Around four in ten Delaware public school students failed to meet new state proficiency standards in both reading and math during the 2010-11 school year, according to results from an overhauled testing system, released on Thursday.
In science, fewer than half the students met higher standards set by the Delaware Comprehensive Assessment System (DCAS), while around 60 percent made the grade in social studies.
Proficiency levels from the first full year of DCAS testing had been expected to drop sharply from those recorded by the old Delaware Student Testing Program (DSTP) which set lower standards.
But officials said the score decline was not as great as predicted.
“The previous standards may have indicated a higher percentage of students meeting expectations but that was because the bar was lower,” the state Department of Education said in a statement.
“The new expectations better measure how children need to be prepared to succeed when competing with students around the nation and around the world,” the department said.
To see the full results of the 2011 Delaware Comprehensive Assessment System (DCAS) tests click here
The DCAS standards, adopted by the State Board of Education in September 2010, are intended to prepare Delaware’s children to compete in a global economy by requiring a better understanding of core subjects in order to qualify as proficient.
Despite the tougher requirements, students generally did better than expected.
“The good news is that students performed generally better than pre-test predictions and made substantial score gains during the year,” the official statement said.
Students from grades 3 through 10 were tested using computers for reading and math proficiency in fall, winter, and spring. Science and social studies tests were administered in the spring only – with grades 5,8, and 10 tested in science and grades 4 and 7 tested in social studies.
For reading, the overall proportion meeting the required standard rose to about 61 percent across all grades by the spring test. In the fall, no grade exceeded 50 percent. As expected, students generally improved their scores later in the school year as they became more comfortable with the new standards, but the degree of improvement declined in higher grades.
The reading proficiency gains between fall and spring were between 20 and 30 percent for grades 3 to 5, dropping to between 14-20 percent in grades 6-10.
In third grade, for example, only 34 percent of all students achieved reading proficiency in the fall tests but that rate climbed to 62.8 percent by the spring. By tenth grade, 63.4 percent of students attained the required standard by spring, compared with 49.4 percent in the fall.
In math, the proportion of students who attained proficiency in spring testing varied from a high of 67.1 percent in grade 3 to a low of 57.2 percent in grade 6. In the fall testing, proficiency levels varied from 27.9 to 40.7 percent.
Science testing showed fewer than 49 percent of fifth graders, fewer than 48 percent of eighth graders, and fewer than 41 percent of 10th graders met the standard.
Under the old system, in which students took tests using pencil and paper, significantly more achieved proficiency. Reading scores, for example, varied from 65 to 80 percent in 2010, while math proficiency was achieved by between 58 and 78 percent of students.
Officials cautioned that the lower scores shouldn’t be read as an indication that students are doing poorly.
“A lower score does not necessarily mean your child knows less than he or she did last year or that he or she is somehow ‘doing worse in school’” the education department said. “It means that the new standards require a higher level of mastery of information and concepts.”
Mary Jo Faust, a second-grade teacher in Capital School District who helped the state government promote DCAS, said the lower scores are a reflection of the new testing standard rather than any indication of a severe educational deficit across the state.
“The reason why the scores are lower right now is that we are working on a new system,” she said in an interview. “We had been shooting at a five-foot basketball hoop. Now, all of a sudden, we are shooting at a nine-foot hoop.”
Faust, also a member of the Delaware State Education Association’s Leadership Team, said the DCAS provides quick results, allowing teachers to adjust their instruction during the school year according to needs identified by the tests, unlike the DSTP whose results were not available until the summer, when it was too late to make changes to the curriculum.
The new tests take much less time away from the classroom than the old paper-and-pencil tests which took a whole week out of the school year, Faust said.
But John Young, a member of the Christina School District board, argued that the new data provide a more accurate picture of the state’s educational shortcomings than the old system which concealed them with higher scores.
“This has merely exposed shocking educational deficits,” he said. “It’s telling the truth after a decade of lying about how good our schools are.”
Young, a former president of the Christina board, said the federal government may have erred in designating Delaware to receive more than $119 million in Race To The Top funding to Delaware because that award was based partly on discredited DSTP data.
Paul Herdman, president of the Rodel Foundation, a leading advocate of educational reform in Delaware, called the DCAS report “a serious wakeup call” for educators in their drive to prepare students for a much more competitive world.
It’s now much harder for students with only a high-school diploma to make enough money to buy a house or raise a family, and educators have a responsibility to give every student at least a shot at getting a college education, Herdman said.
“Expectations have dramatically risen,” he said.
Herdman said the DCAS tests provide a more accurate picture of educational progress than the old system, and offer a clearer picture of where Delaware students are in relation to students in other states.
“We need to look with our eyes wide open at where we are and what we are going to do about it,” he said.
At the district level, educators have been prepared for the higher standards since the DCAS system was launched, and have worked to communicate that to parents, said Judy Curtis, assistant superintendent of Brandywine School District.
The lower scores, especially at the start of the school year when students have not yet learned much of the curriculum, are to be expected, and do not indicate an educational crisis in the state, Curtis said.
“Is it a sudden call to arms? No, I don’t think so,” she said.
To meet the higher standards, Brandywine and other districts are being helped by the Race To The Top funding which is allowing improvements such as additional professional development for teachers, Curtis said.
The DCAS results also showed wide disparities between racial groups in achievement of proficiency. In reading, whites were up to 28 percentage points higher than African Americans and up to 27 points higher than Hispanic students. The gap between whites and other minorities was much smaller.
In math, the white-black achievement gap ranged by grade from 27 to 31 percent while the gap between whites and Hispanics ranged from about 19 to 22 percent, the DCAS results found.
Students from poor backgrounds often had lower proficiency rates than others, the study found. In Brandywine School District, for example, only 45.3 percent of students classed as of low socioeconomic status met the required standard in reading, compared with 75.6 percent of those from more prosperous backgrounds.
The test results also showed wide variation in proficiency achievement by district. In 10th grade reading, for example, 85.4 percent of students at Sussex Technical School District attained the required standard by the spring test, compared with only 46.3 percent in Seaford. For 10th-grade math, the gap between those two districts was an even wider 51 percentage points.
Because of the higher standards in the new testing system, Delaware has applied to the U.S. Department of Education to reset interim standards – known as Annual Measurable Objective -- it must meet on the way to achieving proficiency in reading and math for all students by 2013-14, as required by the federal No Child Left Behind law.
The reset, which has been granted to eight other states, allows extra time for teachers to prepare students to meet the new core-subject standards but does not alter the end goal, Delaware officials said.
The state submitted the request because of the new standards which “raise the bar for what level of mastery is considered proficient,” the state Department of Education said.