EVERETT — The Everett School District last year bought thousands of Google Chromebooks and spent months training teachers, students and parents how to use them.
Educators were gearing up for a new standardized state test, the first to be taken entirely online. Now, they say the preparation seems to have paid off.
The state released early results from the new Smarter Balanced test Thursday morning. The state numbers won’t be broken down by school district until final scores are released in August, but districts have been getting their scores as tests are graded.
So far, the passing rate for Everett students is higher than the state rate, district spokeswoman Mary Waggoner said.
“We have seen that there’s about a 20 percent gap between how we did and how the state did,” she said. “It’s really general right now, but the trendline is that we’re higher than the state scores.”
That’s nothing new, she said. Everett also outperformed the state average on predecessors to the Smarter Balanced test, such as the Washington Assessment of Student Learning.
Overall,the preliminary results in Washington from the new tests based on the Common Core learning standards show students are finding the new exams more challenging than the old state tests.
State officials said Thursday that fewer Washington students scored proficient on the new exams than on the tests based on Washington’s old education standards.
OSPI spokesman Nate Olson cautions against comparing this year’s results to previous test results because the new exams test students abilities differently.
“It’s an apples-to-oranges comparison,” Olson said.
Just over half of the children tested in grades three through eight met the standard on the new English language arts tests this year. And just under half the state’s elementary students met the standard in math.
High school students did better than elementary students on the English test, with 62 percent making the grade. They did much worse on the math test, however, with only 29 percent meeting the standard.
Last year’s results had about 70 percent of elementary students meeting the state reading standard and more than 60 percent meeting the math standard. More than 90 percent of students in the Class of 2014 met those standards and more than 80 percent of the class of 2015 had already met the standards in both English and math last year.
Superintendent of Public Instruction Randy Dorn called the test results a great beginning, in part because most Washington students did better on the Common Core tests, also known as the Smarter Balanced exams, than they did on a trial run in spring of 2014.
Fewer high school students passed the math exam this year than did during the field test in 2014, but more students were tested this spring.
“These new tests give educators a clearer picture of how the system is doing and where instructional improvements need to be made,” Dorn said, in a statement.
The preliminary statewide results released Thursday represent 90 percent of state testing results, according to Dorn’s office.
The remaining 10 percent includes scores from a handful of districts around the state that opted to use paper versions of the test, Olson said. The hand-written tests have not yet been scored. Students in the Index School District took their tests with pencil and paper, the only district in Snohomish County to do so. The 39-student district does not have a high school.
The new Common Core standards were adopted by the state in 2011, but this is the first time statewide test results have been announced for the new exams because this is the first time they were given across the state.
OSPI cautioned that the results are preliminary and more test results are coming into the office every week. Detailed state and district-level results will not be released until August.
Next week, the state plans to release the number of students in each district who refused to take the test. That will change the statewide percentage of passing students announced Thursday, Olson said. The first-look data doesn’t include students who refused to take the test, so adding them in will increase the total pool of students and decrease the percent that passed.
The Everett School District plans to send individual scores out to students and parents after the state certifies them later this summer. The district’s curriculum and assessment department is reviewing test scores to figure out what’s working well and what can be done to help students improve in areas where they’re struggling.
“We need to look deeper into the results so we can help people understand what those scores mean,” Waggoner said. “I think the most important thing for people to understand is that this is a new baseline.”
By the time students return in the fall, that state plans to have information available at schools to help them understand what their scores mean, Olson said. Officials are working on documents that explain what’s needed for a passing score and what classes or study habits could help improve a failing score.
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