Haverford School District Performs Well On Several Standardized Tests

Haverford Township School District shows strong scores on a variety of standardized tests and is making strides with increasing special education students’ scores on state tests, according to a district report on standardized testing which was presented to the Haverford Board of School Directors on Thursday night.

Haverford Township School District overall made adequate yearly progress (AYP) on the state standardized test the PSSA, and two state test alternatives which are offered to Individual Education Plans (IEP) students, the PSSA-M and the PASA, said Nicolas Rotoli, assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction and secondary education.

“Haverford (School District) performs well above the state average in math in all grades and well above average in reading in all grades," Rotoli said.

Individually, all of the district’s schools made AYP except for , which was placed on warning status, Rotoli said. made progress but under School Improvement status.

Chestnutwold was placed on warning because the school’s IEP students, or special education students, did not make AYP in reading, Rotoli said. 

Warning status means Chesnutwold has to improve this year or it could be placed on School Improvement status, meaning the school will be required to come up with an extensive, two-year school improvement plan to try to increase test scores, Rotoli told the Haverford-Havertown Patch in an interview after the meeting.

Designing an improvement plan for special education students poses a challenge, according to Rotoli.

 “We’re talking about IEP students and they’re our neediest students,” Rotoli said.

In addition, the test scores are based on a different group of students than the current school population because some of them have now moved onto the , Rotoli said.

This makes it difficult to come up with an effective improvement plan because each special education student has very different needs and each student has a unique IEP plan, Rotoli said. 

“It’s really comparing apples with oranges sometimes,” Rotoli said.

The middle school made AYP on math and also saw an 8 percent increase on IEP students’ math scores, according to the district’s standardized testing report.

Haverford High School made progress under School Improvement 1.  The high school was placed on School Improvement because for two years, the school’s special education population did not make AYP, Rotoli told Patch.

Some 20 to 22 percent of the high school student population has IEPs, Rotoli told the school board.

If the high school makes progress for a second year, under School Improvement 2 next year, then it will be taken off of School Improvement status, Rotoli told Patch.

The IEP student population’s state standardized test scores are increasing at the high school.

School Board President Denis Gray said, “To me that’s the most positive thing we talked about tonight was the IEP scores moving up at the high school.”

Fred Brown, the district’s K-12 math supervisor, said there was a “large jump in the IEP population from 23 percent (in 2010) to 45 percent (in 2011)” of the special education students scoring advanced and proficient in math on the PSSA, PSSA-M and the PASA.

Brown credited the jump in math scores to an in-school tutoring program which was offered to IEP students and funded through a grant.

A total of 58 percent, or 11 of the 19 students who participated in the tutoring program, scored advanced or proficient in math.

State reading scores for the IEP population at the high school also increased, from 37.9 percent in 2010 to 70 percent in 2011.

Overall, the district found that IEP students performed well above the state average in all grades in IEP math and reading test scores, but the district performed closer to the state average in IEP reading in grade 5.

The total number of high school students who scored advanced or proficient—a total which includes the IEP population—increased from 61.7 percent in 2010 to 73 percent in 2011 for math; and from 76.8 percent in 2010 to 86.1 percent in 2011 for reading.

The district also reported the results of other tests, such as the SATs and AP tests.

SAT scores “are strong in all three categories, math, reading and writing,” Rotoli said.

The 2011 SAT mean scores for Haverford High School were 539 in math, 526 in reading and 524 in writing. When compared to last year’s average, the scores amounted to a one point increase for math and writing, while the reading score stayed the same.

“While our scores went up this year, they did not go up substantially,” Rotoli said.

Rotoli said in past years, 75 percent of the high school students have taken the SATs, but because the district encourages all students to take the test, this year, 80 percent of students took it.

“As the pool gets larger, the average score will decrease,” Rotoli said.

There is also a significant jump each year in the number of students taking AP (Advanced Placement ) tests, Rotoli said.  The test allows high school students who take AP courses to earn college credits if they score high enough on the AP exam.

The number of AP exams taken at Haverford High School has increased from 229 tests during the 2006-2007 school year to 363 during the 2010-2011 school year.

All students who are considering college are encouraged to take AP courses and sit for the tests, Rotoli said.

“We think it’s a real benefit for our students to have that experience,” Rotoli said.

Of the 363 AP tests taken last year, 111 tests received the highest score of five, 79 tests were scored a four, 109 tests received a three, 43 tests received a two, and 21 tests received the lowest score, a 1.