Schools pleased with most test results

Kalispell Public Schools is in a pretty good place.

That’s Assistant Superintendent Dan Zorn’s summation after learning how Kalispell students performed on the Criterion Referenced Test in 2010.

That’s the exam the federal government uses to determine whether schools have made Adequate Yearly Progress, the benchmarks established by the No Child Left Behind Act.

Kalispell’s elementary and high school districts both met the standards in 2010. Individually, only Flathead High School failed to make the benchmark; one subgroup of students didn’t make proficiency and the school missed the target graduation rate, 80 percent, by 1 percent.

But Zorn said Kalispell’s students are performing well and has the data to back up his claims.

In 2010, Kalispell students outperformed the state averages in math, reading and science in nearly every grade level.

The only area in which Kalispell fared worse than the state average was 10th-grade science. Just 40 percent of Kalispell’s students scored proficiently on the science portion of the test.

But, as Zorn pointed out, the state didn’t fare much better: 43 percent of all Montana’s sophomores were proficient. Of the Class AA districts, Bozeman performed the best with 66 percent of its 10th-graders achieving proficiency.

“To date, we have not focused on science,” Zorn said of his district.

That, he added, is beginning to change. Kalispell’s high schools are moving away from semester-long science courses to yearlong studies. Freshmen will take a full year of biology, and sophomores will take a full year of Earth science or chemistry.

The district will take a hard look at its science curricula next summer, Zorn said. Kalispell already has revamped its math and reading curricula, and the numbers suggest the work is paying off.

Reading scores are up in every grade. The most dramatic gains have been in fourth and eighth grades, where students went from 58 percent and 56 percent proficient in 2004, respectively, to 93 percent proficient in both grades last year.

Fourth-graders likewise saw dramatic gains on the math portion of the test. In 2004, 36 percent of Kalispell’s fourth-graders were proficient in math. In 2010, 89 percent of fourth-graders achieved proficiency — significantly higher than the state average of 69 percent.

Only in 10th grade are math scores down from where they were in 2004. Seventy percent of Kalispell’s sophomores achieved proficiency in 2004; in 2010, 65 percent were proficient.

Part of the struggle to reach proficiency in math is philosophical, Zorn said. While he said the “bar for proficiency is a little more aggressive” than in reading, differences of opinion about how to teach math also play a role.

“There’s a disagreement in the math world about whether to teach procedural math skills or mathematical understanding,” Zorn said — adding that the optimal approach would employ a combination of the two theories.

The Criterion Referenced Test isn’t the only assessment that shows Kalispell students’ gains.

The district has been keeping track of how its juniors perform on the Montana University System’s writing assessment since 2007, when the Commissioner of Higher Education invited Montana schools to participate.

All 11th-graders, regardless of whether they see themselves as college-bound, take the exam, Zorn said. In 2007, 67 percent of Kalispell’s juniors were proficient, compared to the state average of 57 percent. Eighty-four percent of last year’s juniors were proficient; statewide proficiency was 74 percent.

Zorn said Kalispell Public Schools is also paying close attention to its graduation rate — the number of students who graduate from high school in four years.

Students who transfer from the district and whose new schools request transcripts don’t count against Kalispell. But all students the district can’t account for, including students who drop out or who take longer than four years to graduate, have a negative impact on the graduation rate.

The 2010 graduation rate, which is based on students who graduated in 2009, was 81 percent. The rate has fluctuated over the years, from a low of 75.45 percent in 2005 to a high of 83.24 percent in 2008.

Shooting for a 100 percent graduation rate isn’t realistic, Zorn said; the district knows it will take some students longer than four years to get through high school. That’s where Kalispell’s alternative high schools, Laser School and Bridge Academy, come in.

The goal is a graduation rate of 90 percent, Zorn said, with the remaining 10 percent graduating in five years.

To reach that goal, the district has taken aggressive measures to lower its high school failure rates, Zorn said. That includes analyzing what courses have high failure rates and employing strategies to help students get through their courses.

“That doesn’t mean lowering standards in classes,” Zorn was quick to add. “We want to provide better and better support to kids who are struggling.”

Support starts with identifying those struggling students early — ideally in their freshman year.

“If they fail so many courses, they get to a point of hopelessness,” he said. “If they get to their sophomore year and they have four credits and need 22,” that’s when hopelessness sets in.

“We want to support students earlier so they don’t get to feeling helpless.”

Support could include working with teachers to help students find other ways to earn credit in a class, or credit retrieval programs offered during the summer, Zorn said. This summer alone, the district helped students earn “well over 100 semester credits” to students who had failed classes during the school year, he said.

It’s still a little early to determine whether the measures the district is using are working. But failure rates decreased last year from the year before.

At the end of the fall 2008 semester, students received F’s in 5.7 percent of Kalispell’s high school classes. At the end of the fall 2009 semester, the failure rate was down to 4.1 percent.

That’s a difference, Zorn said, of about 250 courses. More importantly, he said, those are students who don’t have F’s on their transcripts.

That’s the bottom line, Zorn said: The district is there to educate students, not to try and improve its data.

“We want to put faces to the numbers,” he said.

Reporter Kristi Albertson may be reached at 758-4438 or at kalbertson@dailyinterlake.com.