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State officials said the modest gains over last year’s test scores won’t be enough to keep up with ever-rising demands of the federal No Child Left Behind law.
“Overall we are making progress,” Education Com-missioner Alice Seagren said. “I am not completely satisfied. We need to be making more progress.”
This spring, 556,000 students took the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment II in math and reading. The tests begin at grade three, cover every middle school student and are given once per subject in high school.
Three of the four Houston County districts did better than the state average on the 10th-grade reading test, although only La Crescent-Hokah did better in 11th-grade math, where barely a third of all Minnesota students were proficient.
The tests meet the requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, which says all students must be proficient by 2014, and are used in determining if schools and school districts are making Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP).
La Crescent-Hokah and Caledonia, two of the four districts in Houston County, did not make AYP last year because of lagging special education students.
The Department of Education expects the number of schools and districts not making AYP to increase this year when results are released in August.
Statewide, the percentage of students who scored proficient crept up in both reading and math at most grade levels. The most significant improvement was 10th grade reading, where 70.7 percent of students were proficient, up nearly 9 percentage points from last year.
The department of education attributes the improvement to new reading graduation requirements, which provided extra incentive. Next year, 11th graders will be expected to meet a similar requirement in math, which is expected to improve performance there, too.
Math proficiency declines steadily at every grade level tested. More than 80 percent of third graders were proficient, while only 34.4 percent of juniors passed.
“Students are not mastering Minnesota academic standards,” said Christy Hovanetz Lassila, assistant commissioner of education.
To fix that, the state is introducing a math and science teacher academy this year and revised math requirements so that in 2011, eighth graders will take algebra I and all students will need algebra II to graduate.
La Crescent-Hokah’s high school scores were both above the state average, with nearly 82 percent passing the reading test and just over 38 percent passing math.
Caledonia was the only district in the county to trail the state average for both high school tests. Caledonia district offices were closed Friday, when the data was released to school officials and the media.
Spring Grove had the county’s best results for high school reading — 92.1 percent proficient — but the lowest in math, with only 31.4 percent passing.
The reading score is a huge improvement from 2007, when only 69.5 percent of Spring Grove sophomores passed.
Seagren said her agency is developing a system to more closely keep tabs on individual student progress. Hovanetz Lassila, who oversees testing, said parents will soon see those comparisons on reports for their children, including their performance on tests from 2006 on.
But Minnesota lacks federal permission to use the so-called growth model when assessing school progress under No Child Left Behind.
The law requires schools to show continual progress for all types of students or face sanctions. The bar for schools continues to rise — toward a goal of having all children able to perform at grade level in math and reading by 2014.
This story contains information from the Associated Press.
