Middletown CMT Scores Overall Improvement

City parents will be relieved to know that there has been "a consistent improvement in every grade level in every subject from 2006 to 2011," said Middletown Public Schools Assistant Superintendent Barbara Senges.

"What we're really happy about right now is the reading," said Senges. "The math right now is probably the area where we need the most work. The good news is we know what to do. We're doing it in third, fourth and fifth grade, now we just need to do it in sixth, seventh and eighth grade."

What's wrong with the middle-schoolers? Nothing. They're still excelling, but they're not excelling at the same rate as they were when they were in elementary school.

Senges explains that statistics are generally presented by year, showing the scores for third graders in 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011. That means each years is recording the scores of a different group of third graders. Senges says that this is not the most effective means of measuring progress.

"To measure real progress, you really need to follow the same group of kids," said Senges, which means tracking and comparing a child's scores from year to year. "The problem is" said Senges, "as they were moving up in the grade levels, they were declining."

So while there is overall, consistent progress every year with every new group of students testing, fifth graders in 2009 who had a math proficiency of 87.8 percent moved down to 84 percent in 2010 and 75.8 percent in 2011.

Senges says that the progress in reading "nothing short of a miracle" and she attributes it to the intervention program they started in 2006 — Scientific Research-Based Intervention.

"We haven't mastered the math and writing intervention at the upper grades as we have in reading," said Senges. They are, however, moving toward improvement. "I can say we're implementing with complete fidelity," said Senges. "We really do look at data on an ongoing basis. We know where our kids are and we develop strategies to move them forward."

The solution to getting the writing scores as high as the reading scores? Senges says they need balance. The reading and writing comes in one block more focus has been put on the reading. Senges suggested that more writing be incorporated in other subjects outside of language arts.

In order to boost math scores, Senges says that the means of teaching it is what needs to change completely.

"There's a lot of good tools to assess reading, to determine the real problem when a child is struggling. There's none of that in math. I think it's a weakness in this country that we don't teach math conceptually. The top of my wish list is a new math program," said Senges.

Superintendent Dr. Michael Frechette and Senges both agreed that, attractive as it is, a new math program is not economically viable at the moment — around half a million dollars — and would take up to two years to fully implement.

Aside from intervention, Senges says that much progress can be attributed to classroom teaching, or Tier I teaching. Some room for improvement, however, includes pre-assessments and differentiating.

"We need kids in different groups working on different things," said Senges.

The achievement gap for reading between students that receive free or reduced price lunch and student that pay the regular price has been closed by 19 percent.

"We didn't meet our goal yet," said Senges, who was working toward 30 percent, "but we did pretty well."

Students in receiving free or reduce lunch excelled at higher levels in comparison with students who pay full price. For instance, the reading goal of third graders receiving free or reduced price lunch improved by 11.9 percent from 2010 to 2011 (following the progress of the same group of students into grade four), whereas the reading goal of third graders receiving regular price lunch improved by 10.9 percent from 2010 to 2011.

The intervention system being used, Fountas and Pinnell Leveled Literacy Intervention System, is currently available for elementary students, however, Senges says that Fountas and Pinnel will be releasing a system geared toward intermediate-level students.

Frechette says that the real testament of progress is what you see outside of the classroom. He pulled up a picture on his camera of student reading while on a unicycle at the Middletown Bookmobile event.

"There were kids sitting out there, eating pizza and reading books!" said Frechette, "It was incredible."

"If we don't get our kids to read and read all of the time and love reading," said Senges, "then we're not doing our job."

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