School District Looks at Achievement Gap Progress in Test Scores

The South Orange-Maplewood School District continues to close the achievement gap between black and white high school students, but the progress is incremental and the gap is still too wide.

South Orange Maplewood Chief Information Officer Paul Roth presented a dissection of HSPA data by performance between black and white students at the August 16, 2010 Board of Education meeting. HSPA is the High School Proficiency Assessment. "It's a High School graduation requirement by the state," explained Roth. Students have three opportunities to pass the assessment beginning at the end of their junior year, again in the fall of their senior year, and finally in the spring of senior year.

While the Assessment is used as an individual measure of proficiency in English Language Arts and Math, "we also use it to gauge the achievement gap and our performance against other districts," said Roth.

South Orange-Maplewood is measured against a DFG—or District Factor Group—selected by the state as a "peer group" of districts with similar income levels to South Orange and Maplewood. Surprisingly, those towns include Berkeley Heights, Bridgewater, the Caldwells, Cedar Grove, Glen Ridge, Kinnelon, Moorestown, Montville, Montclair and New Providence, among others. "The group is put together based on income, not their diversity," said Roth. He noted that income levels for Maplewood and South Orange are actually higher than many people think.

Overall, 78.8% of South Orange-Maplewood high school students scored proficient in Math, 10.4 percentage points lower than the DFG. But in language arts, 90.1% of South Orange-Maplewood students scored proficient—the highest percentage measured in 8 years and just 6.1% lower than the DFG. SOMSD students closed the gap with the DFG a bit in "advanced proficient" math scoring (just an 8.1% gap, with 34.6% of students scoring advanced proficient). Also, a record percentage—29.2%—of SOMSD students scored advanced proficient in language arts, although the 5.1% gap with the DFG was not the lowest of the last 8 years.

When breaking down the scores internally by race, there was a 30.2% gap in proficient scores between white (96.3%) and black SOMSD students (66.1%) in math. Roth conceded to the Board of Education that the gap was "very large."

However, in language arts, Roth proclaimed, "This is our good news slide." The gap between white and black students scoring proficient was only 12.2 percentage points—the smallest gap in the last 8 years. White students scored 97.5% proficient while black students scored 85.3% proficient.

Roth did find that the gap was wider in areas of advanced proficiency: The gap was 46.2 percentage points in math and 34.7 percentage points in language arts. Roth noted that the number of black students scoring advanced proficient in language arts—13.8%—was a new high. Roth also said that this year, for the first time, SOMSD black students outperformed DFG black students (13.1%) in advanced proficiency in language arts.

Roth went further and measured the South Orange-Maplewood School District achievement gap against the DFG's achievement gap. Black students in South Orange-Maplewood scored 1.3 percentage points better than DFG black students in math, and white SOMSD students scored 5.2 percentage points better than their white DFG counterparts in math proficiency. In Language Arts, SOMSD black students scored 0.3 percentage points lower than the black students in the DFG, and SOMSD white students scored 0.1 percentage points higher than the DFG.

Overall, the achievement gap differences between South Orange-Maplewood School District and the DFG were quite small, perhaps making the point that the achievement gap issue is not just a South Orange-Maplewood issue.

Superintendent of Schools Brian Osborne did not want to "overclaim" success based on Roth's presentation, but he did credit the work of Assistant Superintendent of Curriculum Rosetta Wilson and of Gary Pankiewicz, Supervisor of English/Language Arts for grades 6-12. Osborne also said improvements were not the result of any one particular intervention but reflected the district's long-term investments in closing the gap. Osborne noted that SOMSD was trending with the DFG but he still was happy to see the highest percentage of passing rates in language arts and the lowest achievement gap in that category.

Overall, Roth noted to Patch that nationally New Jersey consistently ranks in the top 5 in educational achievement. Within New Jersey, Roth noted that "this community is definitely above state averages."

He continued: "In many countries and in the U.S., there are pushes to solve achievement gaps. There are different gaps. Here, it is white and black."

"We've captured data by race and free and reduced lunch, special education, regular education for the past eight years," said Roth. "There's so much information, you couldn't put it out all on one day." However, all the various breakdowns do exist in "excruciating detail," according to Roth, in the State of the District document found on the SOMS District website.