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Schools

Stratford Test Scores Beating the Achievement Gap

Schools also rank at or near the top compared with other towns in the same district reference group.

Stratford educators have something to brag about now that they have analyzed the latest state standardized test scores.

Not only has the district recorded a steady improvement that has raised it to the top of its district reference group (DRG), but the scores also show Stratford making significant headway against the most difficult problem in American education -- the achievement gap.

The hallmark educational reform law of the last decade, the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), was passed largely to force schools and districts to solve the achievement gap, which refers to the relatively poor average academic performance by disadvantaged racial groups compared to white students.

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Stratford’s test scores show the town’s African American, Hispanic, economically disadvantaged and English language learner (ELL) students making significant improvement since 2007.

Black and Hispanic students from Stratford also outperformed the state average scores for their cohorts each of those years.

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Stratford’s achievement gap narrowed far less for students with disabilities, however. Superintendent Irene Cornish said the district has made improving performance for special education students a top priority for this school year.

"They are not making the same gains as other students," she said.

Cornish declined to use the word "satisfied," because it would imply complacency, but she said she was pleased by the gains made by Stratford students.

Stratford is in DRG "G" along with Bloomfield, Bristol, East Haven, Groton, Hamden, Killingly, Manchester, Middletown, Naugatuck, Plainfield, Putnam, Torrington, Vernon and Winchester.

The Stratford public schools failed to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) or Safe Harbor for the second year in a row. Adequate Yearly Progress means test scores met the NCLB benchmarks and Safe Harbor means they improved enough to avoid penalties even though they didn’t make AYP.

The NCLB benchmarks were raised this year to require that 91 percent of students must score at the proficiency level on the Connecticut Mastery Test (CMT) for grades 3 to 8 and the Connecticut Academic Performance Test (CAPT) for grade 10.

However, so many school districts failed to make AYP this year that federal officials are allowing states, including Connecticut, to apply for a waiver of the NCLB law.

This year, only met the AYP standard. , , and schools made Safe Harbor. Last year, all but made AYP or Safe Harbor under the easier standard.

Failing to make AYP doesn’t mean a whole school is failing, however, since the failure of one student in a single cohort group could result in the whole school missing the mark under the way NCLB assesses the scores.

Although neither or high school made AYP or Safe Harbor, Cornish said the CAPT scores were much higher this year than in previous years. Stratford’s CAPT scores put it at or near the top of its DRG for both proficiency and goal rankings in all subjects.

"Connecticut says it’s going to go for a waiver, but nobody knows what that means," Cornish said. She doubted that waivers would completely eliminate the law’s accountability requirements. "You may not have all the strongest requirements and punitive effects," she said.

Also, while Connecticut educators often say the state’s tests are much tougher than tests used by most other states, the state has been criticized for using the "proficiency" level as its benchmark for NCLB instead of the stricter "goal" level.

Cornish said Stratford already focuses on meeting "goal" rather than "proficiency," which is only average. "No more talk about proficiency. That’s not enough. We have to reach above average," she said.

She said the state Department of Education will provide teacher training to help Stratford improve its special education program. One area for training is to improve teacher collaboration when special education teachers and regular classroom teachers are working together.

Cornish said she reassigned 30 special education teachers this year after finding that some schools had stronger teams than others.

During an interview with Cornish and data specialist Bill Benham, who crunches the numbers for the district’s teachers, the superintendent noted two areas of weakness that educators were able to identify with their computerized assessment tools.

Benham said test scores are broken down by individual questions for individual students and displayed on a grid to show teachers exactly what types of skills their students are good at and which ones they aren’t.

For example, Stratford students from grade 3 to 8 had difficulty with estimation, which is the math skill of using a sample to make an educated guess about the whole. This is useful for identifying a wrong answer.

Another weakness the assessment tools recognized that spanned several grades is in the reading skill known as "reader-to-text connection," in which a student can apply situations in a story to his or her own life.

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