State rates schools here - Lancaster Online 3/6/2011

State rates schools here
Measures students' growth
Intelligencer Journal
Lancaster New Era

Updated Mar 06, 2011 21:55
By BRIAN WALLACE, Staff Writer

It's good to be green if you're a school district in Pennsylvania.

The state last week released the latest results of a statistical evaluation called PVAAS that rates schools using the colors of a traffic light.

Green means a school is doing a good job of assuring all students make at least one year's worth of academic growth during a year of schooling.

Yellow means a school may not have been effective in supporting student growth over a year, and pink and red ratings mean there is moderate to significant evidence the school was not effective.

The Pennsylvania Value Added Assessment System has been used internally by school districts for a couple of years, but the results are only now being released to the public.

Overall, they indicate more than eight in 10 public schools serving Lancaster County students earned green ratings in math, while just under 60 percent of county schools had green ratings in reading.

About 5 percent of county schools fell in the yellow column in math and 16 percent were rated yellow in reading. A little over one-fourth of schools earned red ratings in reading, while 16 percent were rated red in math.

No school district earned green ratings for all its schools for 2010.

PVAAS results are based on the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment tests administered in grades three through eight and 11 each year. But unlike the PSSAs, which measure achievement at a single point in time, PVAAS measures growth.

PVAAS looks at students' past PSSA scores and estimates how they'll score the next time they take the test. After the new test results are in, those numbers are compared with the projections to determine if students fell below, at or above the expected score.

The PVAAS ratings, available to the public on the website pvaas.sas.com, show how schools fared in meeting the growth standard in 2010 and over the past three years.

Because PVAAS evaluates how well a school helped students of all abilities, it isn't affected by such factors as a child's socioeconomic status, which can greatly influence PSSA results.

As a result, a school with strong PSSAs scores won't necessarily earn green PVAAS ratings, and the same holds true for schools with low PSSA scores.

Students at Hans Herr Elementary, for instance, had stellar PSSA math and reading scores in 2010, with 92 percent of students proficient or advanced in math and 85 percent hitting those targets in reading.

But the school earned a pink PVAAS rating in reading for 2010 and a red three-year average math rating.

Why the discrepancies?

Like other schools with strong PSSA scores, Hans Herr faces a challenge in keeping high-achieving students at that level as they progress through the grades.

"Our third-grade scores start extremely high," said Kevin Peart, assistant superintendent of Lampeter-Strasburg School District. "There's more room to slip than to improve.

"We need to continue to grow those students who are at higher levels of proficiency to make sure they're making one year's progress," he said.

School District of Lancaster tends to struggle each year on PSSA tests. In 2010, less than half of SDL schools made "adequate yearly progress," the measure of how well schools fare on the standardized tests.

But 14 of 19 SDL schools had green PVAAS ratings in math for 2010, and 10 of 19 scored green in reading. Districtwide, there were only four red ratings in math and two in reading.

"We're happy with a lot of the green that we're seeing," said Tracy Ocasio, SDL director of curriculum and instruction. "We are seeing that we're moving students a year forward."

Where SDL — and many other school districts — fell short was at its secondary schools.

The four SDL middle schools all earned yellow or red ratings in at least one subject, and McCaskey and McCaskey East high schools, considered a single school, were in the red for both subjects.

McCaskey ranked 16th in math and 15th in reading among the 17 public high schools in the county. Solanco High School was last in both categories.

The top-ranked high schools in the county in math were Ephrata, Conestoga Valley, Lampeter-Strasburg, Hempfield and Warwick. The top-ranked high schools in reading were Manheim Township, Ephrata, Warwick, Conestoga Valley and Donegal.

Officials at several districts pointed out that high school ratings are less exact than the ratings for other schools because of the gap in PSSA testing from grades eight to 11.

Because there are fewer test results factored into projections and wide discrepancies in the types of courses students take in high school, the PVAAS projections aren't as reliable as they are for students in lower grades, they say.

Solanco and McCaskey both have taken steps to better align their high school curricula to state standards and improve teaching quality, officials at the two school districts said.

Solanco also implemented a new program this year to help students make the transition from middle school to high school, said Brian Bliss, assistant superintendent.

"We do want their performance to be better than it is," he said. "We're much more aligned than we were (with state standards), and we're aiming for better results."

Among the county's middle schools, the top-rated schools in math were Martin Meylin, Manor, Elizabethtown CV and Ephrata. In reading, the top five were Donegal, Manheim Township, Lincoln, Elizabethtown and Garden Spot.

The top-rated elementary schools in math were Brownstown, Farmdale, Fritz, Bonfield and Lititz. In reading, the top five were Brownstown, Fritz, Eshleman, Washington and Bonfield.

bwallace@lnpnews.com

Read more: http://articles.lancasteronline.com/local/4/359706#ixzz1G3hbCKiK
 

Area high school rankings. Source: Pa. Dept. of Education. (Dan Morris / Staff)

Ratings for area high schools. Source: Pa. Dept. of Education. (Dan Morris / Staff)