School Officials: Students Who Spend Their Whole Career in Watertown Fare Well on the MCAS

Watertown school officials have followed a group of students who have been in the district since third grade and found they fared better than the town's annual scores on the statewide MCAS test would indicate.

All kinds of data is collected for students in the Watertown Public Schools, including the most well known — . Interim Superintendent said the MCAS test is just a small piece of the of the picture when looking at how students' are doing in school.

The state gives tests in math, English Language Arts, various sciences and other subjects. The tests generally provide teachers with information about students, but when they reach high school, students must pass the test to graduate.

The Group

Looking at a group of students who have gone through the Watertown schools since they took the first test, in third grade, officials found every student passed the high school MCAS test the first time, Dan Wulf, the math coordinator at Watertown High School, told the School Committee on Monday.

The results came from a group of 110 juniors at Watertown High School who had been in the system since third grade, Wulf said. Overall, there are 198 juniors.

They came from all three of the elementary schools: 27 from Cunniff, 59 from Hosmer and 24 from Lowell, Wulf said, and the group includes 56 boys and 54 girls.

The students took the test last spring as 10th-graders.

The Results

The state breaks MCAS results into four categories, from highest to lowest: Advanced, Proficient, Needs Improvement, and Warning (or in 10th grade, Fail). The top three categories are considered “passing,” but school officials want them to be in Proficient or Advanced.

All the students who had been in the district since third grade passed the test, and 95 percent were either Proficient or Advanced on the English Language Arts test and 97 percent on the Math test.

“The students we held on to, pretty much all improved,” Wulf said.

Overall, Watertown juniors fared about the same as the state average. In English Language Arts, 81 percent of Watertown Students scored Proficient or higher, 16 percent Needs Improvement and 2 percent Warning. The stat had 84 percent in Proficient or higher and 3 percent in Warning.

On the Math MCAS for juniors, Watertown had 83 percent Proficient or higher, 17 percent Needs Improvement and none in Warning. Statewide, 77 percent scored Proficient and higher, 16 percent Needs Improvement, and 7 percent Warning.

Interim Assistant Superintendent Dari Donavan picked out some typical students from the group of juniors who fit into different categories: male, female, those in special education, low income and those whose first language is not English.

The students did not always score Proficient or Advanced in the first time they took the test, Donavan said, but by 10^th grade they all reached one of those levels.

Donavan, who until this year had been principal of the Lowell School, said that the test scores can be confusing and sometimes worrying for parents. She said even if their child gets a Needs Improvement or Warning, on one of the tests, it does not mean the student will fail the test when it counts toward graduation — at least when they have been in Watertown since third grade.

“What parents see is they see change and want to know ‘What does it mean?’” Donavan said. “Over time, they all got to advanced and proficient.”