Test passing rates high

Nick Hanson
The Free Press

April 26, 2006 01:03 am

— Basic Skills writing test results are in for south-central Minnesota, and the overall picture is looking good.
On the whole, area district passing rates are up. This year south-central Minnesota had 94.92 percent of students pass compared to 93.38 percent in 2005. Area districts also rank above the 2006 statewide average of 92.7 percent.
Students must pass the Basic Skills writing test to graduate from a public school in Minnesota. It’s given in 10th grade.
The Mankato Area School District tested 557 students this year and produced a roughly 95 percent passing rate. It’s down about a percent from last year, but Gwen Walz, district assessment coordinator, is pleased with the results.
“To only have 5 percent of students retaking that test, we’re really pleased with that,” she said. “We see a definite trend in having more students pass it on the first attempt.”
The large crop of passing scores speaks well for the district, she said.
“It’s an excellent comment for the continual improvement in our district curriculum around writing,” Walz said. “But it’s a real focus because once you get to that high number, how much higher can that go? There are just always some students that are going to struggle the first time they take that test.”
Examples may be special education and English as a second language students, she said. If the district maintains about a 93 percent passing rate, which is still above the state average, Walz said she’d be happy.
Some districts are more likely to have swaying scores each year for the simple fact they have fewer students taking the test than larger districts such as Mankato.
If just a handful of students don’t pass — say in a group of 50 compared to about 550 in Mankato — a district percentage can fall up to a point or two.
But a few improved district and school scores are worth noting.
Mankato charter school RiverBend Academy attained a 88.89 percent 2006 passing rate compared to 66.67 last year.
“I think we did pretty well,” said Greg Schmidt, RiverBend coordinator. “We make modification to programs in our language arts all the time. We’ve really tried to emphasize writing, too.”
He said it’s difficult to maintain a consistent score because of the changing nature of a charter school.
“With our population, sometimes we don’t have a steady population like a district does,” he said. “We have a lot of kids in and out, so it’s hard to predict how they’ll do.”
Le Center, a smaller district with fewer than 70 kids testing the past two years, saw a hike in scores from 80.6 percent to 93.31.
“We’ve mapped our curriculum and tried to fill the holes to teach the whole curriculum to every student,” said Tony Boyer, district superintendent. “Our staff has done a great job. We spend a lot of time and effort on our language arts and reading.”
District changes include new text books and classroom procedures, he said.
“We would like to stay there, we don’t want to make this a one-year shot,” Boyer said.
Although it’s smaller, Madelia is the only surrounding district that saw a significant drop. It tested fewer than 51 students in the past two years, but saw a fall from 98.04 percent passing in 2005 to 78.79 in 2006.
“We’re doing a lot of the same things and addressing a lot of the same issues,” said Allan Beyer, Madelia high school principal. “It’s a different crop of kids because we’re not doing anything different than the year before.”
He partly attributes the drop to an increase of English as second language students. Only two of the five who took it this year passed.
“We’ll just have to keep working on it and addressing the needs of our students,” he said.