Local school chiefs agree that the Delaware Student Testing Program continues to give the state and local districts a picture of how well students stand up to state standards in reading, writing and mathematics.
But the superintendents of northern New Castle County’s Brandywine, Red Clay Consolidated and Christina school districts believe there is a better way to measure students’ true abilities.
They hope that a task force studying the future of the state’s student testing program will make a recommendation to change it by 2010. One option is to use a test local school districts use already - the Northwest Education Association’s Measures of Academic Progress, known as MAP.
School chiefs agree the MAP can better evaluate students who are below grade level when it comes to English and mathematics standards and prepare them for the next level.
The beauty of DSTP and the accountability of the federal No Child Left Behind Act is that it tells the local public schools specifically which children are struggling in reading, writing and math, yet it falls short in other areas, Brandywine Superintendent James R. Scanlon said.
“It’s great to measure kids against standards, but one thing that’s missing is level of growth,” Scanlon said. “You can have a kid in eighth grade reading at a fourth-grade level and at the end he’s reading at a sixth grade level. That’s two years of growth. But when he takes the test, it doesn’t measure the growth he’s made.”
The Northwest Education Association’s MAP test has about a 90 percent correlation to the DSTP, Scanlon said, and it does both pre and post testing to measure for growth.
With high school students, the ones who are behind often lack basic skills, according to Red Clay Superintendent Robert J. Andrzejewski.
“Some have trouble with basic algebra concepts,” he said. “Iit’s pretty hard for them to do Algebra II while still learning Algebra I. But you have to play catch up and keep moving forward.”
Any progress should count, and the MAP test is a one way to do it, he said.
Christina Superintendent Lillian M. Lowery said MAP is also a predictor of how students will do on the DSTP. For example, the principal at Gallaher Elementary School used MAP data from the beginning of the school year and found that 60 percent of students would have failed DSTP at that time, Lowery said. But the principal used Title I [federal] money to hire retired teachers to help students catch up.
By the time Department of Education school ratings were released in August, Gallaher’s students were performing so well, the school was rated superior, with greater than 95 percent of its third-graders and fifth-graders meeting or exceeding DSTP reading standards, 94.2 of its third-graders met math standards and 95 percent of its fifth-graders met math standards.
