Columbia Public Schools discusses state and local test results

Early Tuesday morning, the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education released scores from this past April’s Missouri Assessment Program test.

Students take the state test every year to monitor their progress, but this year’s test was a little different.

Elementary school students took the test online for the first time.

“You can do some more intriguing things online than what you can do with just a flat piece of paper,” said Chip Sharp, director of research and assessment. “So some of the questions were perhaps a little more interesting but anytime it’s a little more interesting, it can be a little more challenging.”

State officials warned that the new online test would be more challenging and test scores would be lower because it was a different test from what students were used to.

While the test scores are lower, Commissioner of Education Margie Vandeven said in a statement she was pleased with the results.

She said they were higher than the scores students got during the field tests.

Columbia Public Schools decided to release their numbers today as well.

CPS scores were a bit lower than the state scores on the MAP exam.

The state scores for students who were proficient or advanced in English hovered around 60 percent, but CPS averaged about 5 percent lowered.

In math, CPS had better scores than the state in sixth and seventh grade, but students who scored for math were between 28 percent and 52 percent.

Eighth grade math had the lowest scores across the board, with only 28.3 percent of students scoring proficiently at the state level and 21.2 percent at the local level.

CPS Superintendent Peter Stiepleman said now that the tests aren’t the same every year, they won’t be able to monitor progress of students like they used to and make year to year comparisons.

“I think that it leaves the public with some questions just about ‘how can I know how our district is doing when I can’t do a comparison?'” he said.

His solution is to administer more local tests. CPS has already been administering the STAR test at the local level, but now they will be expanding it.

“We’ve never administered a STAR math test before at the elementary level. It’s now going to be a way that we can measure how students progress in mathematics,” he said. “It just requires that individual local school districts are going to have to come up with their own measures to record growth.”

The MAP scores are usually part of a school district’s annual performance rate and usually help determine its accreditation but Shelli Adams with CPS school improvement said they won’t be used for the next three years.

“We won’t be held accountable if our accreditation changes because of assessments going down,” she said. “We’ll have the opportunity to use our scores from last year. If our scores are miraculously better, we could absolutely gain because of that.”

The test will change again next year since the General Assembly has banned this MAP test because it is based on Common Core Standards.

The rest of the data should be released by next week.