School district's MCAS scores reflect improvement
Date: 10/3/2012
By Carley Dangona
carley@thereminder.comWEST SPRINGFIELD — The school district is motivated to keep improving its Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) scores, after reviewing the current ones, released on Sept. 19.
West Springfield students posted Composite Performance Index (CPI) scores of 92.3 in English language arts, 86.1 in math and 82.9 in science, scoring higher than the state averages of 86.7, 79.9 and 78.6, respectively.
A CPI is a score is calculated per district when individual school scores (on a scale of 100, 75, 50, 25, or 0) are added and then the sum is divided by the total number of participants. The resulting CPI is an average score representing the overall performance of a district.
Superintendent of Schools Dr. Russell Johnston stated, "I am overall pleased to see progress. The two level one ranked schools [Fausey Elementary and West Springfield Middle] show continued progress in math scores.
"There are [still] areas to improve. [However], the MCAS are not the only time of year that we need to know how students are doing. We need to benchmark student progress throughout the year and change our practices [to meet their learning needs]," he continued.
Recently, the district implemented the new Massachusetts Common Core of Learning (MCCL), a curriculum that seeks to improve the academic success of students.
According to its website, "The MCCL sets broad goals for education and is the first step in the process of education reform. The second step is the development of state curriculum frameworks for the areas of the arts, English, foreign languages, health, history and social studies, mathematics, and science and technology.
"These frameworks will contain academic content standards, which establish a basis for objective measurement. The third step is the development of an assessment system to evaluate student performance and measure the success of schools."
Johnston added, "The MCAS [district score] is going to evolve quickly now that we have adopted the Common Core."
