With a mix of good and not-so-good news, Wilton Public School officials presented last spring’s state-mandated standardized testing results with the Board of Education at its meeting on Thursday, Oct. 5.
“Overall, Wilton students continue to demonstrate very high levels of achievement and growth,” said Charles Smith, assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction.
He shared about some monumental successes, including Wilton High School having the highest combined SAT scores in the state, he also cautioned that concerns about challenges facing multi-lingual learners will likely require hiring additional staff.
“To improve or even sustain the academic growth of our multi-lingual learners we will probably need to increase staffing levels,” he said.
With the number of multi-lingual learners almost quadrupling in the past four years, he said the district is “just simply not able to meet the needs of that group and I’m worried about what impact that’s going to have on their achievement.”
Smith said that if more resources aren’t put into English-Language Learner (ELL) services, those same students will ultimately require special education resources to meet their needs.
“We’re going to end up spending the money one way or another,” he said, noting that special education expenses would run much higher than the expenses of an additional ELL teacher.
Success for WHS and 7th Grade Middlebrook Students
Meanwhile, Smith made a high note of achievement success at both the high school and the seventh grade at Middlebrook School.
“We’re near the top in the state in ELA and math,” he said. “Wilton High School had the highest combined SAT scores in Connecticut state.”
“The high school really knocked it out of the park this year … This is the real story. We’re first in ELA and second in math, and the first in total score,” he said, as well as first in the state for the Next Generation Science Standards in grade 11 at 90.2%.
In the Evidence-Based Reading and Writing assessment, 93.7% of students met or exceeded benchmark, while 78.7% of students met or exceeded benchmark in Math.
Last year’s scores were 87.3% and 64.1%, respectively.
By comparison, among other towns in Wilton’s District Reference Group (DRG), Darien achieved 88.4% in ELA and 76.8% in math, New Canaan had 86.3% in ELA and 81.3% in math, and Ridgefield had 87.8% in ELA and 66.2% in math.
Looking at grades three through eight with the Smarter Balanced Assessment (SBA), seventh grade shined this year, with 87% hit or passed benchmark in ELA, compared with 81.8% last year. In math, the seventh grade was at 89.1%, versus 80.1% in 2022.
Smith shared that progress in Special Education has been slower, but moving forward.
“If you look back to our results over time, I’m very pleased with (progress) our students with special needs are making, because for a long time they weren’t making much progress,” he said.
“We’re not talking about a large number of students here,” he said.
How Much is Too Much Testing
Vice Chair Jennifer Lalor, who is stepping down from the board this fall, shared her ongoing concerns that too much time is spent on assessments, taking time away from the flow of instruction and also adding to student stress.
“We test a lot and spend a lot of days testing,” she said.
“We have amazing teachers in our district that I truly feel know how all their kids are doing and I don’t think we always need to rely on all this other information,” she said.
Smith pushed back on the question, stating that he felt the schedule of testing should remain in place until the district achieved its goals.
“We’re getting very close to achieving our goals,” he said. “Once we do, I think we can then have a discussion.”
“It’s a good way to measure progress, in my opinion,” he said.
Lalor acknowledged the benefits but said that as a parent she saw the other side of the experience, which potentially included parents using the information to seek interventions based on comparisons.
“At home, you’re getting a different message … We always want kids to do their best, but they shouldn’t get stressed out,” she said.
Asked how many total days the district did testing, Smith replied, “We don’t test all day.”
Lalor referenced there being a variety of tests, including specific area tests done by teachers.
“Those aren’t tests,” Smiths said. “Those are assessments.”
Lalor countered that no matter the form, they were still modes of data collection that ultimately ate into instructional time.
“There’s still a lot of time that our kids are sitting around, and we go back to instructional time and not wanting to constantly be interrupting it,” she said.
Smith countered, “So would you want teachers to blindly go through instruction without any information about what the students need?”
“I don’t think that’s fair,” Lalor objected.
“Well, it sounds like it,” he said, defending his beliefs.
