NHS Students Scores Presented To School Board

By Eliza Hallabeck

Test scores are only a small part of the larger picture for schools, according to Newtown High School Principal Charles Dumais as he presented scores from different tests administered to students last year to the Board of Education during its meeting on November 18.

“It’s one piece of the bigger picture,” Mr Dumais said to the board.

As an example he mentioned Connecticut Magazine ranking the school as 31 in the state in its November issue that compared roughly 170 schools in the state, and he said NHS was chosen for that because of many different things. Other rankings could have measured the school differently by looking at different areas of education, according to Mr Dumais.

He said there are a number of different tests that are given to students at the high school, and improvement is needed for the CAPT specifically.

“The CAPT is taken in March by all tenth graders in the state of Connecticut. And we get the results,” said Superintendent of Schools Janet Robinson. “[Mr Dumais] has actually done an analysis of the results.”

Test scores that were presented to the board include scores from the ACT, Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), Advance Placement, and Connecticut Academic Performance Test (CAPT).

“There are behaviors and trends that we’ll see, and we’ll talk about our strategies to improve those,” Mr Dumais said, “because I do know that public perception is that schools are what their test scores are. We know that Newtown High School is more than that.”

With some of the tests, Mr Dumais presented the scores NHS students received along with a comparison to other schools in the District Reference Group (DRG), a grouping of schools by the state used to compare things like their test results.

“CAPT, we need some improvement. We’re focused on improvement. We’re focused on making changes that will improve our CAPT scores.”

Newtown’s DRG includes 19 districts and 21 schools, Mr Dumais said.

For the ACT exam, Mr Dumais said there was an increase of students who take the test, and the average test score also increased.

Also on the SAT scores Mr Dumais said, “Essentially in each of the subject areas we have improved our performance over the last five years in every category.”

 

Advanced Placement Scores

For the Advanced Placement scores he broke the scores down by the department in which the tests were being administered.

“You can see, science does really well,” Mr Dumais said. More than 80 percent of students taking the Advanced Placement tests in the science department classes scored at the level of three or more out of score level of four.

“The US history course is probably one of the courses with one of the lower average scores,” Mr Dumais said. He added that both the US history course and the government and politics course are graduation requirements and more students have to take them. “Lots of kids are taking them and if we have 400 kids in a class of kids, I still believe we can support at least 40 students in our highest level.”

He said this was a good example of where there should be more students who can take advanced placement courses.

As far as looking at the student body and asking how many students would be able to take the highest-level courses, Mr Dumais said the High Honor and Honor Roll student lists were released recently by the school.

“I would suspect with these numbers that more of our students are capable of taking these courses,” Mr Dumais said.

Board of Education Chair Elaine McClure said she wanted to know if the cost of the test was stopping students from taking the test.

Mr Dumais said no student was brought to his attention last year who was not able to take the test because of the cost, but there is a practice in place of helping students cope with the cost if the issue does come up.

“We try to identify those students, and we don’t necessarily rely on them to come to us if there is an embarrassment factor or something else.”

Mr Dumais said the Advanced Placement course policy has changed at the school. There used to be a form, and once students signed the form they were acknowledging that they would take the AP test after taking the course.

“I believe that by having students say ‘I will take the test if I take the course’ puts us in a position that you were just asking about,” Mr Dumais said in regard to Ms McClure asking about the cost of the test. “The test costs $80, so when the school requires things from kids then requires them to pay, I think there is a conflict there. So we modified that.”

“I think kids are going to be encouraged to take the test,” Mr Dumais said about the new policy. “Kids will know that they are prepared to take the test, and I think that is a better way.”

 

CAPT Scores

Students are measured and placed into five different categories on the CAPT: Advanced, Goal, Proficiency, Basic, and Below Basic. Mr Dumais said Advanced scores are up while Below Basic scores are down.

Also, in the last two years, a different form of the test has been given to the students. Comparing the results in years before the new test and after the new test can indicate drops or increases, when the scores really are different, according to Mr Dumais.

In math and science the range of scores in the DRG schools got tighter and moved up a bit.

As far as reading is concerned, Mr Dumais said, “We are pretty much at the bottom [of the DRG].”

The last subject, writing, had a small increase, but the whole DRG shifted up on the graph, which means all of the schools had increases in scores.

“Reading, we have some work to do,” he said.

Below Basic score levels have decreased by the number of students, which means there are less students scoring Below Basic, according to Mr Dumais.

“Advanced over the last year, all four categories have increased. There’s only one way for Advanced to increase; if more kids get into Advanced from below. So those are good things.”

Strategies in place to help students prepare for the CAPT test include a ninth grade CAPT practice, CAPT-like prompts that are built into each part of the curriculum, and Mr Dumais said writing across the curriculum is supported at the school.

“A big part of doing well on a test is understanding the format of a test,” said Mr Dumais.

In order to help students understand the format of CAPT, Mr Dumais said teachers also take seminars and courses on the test.

“I don’t bring it up as an excuse. I bring it up as a reality,” said Mr Dumais regarding the number of students per the number of teachers. In 2003, he said, the school averaged about 14 students per teacher.

“If you notice in 2006 and 2007 we had the highest level of students to teacher ratio in our DRG,” said Mr Dumais, who also said being at the top is not a good thing.

On another graph, Mr Dumais compared the schools in the DRG’s average CAPT scores to the schools’ average student per teacher ratio. Newtown had the lowest average test scores and the highest number of students to the lowest number of teachers.

With the incoming wave of students at the high school next year, Mr Dumais said it would take hiring two more teachers for next year to keep Newtown at the same level it is currently at in the DRG.