Comments on student achievement for the School Board, April 9, 2001

by Margaret DeLacy

(these comments represent my own views, as a parent of PPS students, and do not represent the position of any organization that I am associated with)

Dear Board members:

I am here tonight to comment on an important aspect of student achievement that I feel is being overlooked during the present discussions.

I am sure I do not need to remind board members that "the mission of Portland Public Schools is to support ALL students in achieving their very highest educational and personal potential...." or that the district’s objectives include the statement that by 2005 "One hundred percent of our students will demonstrate significant growth every year"

These are the most fundamental and significant objectives that the district has set for itself.

We have recently heard a lot of discussion about student achievement. Achievement is often understood as a single test score. Many people seem to believe if a student’s score is high enough, that student is showing acceptable "achievement." But a single score offers us almost no information about whether a school system is actually doing a good job of teaching. It may tell more about what a student has learned at home than in school.

If a student enters third grade with a given achievement test score, and leaves at the end of the year with the SAME score, then the student has not made "significant growth" or in fact, any growth at all, no matter what that score was when the student entered.

To understand whether students are making "growth" we must compare student scores from one year to another year to see whether they have improved. This GAIN in student test scores is a better measure than absolute scores of how good a job the district is doing in teaching its students and how much our students are actually learning in school. This information is available in a report prepared annually by the Research and Evaluation Department entitled "RIT gains by Achievement level."

I have shared this information with some of you previously, so I want to take this opportunity to make a comment. After I shared some of the data from last year, we discussed it further with the Research and Evaluation department and it became clear that last year’s data does not give an accurate picture because it reflects a transition from district PALT data to State test data. Evelyn Brzezinski has told me that this is a transition problem, and will not continue to confuse the picture in future years. I have included data from last year in a separate table so you can see what it looks like, but you should not rely on it.

Data from the last year before this transition problem shows very clearly that we have a very serious achievement problem among our very high achieving students.

I have given you the complete District report, and have prepared a summary myself on the first page.

In reading, very high achieving students were essentially making no gains at all, except in fifth grade, and even in fifth grade they were making lower gains than their average classmates. In math they were doing slightly better, but still trailed average students in three years out of five. The fact that they performed slightly better than their classmates in fifth and seventh grade provides "the exception that proves the rule": it suggests that the problem is not simply some quirk of the tests. In addition, these scores represent achievement at a time when the district gave six levels of PALT tests at each grade level, making "ceiling effects" a less significant problem.

If the district is really serious in supporting ALL students to reach their "very highest potential" then it will take serious steps to address the "achievement gap" that these test scores demonstrate. We cannot afford to warehouse our best students.

Comparison of average and very high 1997-8 

RIT score gains by spring 1997 achievement level, 

Portland Public Schools

 

READING	GRADE	Average students	Very high students
	four	7.7	1.2
	five	5.2	4.5
	six	4.1	0.1
	seven	4.4	0.5
	eight	4.1	-1.1
MATH
	four	11.5	6.1
	five	7.3	9.2
	six	5.9	3.9
	seven	6.5	7.0
	eight	7.6	4.1

 

Compilation by Margaret DeLacy from data supplied by Portland Public Schools

Addendum 2002:

    Here are the scores for the current year.  Because these scores intersperse State with District testing, the score gains are less reliable than those in the earlier year when the tests were all given by PPS.  A problem with the Oregon State testing resulted in an unusually large number of 3rd grade students "hitting the ceiling" on the reading test and those scores have been omitted from this report.  There may be a similar problem with the sixth grade reading tests.  This should be corrected in the next report.

Compilation by Margaret DeLacy from data supplied by Portland Public Schools

Comparison of average and very high 2000/01  RIT score gains by spring 2000 achievement level

READING	GRADE	Average students	Very high students
	four	2.9	n/a
	five	6.6	2.4
	six	3.4	-5.2(?)
	seven	5.4	1.4
	eight	3.5	-1.8
MATH
	four	9.3	5.6
	five	6.0	3.8
	six	4.5	4.6
	seven	8.9	4.8
	eight	1.5	-0.9

Addendum 2003: