By Nicholas von Wettberg
The Davis Joint Unified School District (DJUSD) Board of Education heard a report on the results of spring tests at its regular meeting on Thursday night.
In 2014, the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress (CAASPP) system was implemented, replacing the Standardized Testing and Reporting System (STAR).
The CAASPP Smarter Balanced Summative Assessments are full-length tests, done in two parts, and are aligned with the Common Core State Standards in English language arts (ELA)/literacy and mathematics.
Students in grades 3 through 8 and grade 11 are given the summative assessment in ELA and math, while those in grades 5, 8 and 10 take the assessment in science.
Each of the Smarter Balanced tests includes an adaptive assessment part, where questions asked in real time increase in difficulty with every correct answer (and vice versa). The other part is performance tasks.
DJUSD Superintendent Dr. John Bowes, who joined the trustees at the dais for the entire meeting (Board Member Alan Fernandes was not in attendance), said the students’ performance tasks section “challenges their ability to apply their knowledge and skills to problems in a real world setting.”
Bowes added: “The two parts measure depth of understanding, writing research and problem solving skills more thoroughly than just a multiple choice, paper-based test which they replaced.”
Updated results of the spring tests became available to LEAs (Local Educational Agencies) in August.
Now in its second year, CAASPP testing was administered to over 3.2 million students, according to the California Department of Education.
In the testing results report, presented by Associate Superintendent Clark Bryant, the district outlined four goals: to maintain a focus on learning; report results to gain understanding; describe the collaborative ongoing process to close the achievement/opportunity gap; and to understand the applications for individual students.
Bryant clarified that the statewide summative assessments are part of a larger system and hold less weight in the overall standards process than that of classroom formative assessments.
“The summative assessments will give us a snapshot in time of the results,” Bryant said. “Formative assessments will help us to change student learning, will help teachers to think about how they’re going about instruction. Formative assessment really focuses in on how are teachers working with students to clarify student learning goals.”
Earlier in the meeting, Davis Teachers Association (DTA) President Blair Howard had expressed his concern with the entire concept of standardized testing, saying it “is flawed and goes against many principles of good teaching and good child development.”
Howard added: “To assume that all students at a grade level are in enough of the same place to perform at the expected level is hard to fathom. Knowing our students, we all know that they all have different strengths and different talents and will get to where they need to go in their own way and on their own time.”
Preparing students for standardized testing is no easy task for many teachers.
Along with the break in curriculum and added pressures felt by teachers, the same could be said of the weight of expectations the process has on both students and parents, who, according to Howard, have voiced concerns of their own.
The King High School teacher recounted an incident that took place last week, when the parent of one of his students came in to his classroom, worrying about the consequences the test scores would have on her daughter’s academic career.
“As a teacher I’ve seen this students work, know her skills, know she’s an excellent writer and a hard worker and that she will be a success,” said Howard. “And yet a test that is not culturally relevant to her tells her she’s not good enough.”
Howard went on to call the tests “benign” and “harmful,” revealing that teachers are forced to sign a document guaranteeing they do not discuss the assessments.
“How can we have an honest and critical conversation about these tests that take so much of our preparation, time and focus if we cannot even openly and honestly discuss these tests?” he asked.
Howard said that educators in Davis are continuing to discuss the issue.
Bryant described the summative assessments as a place to start the conversation for ongoing assessment change taking place in the classroom.
In the report, there was a variety of graphic data – charts and graphs, in which numbers for student achievement were provided and broken down in to sub-groups, like grade level and ethnicity.
Bryant cited the collaborative work that takes place between teachers and site administrators, in the alignment of instruction, as perhaps one of the reasons ELA/literacy standards were met by 82 percent of all Davis students in grade 11.
Four achievement levels are used to determine performance (Standard Exceeded, Standard Met, Standard Nearly Met, Standard Not Met).
When the ELA numbers, for Davis students, are broken down by socio-economic status, the district’s achievement/opportunity gap is on full display.
While there may have only been a one percent difference in the improvement over last year, between ELA scores of low-income students and scores of non low-income students, the gap remains big.
Last year, 35 percent of Davis low-income students met or exceeded the standards. For 2015-16, the numbers rose to 37 percent. As for ELA percentages of standards met/exceeded for DJUSD students who are not low-income, they were 77 percent, last year, and 80 percent this year.
Statewide, in all grades tested, nearly half (49 percent) of the students met or exceeded ELA/literacy standards – a five-percentage point jump from last year.
California’s achievement/opportunity gap is revealed when the numbers are looked at for the sub-groups of Latino/Hispanic and African American. Sixty-four percent of white students met or exceeded ELA/literacy standards, while the percentages of Latino/Hispanic students (37 percent) and African American students (31 percent), for that assessment, were much lower.
The statewide totals for math were better than last year’s, with an increase of four percentage points, up to 37 percent of the students meeting or exceeding standards.
When looking at the math results for the district – broken down by ethnicity – the numbers for standards met or exceeded were low for both African American and Latino/Hispanic students.