“In good conscience, I could not support cutting back the frequency,” he said. “If I didn’t think it was a valuable expenditure of time, I would stop doing it. I would say the proof is in the pudding.”
Board member Laura Schwemm echoed concerns about how students might experience the testing.
“It’s very stressful for the kids, very stressful,” she said.
Board Chair Ruth DeLuca cautioned her on elaborating about this idea.
“I think that’s a generalization to say that all kids are stressed out. I think we have to be careful in all the things we say,” she said.
DeLuca spoke in support of the current assessment regimen and its purpose.
“I also think it’s a way to ensure assured experiences across the classrooms and across the grades,” she said.
“I guess we can agree to disagree on this,” Smith told Lalor, noting the tests were a good way to measure progress.
“Let’s meet our goals,” he said, “then we can have a discussion. And we’re close. We’re getting so close to having that discussion.”
Asked how the administration planned to foster improvements, Smith said the post-Covid pandemic “acceleration framework” approach seemed to be doing well, and, going forward, would include “doubling down on responsive lesson planning” and “using formative assessments.”
“Also, we have a very robust intervention program,” he said.
With the MAP test (which is, as far as I can tell, the only standardized test they do regularly for reasons other than compliance with state law), I think a big part of the problem is that while it’s an achievement test rather than an aptitude test – measuring how much you’ve learned (and specifically, how much the school has taught you), rather than how smart you are – it nevertheless produces a percentile just like the SAT does, and so, lacking any other regular standardized assessment, a lot of families tend to look at it as a measure of How Smart Your Kid Is / their future college prospects / etc. So it feeds into this larger problem with achievement-related stress that’s so pervasive here.
The MAP really isn’t that useful for that stuff – if you Google around for studies attempting to correlate MAP scores to SAT/ACT scores, you’ll see that they all produce wildly different results and don’t really even line up quartile-to-quartile – but people see their kid has a 24th or a 57th or a 79th or a 93rd percentile on something and start preemptively celebrating / panicking / wondering whether there’s still time to correct that (and end up spending a lot of money on Kumon classes / tutors / etc they probably don’t even need). Plenty of kids with 33rd percentile MAP scores end up getting into Harvard, and plenty of kids with 99th percentile scores don’t.
The actual test is relatively short – it seems like it’s typically 2-3 hours total for most kids, spread out over 4 days, and because it’s an adaptive computer-based test, it seems to be pretty good about not throwing a whole lot of problems at kids that they can’t solve / get frustrated by. So the extent that there is stress surrounding the MAP, I think it comes much more from the families than from the test itself.
Hence, my suggestion going forward would be that the district do a better job of communicating both to families and to students that this is *not* a test of how smart kids are; it’s mostly meant to measure how well the *school* is teaching *them*, and perhaps contribute to some instructional adjustments to help with areas they (or their class) might be weak at. The MAP is an assessment of how WPS is doing, and very much not of any individual kid.
And the use case for individual MAP score reports is, likewise, *not* to see how well your kid is learning, but rather how well the *school* is teaching them; if your kid’s not showing the growth you’d like to see (and emphasis here on growth, not percentiles), that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with your kid, but it means there might be something wrong with your kid’s education, and it gives you a great excuse to reach out to the school and teacher to advocate for them and make sure they get what they need. It’s a form of transparency and accountability, basically – the school is doing an independent evaluation of how well they’ve taught your kid, and showing you the results so you can address them accordingly.
Eep, sorry, that somehow ended up with redundant bits of two different drafts – basically, they’re testing the schools, not the kids, and most of the stress surrounding standardized testing comes from families failing to appreciate that distinction. (and – not for the first time – I could have actually said all of that in 2-3 sentences and saved everyone a lot of reading)
The schools in Wilton are awesome.
Highest SAT scores in the state. What is not to like about that? One of the many things that makes our town one of the best places to call home.
Dr Kevin Smith should be commended for his guidance and leadership with our schools.