Cherry Hill Students Ahead of Group Averages in Annual Testing Report

Cherry Hill students continue to perform at or better than students in similar districts, according to the annual end-of-year assessment report presented Monday night.

Students in the general population matched or exceeded the performance of the average across the board in language arts, math and science for Cherry Hill’s district factor group—a grouping based on socioeconomic conditions, among other factors—and in some cases matched or bettered the performance of students in higher groups.

Students with disabilities fared nearly as well, coming at or above the district factor group average in language arts and math, and falling just three points shy of the average in fourth-grade science.

Though there were some year-to-year dips—a 10-point drop in language arts scores among fourth-graders, notably—nearly all mirrored statewide trends, and Valerie Sadwin, the district’s coordinator of research and assessment, emphasized the point that the data are annual snapshots of what’s going on in testing.

“I can’t get excited about year-to-year fluctuations,” she said.

While there remains an achievement gap between general education students and students with disabilities, and a gap between ethnic groups, especially in younger grades in language arts, Sadwin pointed to the trends, which show those gaps are less of a problem locally than they are elsewhere.

“[Cherry Hill] is closing the gap faster than the district factor group,” she said. “It’s important to compare ourselves to our peers.”

That’s especially evident in the languages arts assessments at the end of middle school as compared to the high school’s HSPA testing—87 percent of African-American students were proficient or advanced proficient at the eighth-grade level in 2009, putting them 10 percent behind white students. By the HSPA exam in 2012, that gap was almost nonexistent, thanks to a 10-point increase among African-American students.

Ethnic groups aren’t the only gaps, though—there’s also a gap between East and West in terms of SAT performance, as Sadwin pointed out.

Last year, East students scored an average of 546 on critical reading, 576 on math and 556 on the writing portion, performing not only better than Cherry Hill’s district factor group, but higher than the average for the next group up on the scale, which includes schools like Moorestown.

Students at West, meanwhile, averaged a 505 on critical reading, 519 on math and 518 on the written portion, putting them behind the average on math and critical reading for Cherry Hill’s district factor group.

Both schools, however, were above both the state and national averages for the SAT, and the overall district average is above that of the factor group.

Even with that gap, Sadwin said district officials are more focused on the gap between ethnicities, as well as the gap between general education students and those with disabilities, especially the larger achievement gaps in math.

School board members honed in on that gap, as well, and board member Steven Robbins emphasized the need to find solutions within the classroom.

“The answers to our achievement gap are in the schools,” he said. “It’s got to be in the trenches.”

There also needs to be a push to get more students proficient and advanced proficient at multiple grade levels, Sadwin said, focusing in on the spots where fewer than 80 percent of the total student population had reached that level.