All but three Española School District schools failed to meet state standards under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, according to standardized testing data released Aug. 1 by the state Education Department.
Alcalde Elementary tallied a third year onto its streak of academic progress. Velarde and Dixon elementary schools, which last year met state benchmarks overall but failed to meet standards for English-language learner proficiency and attendance, respectively, both met state standards this year.
Española and Chimayó elementary schools, both of which made adequate yearly progress last year, missed state benchmarks by only a few percentage points. So did San Juan and Mountain View elementary schools.
“It was a bit of a shocker,” Chimayó Principal Wilfredo Aguilar said. “I’m real curious to see how the staff reacts. They have a lot of pride — we’re talking about a school that’s made AYP four years straight — and we were right there on the bubble.”
Española Elementary Principal Maxine Abeyta said she had set her hopes higher than just meeting adequacy standards this year.
“To an extent, yeah, (I’m disappointed we barely missed AYP),” Abeyta said. “But I also think that we should’ve exceeded that.”
The proportion of District schools that met state targets this year falls short of statewide figures. Department estimates show 30 percent New Mexico schools made adequate yearly progress (AYP) this year, compared to 20 percent of District schools that did the same.
Under the Act, the Department sets state standards indicating that a certain percentage of students in every school must test “proficient,” or at grade level, each year. Schools that meet that goal, or benchmark, make adequate yearly progress for that year. The benchmark rises each year with the goal that 100 percent of students will test at grade level by the 2013-14 school year.
Students in grades three through nine and eleven are tested for proficiency each spring. Ninth graders will no longer be tested from next year onward.
At the same time, District schools matched state trends in the rate of decline in the number of schools meeting state benchmarks. Both at the District level and statewide, the proportion of schools meeting state targets dropped by roughly 10 percent. State Education Secretary Veronica Garcia cited rising proficiency standards as the culprit, and Superintendent David Cockerham did the same.
“The bar’s been raised, and it’s been raised extremely high,” Cockerham said. “It’s going to keep on getting harder and harder.”
Until now, state proficiency benchmarks rose from year to year by small, single-digit increments. This year, benchmarks were an average 12 percentage points higher than last year. But in school districts like Española, that assessment is only partially accurate. The Department may have flung the bar higher this year, but not necessarily for smaller schools.
The Department adjusts its benchmarks according to school size to allow for statistical error. The smaller the school, the lower the benchmark, and in a small school like Mountain View Elementary, which tested only 30 students, that translates to a 20.5 math proficiency goal that is exactly half the statewide goal of 41 percent. What that means is only 20.5 percent of all Mountain View students needed to test at grade level in math. In Mountain View, as in many other District schools, that adjusted benchmark has increased by as little as 10 points over the past two years. Mountain View made adequate yearly progress last year, and it surpassed that adjusted benchmark in math this year. But it fell short by 3 percentage points of its weighted reading goal of 31 percent.
The Española Military Academy and Española middle school trailed the pack as the only two District schools with single-digit proficiency scores in any subject. Math proficiency at the Academy has remained below 5 percent since the school opened, and this year was no different. Less than 2 percent of Academy students — equivalent to one or two of the 80 9th-and-11th-graders tested — scored proficient in math. At the middle school, only 7 percent of students tested proficient in the same subject, fewer than last year’s 11 percent and roughly the same as two years ago.
“We went through three math teachers last year,” Academy Principal Steve Baca said. “What else can I say?”
Baca said the Academy will make changes next year that will address its woeful math scores. For one thing, he plans to replace some computer-based courses with live teachers. All four high school core courses were computer-taught last year. This year, only science and some math courses will remain computer-based.
He has also hired an academic trainer to coach instructors, and will expect all Academy teachers to use math problems every day, in every class, and teach more problem-solving skills, he said
“That’s what these kids are missing. They don’t do well on these tests because they haven’t learned problem-solving techniques,” Baca said. “But this year, our emphasis was in reading. I’m very pleased with our reading scores.”
The Academy and the middle school both boosted their students’ reading proficiency to meet state standards. While the Academy’s proficiency rate of 32 percent and the middle school’s rate of 39 percent still fall short of the state’s progress benchmark of 56 percent, both schools made adequate yearly progress in that subject under the Act’s “safe harbor” provision, which rewards schools that improve proficiency in a subject by 10 percent or more.
The same provision nearly earned adequate yearly progress for Española seventh grade school, even though that school’s 15 percent math proficiency and 36 percent reading proficiency still trail state expectations by 20 points each. Overall math and reading scores at the seventh-grade school improved by exactly 10 percent over last year,
Española Valley High School failed to replicate the success it had last year when it made adequate yearly progress for the first time since No Child Left Behind was enacted in 2001. The high school’s math and reading scores not only failed to meet state targets this year, but actually decreased by 6 percentage points in math and 22 percentage points in reading.
The high school’s testing success last year coincided with a drastic change in the criteria the school uses to classify students by grade level. The upshot was that many 11th-graders were sent back to the 10th grade and failed to test that year. A year later, many of those reclassified 10th-graders made up their credits and jumped to the 12th grade, some at the beginning and some halfway through the school year.
While the high school tested those 12th graders, the Department only took into account the scores of students classified as 11th-graders on the 80th day of class when calculating test scores.
Principal Bruce Hopmeier said he suspects at the scores of at least some reclassified 11th-graders have been left out of his school’s scores, and intends to dispute the high school’s scores with the Department if closer inspection of testing data backs up his hunch. Schools have until Aug. 16 to review and dispute test data, and the Department will release finalized data Aug. 30, Department spokeswoman Danielle Montoya said.
If it had met state benchmarks for one more year, the high school would have joined the District six other corrective designation-free schools this year. Instead, it will slide back into the final, and most heavily sanctioned, phase of school improvement.
Schools in that final restructuring phase face a variety of state sanctions that are at once threatening and noncommittal.
State law threatens to close those underperforming schools and reopen them as charter schools, to replace their principals and entire staff and even bring in state administrators to run them. But it also allows schools to write their own action plans, which are often vague and almost always less drastic.
State officials argue there’s a reason for that.
“The restructuring options have a wide variety. They can be as simple as having a new curriculum in place,” said Sheila Hyde, who oversees priority schools for the Department. “Some schools will hire a math interventionist, some will offer a new kind of professional development. But research shows the best results come from local control with the community and school board participating.”
Last year, the District replaced principals in most of its restructuring schools. Neither of those schools met state standards this year, either.
This year, action plans for District restructuring schools share a theme of increased professional development and using data to improve instruction — two techniques the District already uses extensively. Plans for some schools also include fuzzy proposals like re-writing “vision statements” and assigning “goal teams.”Cockerham denied those measures amount to more of the same.
He pointed to Española middle school as an example.
A restructuring of the District’s secondary schools will move seventh-graders to Española middle school from their old facility on Hunter Street, and in turn move ninth-graders from the middle school to the high school.
“You’re telling me that’s not drastic?” Cockerham asked. “It doesn’t get more drastic than that. Those are some pretty big changes.”