Prospective families always want to know: how do our students compare academically to their local peers? It’s a great question, and it is one I certainly would ask as a parent, in search of an alternative to public school. It’s a tough question to answer, though. Our school evaluates the effectiveness of our curricula using a different tool than what is used currently in public schools. Here, I will do my best to explain both sets of assessments (and the one coming down the pike next year) to help you better understand how they compare.
Since 2005, students attending public schools in Vermont have been participating in the New England Common Assessment Program, or NECAP, for short. This test is a series of reading, writing, math, and science tests for students in selected grades. For example, reading and math are assessed for students in grades 3-8 and 11. Writing is assessed for students in 5, 8, and 11. Science is assessed for students in 4, 8, and 11. The results are designed to measure grade expectations (or GEs), that were developed by teams of teachers from the states who participate in the NECAPs: Vermont, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire.
Effective the spring of 2015, the NECAPs will no longer be used in Vermont public schools. Beginning next spring, students in grades 3-8 and 11 in Vermont (and 20 other states) will begin taking the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, or SBAC, for short. This test will include English/language arts and math, initially. The SBAC will be based on the Common Core State Standards, which are replacing the Vermont Framework of Standards and Learning Opportunities.
Bishop Marshall uses the Stanford Achievement Test Series, or the SAT-10, for short. The SAT-10 is a set of achievement tests administered throughout the United States and in American schools abroad, used since 1926. The SAT-10 is a more comprehensive scope, assessing our students in grades 1-8 in the areas of: reading comprehension, math computation and problem solving, vocabulary, language, spelling, listening, science, social studies, and overall thinking skills. The testing occurs in April and the results take about one month to come in. The results provide narrative summaries, process and cluster summaries, and graphic displays to showcase student achievement. The SAT-10 is one of the few tests in the United States that continues to use a standard nine scale (called a stanine, which is a nine-point standard scale) to report scores.
So, you can see that the SAT-10 involves much more than the NECAP and SBAC, making the two (and three) hard to compare. With the SAT-10, more content is covered, more students are assessed, more states are included than in the NECAP, and students are compared nationally rather than individually. Funding is another important point to note. Our school’s ability to maintain, increase, or decrease offerings is not mandated by the government. As an independent school, we make decisions within our school, deciding as a faculty what is best for our students. It must be devastating for public schools to experience cuts, imposed by law rather than reason, based solely on student performance. What a message to send…those most in need feel the most significant loss of much-needed programs offering support. Heartbreaking, really.
However, I know there are similarities. I am confident that the public schools use the results to guide curricular tools, staffing, and professional development opportunities, just as we do. Each year, we target an area for growth based on our results. This year, we emphasized spelling. We are very pleased with our results, noting an average increase of nearly an entire grade level in performance. We use our assessments as a means to make improvements; we tell our students that the SAT-10 is really a report card for the school. It tells us what we do well, and it tells us where we need to improve.
So, there you have it. The NECAP/SBAC versus the SAT-10. The differences, the similarities, and the purposes. While you’re here, why don’t you take a look at the fantastic work our upper school students did this year on the SAT-10s! It’s plain to see; our students truly love learning.
Posted by Mrs. Wilson
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