PARCC report card

The wait is finally over for the first year of Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) scores.
The new standardized test, which is only taken by public school students in grades three through eight, proved to be more rigorous than the former test administered in public schools, which was Louisiana Educational Assessment Program (LEAP). The difficulty of the new test caused eight out of 12 school’s assessment index scores to decline from last year’s LEAP test assessment index scores in Evangeline Parish.
Even with eight of the 12 schools’ declining on their assessment index score, when the scores were released in December, Evangeline Parish School Board Title One Supervisor Penny McDaniel along with Evangeline Parish School’s Superintendent Toni Hamlin were left pleasantly surprised with the results.
McDaniel said, “We were pleased with the scores because the overall assessment index for the district for grades three through eight only declined 3.3 points. The district’s overall assessment index ended up being a 76 and a 76.3, which is considered a C, for the district performance score.”
The assessment index however is not the same as the district performance score (DPS) or school performance score (SPS).
The DPS and SPS are how schools receive a letter grade. The DPS is determined by looking at all of the school’s scores and giving the district a grade as a whole, while determining the SPS involves factors including whether a school is Kindergarten through fourth grade, or whether it is a combination school. Combination schools have to factor in high school student’s data as well to determine the SPS. When it comes to the SPS in the district, eight out of 12 schools had an SPS that was an A or a B.
Because the Evangeline Parish School District has combination schools, the only way to compare how all of the students taking PARCC in the district performed is by reviewing the assessment index for those particular grades. This will show you how the students performed specifically on the PARCC test.
High school students are scored differently because they do not take PARCC, so you cannot look at the letter grade for combination schools because there will be more than just PARCC data involved in determining the school’s SPS.
The first round of PARCC was administered to students during the 2015 school year, and because of the difficulty of this new test McDaniel said, “We were expecting the scores to be worse than they were because this was a harder test and it also had new material on it. You have to remember these middle school kids did not come up with Common Core, so they are taking a test that they have not gone through school being prepared for until now, unlike children in lower grades.”
Some of the schools who endured the greatest decline in their assessment index were: Bayou Chicot Elementary, who dropped 10.8 points; Mamou High School’s junior high, who dropped 9.1 points; Ville Platte Elementary, who dropped 13.9 points; and James Stephen’s Montessori, who dropped 10.8.
Now that the data from the first year of testing has been received, administrators and teachers are able to review their school’s weaknesses and work on improving the areas their students are struggling in the most.
With a current DPS of 76.3, the district still has a ways to go to reach their goals.
According to McDaniel, the “goal is to have a district performance score of 100 out of 150 because that would give us an A for the district.”
At the Evangeline Parish School Board meeting last Wednesday, Hamlin informed the board of the results from last year’s test, and immediately the first question asked by board member for Bayou Chicot Elementary, Peggy Forman, was, “Is there a plan in place to address the decline?”
Hamlin assured the board that steps have already been taken to insure that the district’s schools will grow from here. Hamlin said, “We have met with the principals and looked over the data. Now, the principals are going to work with their teachers to create the best action plans for their school.”
The area that the district seems to be struggling in the most, according to Hamlin, is sixth grade math.
The Superintendent explained this by stating, “The shift in what these students are learning, what the state is looking for, and the shift in the assessments has all played a part in our sixth grade students struggling in math.”
Overall the school district is just glad to finally have scores to look at, because now administrators can see where their students are at and they can also begin working towards growth.
Hamlin said, “Without the scores it was hard for our teachers to know how they need to teach and what areas to focus on, but now our teachers are working together to construct assessments to prepare their students for 2016 PARCC test. After the next round of test, we will have data from two years of the same test to compare which is going to benefit our students and educators even more.”