Make no mistake about it, anyone with any type of involvement in Greenwich Public Schools – that means school board members, administrators, teachers, students, parents, and the community – should be disappointed with the test scores released last week, showing another disappointing year for Greenwich on the Connecticut Academic Performance Test and the Connecticut Mastery Test.
While standardized tests do not tell the entire story, they are important measures of how our schools are doing. As New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg likes to say, “In God we trust. Everyone else, bring data.” Well, the data is not very good.
So where does another year of unacceptable scores leave GPS?
Here’s what board chairman Steve Anderson told me back at the end of May when I asked him about the disappointing CAPT and CMT scores in recent years:
“Finishing off year two of the [district's strategic] improvement plan, I’m expecting some nice scores to come in over the summer. I’ll be very disappointed if the scores aren’t nice.
“I would expect this year for test scores to be good and next year, the third year of the plan, also to show some good results.”
When the 2011 CAPT scores were released last week, Anderson told the Greenwich Time that the results were “not good enough.”
“Every year we need to be trending higher, and I think the board needs to be consistent and constant with that message,” Anderson went on to say. “We need to keep improving. It’s what the town expects, and our students deserve.”
In the coming days, I’ll give you my thoughts on why test scores have declined. In the meantime, be sure to check out my other Hearst Connecticut blog, Jets Takeoff.
Steadily building a college- and workplace-ready vocabulary is another thing that supports comprehension skills and critical thinking etc. I wish Greenwich would take a look.
We have developed http://www.my400words.com which is in line with CCSS recommendations and explicitly teaches Tier 2 and Tier 3 words to students while expanding cultural literacy.
The data is simple and friendly: one number between 0 and 400. “How many words have you learned so far this year?” Research shows that 400 is the closest we have to a magic number. Please take a look and add it to your mix. We are currently running The Official CMT League which helped 17,000 CT children with CMT skills last year. See data on our site. Great results