Burlington Public Schools Assessment Update from October 18, 2016 School Committee Meeting

The presentation embedded above was shared at our School Committee Meeting last Tuesday. It is a brief overview of some of our assessment data from across the district. 

Elementary Assessment Data 

Slides 3-11 are a glimpse at our Response to Intervention (RTI) Assessment data that we utilize for monitoring the progress of our elementary students. The highlights are as follows:

Slide 3 - This slide shows the trends in our Burlington elementary data with a focus on the fact that we moved 207 students from Tier 2 back to Tier 1 last year.

Slides 4-5 - These two slides are graphs that show concretely the increase in Tier 1 students during the course of the school year along with a decrease in Tier 2 students.

Slide 6-7 - These slides compare both  our mid-year data and end-of-year data from 2015 to 2016. In both cases, there is a clear improvement from 2015 to 2016. 

Slides 8-9 - These slides are further evidence of the fact that our elementary students are receiving focused instruction that is allowing them to improve upon deficits and move back to Tier 1.

Slides 10-11- These are the district-wide elementary results ELA and Math assessments. As the results indicate, we are hitting our mark of at least 80% of our students in Tier 1, no more than 15% in Tier 2, and no more than 5% in Tier 3. 

Slide 12 and 14 - These are our PARCC scores from last year for grades 3-8. It is noteworthy that all of our students took their PARCC assessments on digital devices. It is also worth noting that the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education stated the following about computer-based testing:

"The preliminary PARCC results showed that in most grades, students who took PARCC math and English language arts tests on a computer were less likely to score in the "meeting expectations" range...(Link to source)"

With this in mind, our Burlington elementary and middle school students still scored near or above 750, which is "meeting expectations" . 

Slides 16-17 - These slides show our high school MCAS scores for ELA and Math. In both areas, our students continue to perform well with 94% scoring in Advanced and Proficient in ELA and 89% in Advanced and Proficient in Math.  

Slide 18 - This slide shows the tremendous growth in our Advanced Placement courses at BHS. Since 2012, we have increased the number of AP Tests given from 260 to 404. At the same time, we have increased the percentage of passing scores from 72.9% to 82.2%. In addition, it is worth noting that over the same timespan our percentage of students passing the AP test compared to the state average has gone from 1% below the state average to 11.7% above the state average.