NEWS

PTARMIGAN IMPROVES, BUT NEEDS IMPROVEMENT

By: Lyle Evansiano September 2, 2008

You may remember, just before school let out in June of this year, your children may have been busy with the WASL tests. The state-level Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL) exam assessments require students to both select and create answers to demonstrate their knowledge, skills, and understanding in each of the Essential Academic Learning Requirements (EALRs)--from multiple-choice and short-answer questions to more extended responses, essays, and problem solving tasks.

Ptarmigan Ridge Intermediate Reading scores rose in third through fifth grades, including a 9-percentage-point leap in the fifth grade. While math scores dropped in third grade, math scores jumped 3 points in fifth grade and 8 points in fourth grade.

The school is also among the schools moving onto Step 1 of the “needs improvement” list. Ptarmigan School now ranks 239 out of 351 in SchoolDigger.com's ranking system for all Washington public primary, middle, and high schools that have published math and reading test scores for the latest year.

Although Ptarmigan did improve, and district officals have been quoted as being quite pleased with that growth, the schools score improvements were not enough to make the state recommended Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) refering to the state’s measure of yearly progress toward achieving state academic standards.

The federal achievement goals call in part for a specific – and growing – percentage of students to pass the math and reading sections of the WASL in order to make what’s known as “adequate yearly progress.” The goal is for all students in all the country’s schools to be proficient in reading and math by 2014.

This year, there were double-digit increases in Washington state’s testing goals, which vary by subject and grade level. In third through fifth grades, for instance, 47 percent of students had to pass the math WASL as one of the requirements for their school to make AYP last year.

Now with tougher requirements, almost twice as many Washington schools and districts than last year did not meet federal student testing and achievement goals. According to the Tacoma News Tribune, about half of those 1,311 schools – 628 statewide – missed their goals for the second consecutive year, which will keep or put them on the federal government’s list of schools that need to improve.

In Washington state, 57 of the state’s 295 districts are “in improvement” this year versus 30 last year. For South Sound schools, Auburn, Federal Way, Fife, Franklin Pierce, Peninsula, South Kitsap and White River joined Bethel, Clover Park, North Thurston and Tacoma on the "in improvement" list.