Westford School Department Assistant Superintendent Kerry Clery accepted the fact that she had some tough competition in the Patriots’ game, but hoped that her positive news could find just as many fans among Westford residents.
Last year the School Committee voted to go with limited early experimentation in the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers test, better known as PARCC. On Monday night, Clery announced Westford’s results with that limited testing as well as on the grades that kept the MCAS tests.
The results were superlative to say the least.
With the new standards, the Massachusetts Department of Secondary and Elementary Education (DESE) split the PARCC test results into five categories: “exceeded expectations,” “met expectations,” “approached expectations,” “partially met expectations,” and “did not yet meet expectations.”
In the Abbot, Crisafulli and Day Schools, approximately one percent of all students were in the last category for math and English language arts tests while each school had approximately 20 to 40 percent more students in the first two categories than the state average.
At Westford Academy, which continued the MCAS testing, the story remained the same. A negligible amount of students received failing or “warning” grades while the level of advanced students in mathematics and English language arts exceeded state averages by over 30 percentage points.
None of the schools took the PARCC in Science, Technology and Engineering portion of the standardized testing, but the result was almost identical to the other tests, with each school scoring significantly higher than the state average.
Clery also provided a cohort of nine comparable high-performing school districts elsewhere in Massachusetts, with Westford scoring in the top three in every single category, save for fifth grade math.
When asked about the students that had difficulties in the past, particularly at the Abbot School, Clery discussed intervention methods as well as cross-grade collaboration between teachers. This, she said, led to student learning issues being addressed sooner thanks to a greater understanding of their needs from past performance.
Following a recent ruling from the DESE that will incorporate the key parts of the PARCC into an “MCAS 2.0,” Westford will eventually phase out PARCC in 2016, with early MCAS 2.0 testing beginning in 2017 and district-wide online testing scheduled for 2019.
A full copy of the report can be found here.