African American students made a one percent gain from last year, up to 38 percent, but the math numbers took a slight dip for Latino/Hispanic students, from 36 to 34 percent.
Bryant went over charts that compared Davis students’ proficiency in ELA and math to that of other districts, notably Palo Alto, whose students met or exceeded standards in ELA (83 percent) and math (84 percent) for the CAASPP.
Seventy-one percent of all Davis students tested exceeded or met the standards in ELA/literacy, while the percentage was lower for math, at 66 percent.
“I wanted to mention that one of the major pieces that we look at, in comparison with Palo Alto, is the level of funding,” said Bryant. “The level of funding in Palo Alto is about 160 percent of the state average, whereas Davis is about 98 percent of the state average.”
Tracking student success within the district is achieved by LEAs through the use of what Bryant called “data mechanisms,” charts with standards met or standards exceeded, either by grade level or cohort.
“One way you can look at (it) is we’re watching programs from one year to the next, as the particular grade level begins to focus in on particular areas of instruction, they can track how that impacts that particular grade level of instruction,” Bryant explained. “It’s a different group of students but perhaps there are some changes that are being made in the way that instruction is taking place.”
As for the tracking cohorts mechanism, Bryant said that the standard scale scores is a continuum of scores consistent from one grade level to another so as students progress along they are going through one set of score results.
The various processes of analysis were presented in the report, with the first piece of assessment broken down through achievement level, which is the exact way in which a student scores.
Claim descriptors are used to gauge how successful students were in answering a progression of questions that involve target areas and standards.
Also part of the process of analysis is a system of icons, representing one of four target levels. According to the chart provided in the report, the plus icon means the student scored better on items from that particular target than on any other in the test.
The equal icon means that the student did no better on a particular target area than any other in the test, while the minus icon indicates a worse performance in a specific target area than on any part of the test.
A black diamond icon indicates that there is not enough information to say if the particular target is a strength or weakness.
Trustee Susan Lovenburg opened up the comments and questions part of discussion/action item, saying that, although the talk about testing makes her feel somewhat distant from the kids, “it’s really important information that helps guide us in decisions that we’re making about programs to best serve children, so I really appreciate the opportunity to see it and to understand it…and to mostly understand how it’s used by the district, by principals and by teachers.”
Lovenburg brought up the district’s strategic planning goal, and that one of its goals is to implement a district-wide system of assessments.
Bryant referenced the district assessment management system, called Illuminate, which he said houses the scores from the summative assessments, reading cards and math benchmarks, helping, among other things, teachers connect report cards to standards.
What Bryant finds even more useful is the social-emotional piece to the system, in which information like attendance records, counseling support, or data from the HealthyKids survey are considered.
Short-term interventions, if necessary, could be carried out, accompanied by entry criteria, participation and exit criteria.
Board member Barbara Archer said that she was interested in education levels because, as a college community, Davis has a sizable amount of parents with high education levels but who are also low-income earners.
Archer asked about the ability for teachers to identify their students, from the year-to-year results, in a particular subject.
Bryant said that, presently, they are looking at what is called an early learning system, as a piece to Illuminate and part of their multi-tiered system, “so trying to have a way that we have students that have sudden drops get some sort of flag on them.”
“Again, teachers are pretty in tune with what’s happening with their students, and they’ll be tracking in-class assignments and in-class assessments that are going on,” Bryant said. “They can see from how a student is responding to formative assessment for example about whether or not they’re engaged as they normally are or if it’s something where they’re off on a particular day and it’s those relationships, again, where it’s going to be the important component of that whole system of supports that going to help to identify those issues when something comes up.”
Archer followed up with another question about tracking.
“If you see in a third grade cohort that one particular classroom scores through the roof can you say to that teacher, ‘hey can we talk to you about collaboration and what are you doing that’s producing these results?’”
Bryant said, “Yes, those conversations do take place.”
Trustee Tom Adams requested the raw numbers, between the low socio-economic students and then those at their grade, in terms of who are not making grade-level standard, and asked about the means of identifying clusters, or concentrations of those students.
“Should we be targeting it district-wide or are there certain campuses that probably need maybe a little extra boost on early literacy and then should we be drawing down maybe to TK, Kindergarten, first, second grade, in terms of maybe, there it’s really an issue of literacy and vocabulary or is it really one of basic skills?” Adams asked. “I mean, that to me is the question hanging out there, in terms of program design – are we meeting the needs of the kids and do they have the right resources there.”
In reference to the differences in ELA and math numbers from district students in grade 11, Adams wondered that, since these are the same kids, is the issue the test, or an instructional issue that could be figured out.
“And, maybe it’s time that math teachers and language arts teachers, believe it or not, might start talking to each other, and comparing their strategies and things like that.”
Adams said he was also interested when the tests were broken down by ethnicity.
“Are there any patterns over grade levels,” he asked. “Do we see maybe more achievement at the elementary, middle or high school level? Do we see an overall pattern here as we go up the grade levels that can help us answer it? In that sense, that might be helping us understand the achievement gap.”
