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Two big winners in the Colorado Student Assessment Program (CSAP) test results announced today are Denver and Aurora, two of the state’s most challenged school districts.
Students in both districts made striking progress on some state achievement tests this past year, though both still lag behind statewide averages.
In Denver, the state’s second-largest school district with some 73,000 students, the CSAP results showed across-the-board gains in almost every grade level in reading, writing and in math in 2008. Reading scores – particularly in the middle grades – made especially dramatic gains.
In total, 46.2 percent of DPS students now read at or above grade level, an increase of 3.6 percentage points over last year . That’s one of the largest rates of growth in the state, and far and away the largest of any urban school district. Among middle schoolers – a focus of much district remedial work lately - the number reading at or above grade level increased by 10 percentage points.
Meanwhile, scores in writing and math were up 0.7 percentage points district-wide.
“This is the first time we’ve seen those kind of gains,” said Theresa Peña, chairwoman of the Denver Board of Education. “I would say the results are very promising. But we still have a long way to go. While this is great, my excitement is tempered.”
In Aurora, the gains in reading weren’t quite as dramatic as in Denver, but the district showed steady improvement overall: scores were up 1.5 percentage points in reading, up 1.3 percentage points in writing and up 1.3 percentage points in math. And again, the increase in reading scores was particularly noteworthy at the middle school level, an age when student achievement begins to drop off.
“We had the largest growth in Aurora that we’ve seen in any of the last six years,” said John Barry, superintendent of the 32,000-student district. “And when you go back to 2002, we had 55 percent fewer English-language learners then, and fewer students on free- and reduced-price lunch.” This past spring, when the CSAP tests were administered, 62 percent of Aurora Public Schools students qualified for free and reduced-price lunch.
In all, 21 of the district’s 52 schools improved their overall CSAP performance by 3 percent or more. Last year, only nine of the district’s schools got that rate of increase.
“Remember, this is a district of 93 languages and over 100 countries,” Barry said. “We’re a little U.N. And as far as those ethnic groups are concerned, we definitely made progress. Not as much as we want, but we brought a little closure to the achievement gap for the first time. We made clear gains in reading and writing among Hispanics and African-Americans. The only area we fell short on was math among Hispanic students.”
The performance of Denver and Aurora students drew praise from Colorado Department of Education Commissioner Dwight Jones. “These are districts that serve some of the state’s highest-needs populations but are showing tremendous strides forward,” Jones said at a morning press conference to announce the results. He also singled out Colorado Springs District 11 and Greeley-Evans School District 6 for similar reasons.
Gov. Bill Ritter also praised what he called the “historic progress” in DPS reading scores. “It gives us reason to hope,” he said. But he said he is troubled to see that progress steadily erode as students reach high school. While the number of proficient readers in DPS remains fairly steady at between 42 and 49 percent between fourth and ninth grades, by the time DPS students reach 10th grade, only 28 percent continue to read at or above grade level. That figure hasn’t moved much in the past three years.
DPS Superintendent Michael Bennet, exultant at the progress the district has made, said he hopes that a new program, initiated at the end of the school year, may help bring some of the lagging students up to par. Called Core Matters, it will target the 30 lowest-performing schools in the district to receive additional instructional support.
“We finally are in a cycle of continuous improvement in Denver Public Schools,” Bennet said. “We won’t arrive at our destination in one year or two year or three years, but we’re on the way there, and all the people in the district can feel proud of what we’ve accomplished.”
Among the state’s other eight largest school districts in the state, only Colorado Springs District 11 saw consistent gains in all academic areas tested by CSAP. That district saw scores rise by nearly 1 percent age point in reading, writing and math.
The state’s largest school district, Jefferson County, posted almost a 1 percent increase in reading scores, but lost ground in writing and math. Ditto for Cherry Creek, St. Vrain Valley and Adams Five Star schools, whose reading scores were all up slightly, but whose math and writing scores were down. And students in Boulder Valley, Douglas County and Poudre Valley all showed across-the-board losses. In Poudre Valley, writing and math scores were down 2 percentage points.
Another metro Denver school district that saw some significant declines in student achievement for the second straight year was Mapleton, a district widely touted for its ground-breaking reforms in recent years. In that district, overall reading scores are down 4 percentage points, writing scores are down 1.5 percentage points and math scores are down 0.3 percentage points.
Commissioner Jones addressed the relatively flat test scores seen across the state. “It should be noted that the mild progress in this year’s overall CSAP results for the entire state come at a time when the face of our state is changing,” he said. “As the Colorado Children’s Campaign recently reported, there were almost 76,000 more children living in poverty in 2006 than in the year 2000. Colorado’s rate of growth for poverty among children is the fastest growing in the country. This is not an excuse, simply a clear picture of the increasing needs of students in our schools.”
Related
Data
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Go to this page on the CDE website
for full CSAP data, including information on the Spanish-language
reading and writing tests, the CSAPA tests and more details on
longitudinal growth.
- You can search individual scores on the www.denverpost.com and www.rockymountainnews.com sites.
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