Test Flop Leaves School Board Stumped

Ana Rodriguez said Clinton Avenue students need more than a strong plan to do better on the Common Core-aligned exam next spring.

They need more staff and resources to carry it out.

Principal Rodriguez is one of the district and school officials rebounding from Smarter Balance Assessment Consortium (SBAC) scores that came in well below the state average, figuring out how to get them higher next spring.

That prompted debated at a Board of Education meeting Monday night, when members disagreed about whether to double down on existing efforts, throw out the status quo and try again, or develop some combination of the two. They also debated what to make of significantly better results among charter-school students.

The problem: no one knows exactly what went wrong.

The state Department of Education released scores at the end of August showing that 29.1 percent of New Haven students are on track for literacy and 13.5 percent are on track for math, compared to 55.4 percent and 39.1 percent statewide. Students in grades 3 through 8 and 11 spent five weeks taking various parts of the test this past May.

Connecticut is one of 45 states that have agreed to adopt the Common Core, national academic standards that set benchmarks in English and math for students from K to 12 — aligned to the standardized Smart Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) test. The Achievement First (AF) charter network and New Haven Public School district decided to switch to the controversial high-stakes Common Core two years before the state requirement of 2015.

The first year was a test run; last year determined the district’s baseline score. District leaders expected recent scores to be low, as students got accustomed to a new evaluation — but these results are ​“unacceptable,” Superintendent Garth Harries said Monday.

He made SBAC score analysis a large part of his annual performance review Monday, providing the board with a summary of the district’s reform goals, priorities, successes and target problems. Click here to see the entire performance review presentation.

Graduation rates are rising each year — with an estimated 2 percent jump from 2014 to 2015. More students are going to college and more of those are staying in higher education. Even so, SBAC results show that students are not on track for college and career success, Harries said.

Just days after the city launched its ​“Attendance Matters” campaign, to target chronic absence, Harries said attendance was only somewhat relevant in predicting SBAC scores. Students with higher attendance did better on the exam, but those with good attendance still did poorly relative to state scores.

Just 37 percent of students who had near perfect attendance met the literacy standard, and just 20 percent of those students met the math standard. In comparison, eight percent of students with less than 80 percent attendance met the literacy standards, and one percent met the math standard.

Developing A Plan

Harries and Assistant Superintendent Imma Canelli presented to the board Monday a list of initiatives in development to boost students’ scores in both math and literacy.

Math and literacy coaches will use half their time to support teachers and the other half to lead or facilitate meetings that help growth in their subject areas. Canelli reiterated her objective that reading and writing be taught across various subjects, including world history and geography, to encourage students to engage deeply with all material.

The district has focused more of its attention on improving literacy than math, Harries said. To shift that imbalance, all schools will strive to offer one hour of an uninterrupted math block and to have grade level meetings twice a month. Teachers of grades 3 – 6 will receive more developed instruction on how to teach math.

Principal Rodriguez said the district’s list of strategies is ​“very good…The intention is in the right place.”

But, she added, if the strategies are not being implemented at a classroom level, they will not help students. ​“We can put coaching in place, but if there’s no monitoring of it, you can coach all you want. If it’s not being dispersed in the classroom…it’s back to square one.”

Clinton Avenue needs resources to execute some of those strategies. ​“What we need is human capital,” she said, including more teachers and support staff. Teachers know what skill weaknesses to target for each students, ​“but I can’t do it by myself for 27 kids six hours a day,” Rodriguez said.

Last academic year, Clinton Avenue students and teachers focused on getting familiar with the online tools needed to take the test, more so than they did on academic test prep. The school has six laptop carts, each with 30 Intel laptops, as well as a library filled with 30 desktops.

The existing curriculum was intended to prepare students for the exam, so there was no need for extra test prep sessions, Rodriguez said.

They thought they were ready. But students overall did poorly, with 19 percent meeting on track for literacy and 6 percent for math.

Principal Rodriguez (pictured) said students were likely to improve their scores with practice — ​“attacking it with short steps at a time.”

Following the general districtwide pattern, Clinton Avenue seventh and eighth graders performed better than students in grades 3 – 6. Rodriguez said she wasn’t sure why. But those grades have more ​“consistency in their staff,” she said, ​“a cohesive staff that’s been there for two or three years and understands what the demands are…Students are being guided by a team of teachers instead of individualized teachers.”

Clinton Avenue is now in the state’s commissioner’s network, receiving $200,000 for a planning year that administrators plan to use to equip each classroom with three to five Chromebooks, ​“so we can help students quicken their pace and quicken their ability to utilize the technology,” Rodriguez said.

Charter Comparison

AF charter network schools scored within 10 percentage points of the state average, much higher than the district. Board members Monday night argued over how much New Haven Public Schools could glean from charter schools’ academic strategies.

This past winter, the district considered, and ultimately decided against, entering into a financial partnership with AF on a new charter school called Elm City Imagine. A couple of board members lamented that decision Monday.

“We had an opportunity last year to partner with Achievement First on something new…We chose not to pursue that,” said board member Alex Johnston, former CEO of charter advocacy group ConnCAN. ​“We need to be not just learning from them but giving them the opportunity to teach more kids.”

He urged the district to do ​“two things at once”: keep improving existing strategies while differentiating its approach to education. ​“People say we can’t experiment” with education, he said. ​“We will not succeed if we don’t.”

But board member Carlos Torre said it didn’t make sense to compare district students to charter school students. ​“They do need different kinds of things. Let’s figure out what we need for certain kinds of schools,” he said. ​“The same old thing the same old way is insanity. So is shooting in the dark.”

Mayor Toni Harp—newly voted the board’s president—sided with Johnston. ​“We have the ability to look into our charter schools. What are they doing that we’re not doing?” she said.

Harp also lamented a lost opportunity for educational experimentation — the plan to move the Strong School to Southern Connecticut State University’s campus to serve as a teaching lab for college students.

“I’m most upset because when we had an opportunity to learn about education through Southern’s prism, we weren’t allowed to do it by the Board of Alders,” she said.

Harries said that none of the schools are ​“at a success level we’re happy with,” but some did better than others on the test. About 42 percent of Mauro-Sheridan School students met literacy standards on the SBAC and 18 percent met math standards. ​“These schools are not generally looking at a different curriculum,” but rather a ​“different level of implementation,” he said.

Harp said principals whose students scored in the single digits should go to the board and ​“tell us what it is they need to move forward,” in order ​“make sure there is equity among these schools. Schools did really well because of the excellent way those parents have advocated for what’s in the schools.”

Improving SBAC scores and students’ college and career readiness will ​“define our work going forward,” Harries said. ​“We’re committed to doing the hard work.”