percent. The number of kids scoring “at goal” rose from 26.7 to 27.9 percent.
Brennan/Rogers, the city’s first in-house turnaround school, was one of just a few schools to show declines across the board in reading. Third grade reading fell from 21.2 to 13.0 percent proficient. Overall, reading fell from 41.1 to 36.0 percent proficient. Overall, the number of kids scoring proficient fell from 44.3 to 43.3 percent, while the number of kids scoring “at goal” rose from 21.8 to 22.3 percent.
Harries noted that Brennan made large gains this year in school culture, as measured by the school climate surveys.
With a slew of brand new teachers, the school didn’t “hit on all its cylinders” until the spring, he noted. He said he expects to see more academic gains in coming years. “The point for us is long-term change. The overall story remains pretty good.”
Reform “Success”?
Overall, this week’s release of test scores was good news for the system. How much of that news can be attributed to school reform, which just kicked into gear? Some efforts — most notably the reading intervention — began years ago. Some schools, like Davis and Fair Haven, have been showing gains for years; on the other hand, they’re getting new tools under the reform drive. Some of the most intensive work begun under school reform — at the lowest-performing “transformation schools” — did not contribute to the latest wave of positive scores; it will probably take longer for the results of those efforts to show up on standardized tests (although they have already demonstrated progress in the new “climate” surveys.)
DeStefano has made the success of school reform a central plank of his current campaign for a 10th two-year term.
DeStefano argued that while these test scores don’t show the entire picture, they are “one demonstrable result in how New Haven school change is working.” The district met its goal of improving 3.4 percent across all subjects at goal, and fell 0.2 percentage points shy of improving 3.4 points in proficiency. The city aims to close the achievement gap with the state by 2019, in part through a method of “transformation planning” in with a batch of seven to eight schools per year.
DeStefano was asked to compare the success so far of the transformation schools, which included two low-performing “turnarounds,” compared to the rest of the district.
“There’s not necessarily a correlation between the turnaround and the growth,” DeStefano said, but other factors are part of “school reform” that led test scores to rise. For example, the district rolled out a new teacher evaluation program based on student performance.
“We saw a lot of people picking up their game as a result” of the new evaluations, DeStefano said.
While only some schools saw intensive “transformation” planning, all schools were graded into tiers, and used feedback from school climate surveys to guide how they run the school, DeStefano noted.
Truman Principal Roy Araujo, whose school has not yet been tapped for transformation, said his school has benefited from a new sense of “focus” on learning as part of the school change effort.
Part of that focus comes due to more intensive work in drafting School Improvement Plans, argued school reform czar Harries. Some schools also launched BOOST, a program that is supposed to connect students with social services.
While transformation planning is a significant part of the school reform drive, “producing learning gains takes a huge range of efforts,” Harries said. He said it’s difficult to parse out which gains might be due to reforms versus other methods already under way in the schools. “The bottom line is that the school district is improving.”
“This is not an aircraft carrier moment,” Harries said, but “school change is happening. We had a great first year.”
At Domus Academy, the city's new charter experiment for troubled middle-schoolers, showed some progress in reading with a difficult population. Twenty-two kids took the reading test, with 63.6 scoring "proficient" and 59.1 "at goal." None of 22 students scored "at goal" in math, but 36.4 percent scored "proficient." All 36 kids took the writing test. None scored "at goal"; 5.6 percent scored proficient. The test results are difficult to compare with last year, since so few students took the test.
Like I said Domus is a waste of money.Keep exposing them.
Brennan/Rogers, the city's first in-house turnaround school, was one of just a few schools to show declines across the board in reading. Third grade reading fell from 21.2 to 13.0 percent proficient. Overall, reading fell from 41.1 to 36.0 percent proficient. Overall, the number of kids scoring proficient fell from 44.3 to 43.3 percent, while the number of kids scoring "at goal" rose from 21.8 to 22.3 percent.
This is what happens when you get rid of Good teachers like Ms Lott did.This school will keep on failing.Just like domus.I wonder what the turn over rate is for the teachers in both these schools.