CMT Scores Rank High in DRG in Nearly All Cases

Unlike the scores of their counterparts in 10^th grade, results from the 2011 Connecticut Mastery Test place Newtown students in third through eighth grade in the top half of District Reference Group B in nearly all categories except fifth grade science.

In several cases – sixth grade math and seventh grade reading and math – some of the scores placed Newtown at the very top of the DRG.

“We’ve really worked on those primary grades,” Superintendent of Schools Janet Robinson said.

Particularly noteworthy was the seventh grade, which had the best showing across all of the district’s grades. The percent of seventh graders scoring at or above goal in reading, writing and math was the district’s best in six years, and that also was reflected in DRG comparisons.

School districts are grouped into DRGs depending on whether the communities in which they are located share similar socioeconomic conditions. Newtown belongs in DRG B, which includes Avon, Brookfield, Fairfield, Greenwich Monroe, Trumbull and New Fairfield.

Compared to other school systems in the same DRG, Newtown placed first in reading and math and second in writing when it came to the percent of seventh graders scoring at or above goal.

At-or-above-goal scores is the state's standard for student performance while at-or-above-proficient is the federal standard used under the No Child Left Behind Act.

The sixth grade also did particularly well, coming in among the top five of the DRG in all categories of reading, writing and math. A nearly 4-percentage point increase in at-goal writing scores propelled Newtown to second in the DRG in that category. Although proficient scores fell slightly compared to last year, Newtown still placed fourth in the DRG in the percent of students scoring at or above proficient in writing.

Fifth grade scores appeared to have falter compared overall to last year’s class, with science at-goal scores down from last year by nearly 4 percentage points, which put Newtown fifth from the bottom in the DRG.

Still officials said that it was unfair to compare two different classes made up of different students, and that this year’s fifth graders made improvements in the CMT scores from when they were in third grade.

“You don’t compare apples to oranges,” Reed Intermediate School principal Sharon Epple said. “When you really look at improvement, you look at the students and where they are coming from…You just want to see that continual improvement from year to year.”

At the same time, Robinson said that fifth grade scores did merit further study, and that it would take some time to bring up the scores in that particular class.

“We knew we had a number of kids needing remediation in fifth grade,” she said. “We’re monitoring it.”

Robinson said that for the past several years, CMT score results have outperformed . Officials believe class size may be a factor, adding that the sophomores also are one of the biggest classes to hit the high school.

“We have this same sort of thing last year,” she said. “We have too big class sizes…we haven’t been successful adding staff.”

The education board did approve the addition of a .