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The results are from the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) tests, which are national assessments of English language arts and math for third through eighth graders.
District scores in English increased by nearly 2 percentage points and scores in math increased by roughly 2.5 percentage points over the year prior. Seventy percent of schools in the district improved their scores year-over-year.
“We feel that these scores are promising and show that we are heading in the right direction thanks to the hard work of our staff and students,” district superintendent Susan Enfield said.
Shaw Middle School is one of the schools that has surpassed its pre-pandemic levels.
“We created an environment that was very welcoming, understanding, a lot of caring relationships between staff and students, so that our students wanted to perform for our school,” outgoing Shaw principal Mike Gifford said.
District-wide, less than half of students scored at or above grade level for English and only about a third did so for math. The district will distribute the data to school principals so that it can be used for targeted programming.
Jose Davila IV is a corps member for Report for America, an initiative of the GroundTruth Project.