Superintendent of Schools Joseph V. Erardi, Jr, responded to the state’s release of the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) exam results on August 28, by calling the results “baseline data.”

The superintendent said on Monday that the new exam has no correlation with the Connecticut Mastery Test and the Connecticut Academic Performance test, which were administered in previous years.

“The SBAC test is a different assessment. It just is,” said Dr Erardi.

After reviewing the results, Dr Erardi said Newtown’s schools are “competitive with performance,” which he said indicated to him, “The district continues in a very positive way to rebuild and to recover.”

According to a Connecticut State Department of Education release announcing the statewide results, the state transitioned to the new Common Core-aligned exams, which presented significantly tougher questions “intended to test real-world skills.” Similar shifts in testing occurred nationwide, according to the department.

“The results show that 55.4 percent of grades 3 to 8 and 11 students are meeting or exceeding the achievement level in English/Language Arts (ELA), which significantly exceeded expectations, and 39.1 percent of students are meeting or exceeding the achievement level in mathematics, which matched state officials’ expectations,” according to the Department of Education release.

Results were reported in four categories: “Does Not Meet the Achievement Level,” “Approaching Achievement Level,” “Meets the Achievement Level,” and “Exceeds the Achievement Level.”

Newtown’s results show 74.8 percent of students met or exceeded the achievement level in ELA, and 59.7 percent met or exceeded the achievement level in math.

Dr Erardi said the collection of relevant student data is limited with the new test, as the results cannot be compared to former test results, but the district has internal assessments for students in kindergarten through eighth grade and has benchmark assessments at the high school level to compare to national results.

The last week of August is also late for testing results to be released, according to the superintendent, who added that building principals already had improvement plans in place by the start of the new school year that could not include the test results due to their late release.

While the superintendent said he never wants to get excited when a district does well or too overwhelmed when a district does not perform well, overall, he said, “I’m just awfully proud of the way our kids competed.”

Dr Erardi said a district team will perform an internal analysis on the results, “but we will not teach to the test.”

The continuing mission, Dr Erardi said, will be to “do our absolute best teaching every day,” adding that he is certain those practices will show on future test results.

Assistant Superintendent of Schools Jean M. Evans Davila told the school board during its meeting on Tuesday, September 1, “These results as they are today are just baseline data. It is not like when we had CMT and CAPT, and we were able to look year to year and make some valid assumptions about the data. Right now we are really building a foundation for how we will do that in subsequent years.”

However, the data from this first official round of testing, Ms Davila said, are thought-provoking.

Any assessment is only a part of the work a student does in the Newtown Public Schools district, Ms Davila said, stressing “no single assessment should stand as the mark of our children’s achievement in the district.”

Ms Davila also warned against regressing to a “culture that tries to teach to a test.”

Along with looking at how Newtown’s students did compared to the state results, Ms Davila said she also compared Newtown’s results to other districts in its District Reference Group (DRG), which is a grouping of similar districts designated by the state.

“That provides you, once you begin to build some trend data, an analysis of how we could share best practices interdistrict and outside the district as well,” said Ms Davila.

When she compared Newtown with seven towns she highlighted as Newtown’s closest neighbors in Fairfield County, she said, “Newtown held their own pretty well. In a comparison in that group across grades three through eight and grade eleven Newtown places third among these eight groups...”

One highlight Ms Davila said she “just couldn’t neglect, because I know the town is so focused on the well-being of Sandy Hook [Elementary School] students and staff” was the third grade students who took the test last spring were ranked first in the math category among the town’s elementary schools and second in ELA.

“I just think that is phenomenal and I think we should celebrate that,” said Ms Davila.

Ms Davila said there is still work to be completed with the SBAC data.

“I hope the town will keep in mind this is a piece of a portrait,” she said.