Schools

Maguire: 'We Are Pretty Comfortable' with Medfield's MCAS Scores

Bob Maguire, Medfield Superintendent of Public Schools, shared the 2011 MCAS results with the School Committee at Monday's meeting and said the performance of the students "was very good."

“In general, the scores are very good. … “We are pretty comfortable with the scores.”

That was Medfield Superintendent of Public Schools, Bob Maguire’s take on Medfield’s performance in the 2011 MCAS as he reviewed them with the School Committee at Monday’s meeting.

While Maguire said he had not seen any district rankings as of yet, he was pleased with the scores throughout Medfield.

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“The results are strong across the board,” Maguire said. “The performance of the kids was vey good.”

Medfield’s results, according to Maguire, were better than originally thought after an error with the test’s scoring for the 10th grade math portion of the test was discovered.

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“There was a scoring error,” Maguire said. “The math, grade 10 results, were incorrectly tabulated by the company Measured Progress [MCAS contractor]. It turns out they used the scaled score information from 2010 inadvertently. So, they used the wrong scoring table for the grade 10 in math. It is going to affect about 55,000 students in the Commonwealth.”

The error, reported by several media outlets, (http://boston.cbslocal.com/2011/10/01/math-error-on-mcas-math-test-results/) said more than 3,000 students would be affected by the scoring change. Maguire explained to the school committee the change actually benefits the affected students, as no score will have a negative impact from the error.

“Scores will increase on average about two points,” Maguire said. “There are some students that will move up in a category, for example, from proficient to advanced. It’s a pretty big deal. There’s none that go down. The error was such that everybody that it’s affected will go up. It’s a substantial number. It had turned out that it had actually changed the school score.”

The only negative impact this error has in Medfield, according to Maguire, is sending families incorrect information and having to resend the updated results.

“The downside is we got everything out to people because they got us the information to get out to families,” Maguire said. “We really worked very hard to get it out quickly so what the 10th grade math scores that people got are an error. They’re now sending us this week the updated information, which we will turnaround and get out again.”

Overall, Maguire said the scores show the schools are up “in many instances” with only a “few examples here and there where” the scores are down.

Maguire also outlined for the committee a new statistic being introduced in this year’s scoring: Student Percentile Growth.

“We’re still trying to figure this out,” Maguire said of the new statistic. “The original concept [of the MCAS] was based on standards that students were being taught and the idea was how well did that student do in scoring against that standard. Now, there’s a shift there and they’re actually trying to look at growth of students.”

The new statistic, according to Maguire, aims to measure how a student grows over a year’s time by having the student test against him or herself as well as against other students with similar results.

“They’re looking for other kids that have that same combination of scores and then they compare on the third score how [students] did compared to those other kids,” Maguire said. “Mathematically, they are coming up with a statistic of whether [students] had an average score like everybody else, or did [a student] do lower than [the other kids] or did [the student] do higher than [the other students].”

Maguire said while the formula makes sense logically, he remains cautious of the statistic’s purpose.

“We still have a lot of questions about it,” Maguire said. “In terms of statistical validity but also what is it useful for?”

The information is broken down both individually and as a group by percentiles, giving  an easy indication of the amount of growth students are achieving.

“If you score anywhere from 0 to 40, that is considered potentially, lower than average,” Maguire said. “Where if you score between 40 and 60, they’re saying that’s average growth. If you score 60 and higher, that’s very strong growth. The way they do it is like a bell curve. So the vast majority tends to be in the average growth range. So if you got up to the 80th percentile, that is extraordinary growth.”

Medfield has no numbers by group under the new statistic that is being posted below average.

“There were actually some numbers that were pretty high,” Maguire said of Medfield’s performance. “There were a couple of places where we showed the 80 percentile and 75 percentile. We are trying to sort that out, we are still trying to understand that [new statistic].”

While the scores are high in the district, Maguire wants to know exactly what those numbers mean and how this statistic can be used to measure both a student’s and a school’s success.

“What can we gather from it?” Maguire asked of the statistic. “Eventually, the theory would be maybe you can take that information and use it in a way to have stronger growth in other areas.”

No matter the statistics or formulas being used, Maguire said the district’s goal is to make sure every student graduates.

“Principals use [the results] informationally,” Maguire said. “They are looking at students that aren’t in advanced and proficient [categories]. We have low numbers there but we do really try to identify kids through the testing. In many instances, there has already been identification that has occurred. We do try to put improvement plans in place for any child that’s not meeting the standard. We have very good success when you see the kids get to grade 10.  We’ve got some targeted programs where our goal is to see every kid graduate through this process. That’s very important and we have very good results with that.”


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