News : VS School Board hears test score reports from principals

Vinton-Shellsburg Assistant Principal Ryan Davis told the school board Monday night about a high school student who took the ITED (Iowa Test of Educational Development) earlier this year. That student, said Davis, took two of the three tests with his class, but missed the third, and had to make it up on his own. On the two tests that student took with his class, he scored above the 60-percentile level. But on the test he had to make up and took by himself, his score was nearly 50 points lower.

Davis told the board that if that student had been able to take the third test with his class on the sheduled day of testing, his score would have been much higher.

In the era of No Child Left Behind, when the U.S. Department of Education looks at test scores as a measure of how well a school is teaching its students, every test score contributes to the government's perception of the quality of teaching. Like many other districts in Iowa, Vinton-Shellsburg implemented additional reading programs in the lower grades when test scores resulted in the district being labeled a "School in Need of Assistance" under federal guidelines.

The VS School Board spent approximately an hour Monday night listening to the district's four principals discuss the test scores from the 2010-2011 school year.

The reports contained some positive news, such as the 51 students at VSHS (including one student in the alternative high school) who scored at or above 90 percent on the ITED this year. See that story HERE.

There were also areas of concern which are common to many school districts. Females typically tested better than males in many areas, and those students from low-income families tested noticably lower than their peers. Johnson also said that while the number of students whose test results indicate proficiency continues to remain strong, the number of students who test in the top 10 percent is showing somewhat of a decline.

After the meeting, Superintendent Mary Jo Hainstock offered this summary of the test data:

"The elementary data indicate that our focus on reading strategies is showing positive results with many of our students at 2nd and 3rd grade proficient. I would share that we continue to document a “dip” with the sixth grade achievement from when they were fifth graders to sixth graders. And this year our 8th grade special education students show very positive gains as we attribute part of their success with our work with the Literacy Project sponsored with the Department of Education. We anticipate that teachers will be drilling into the data in August as they are making plans for their classrooms and this fall’s instruction."

Click here to see the High School Test results for VS this year: data

See an explanation of the test from the U of Iowa HERE.