These challenges include meeting the state average of the percentage of students at or above grade level and addressing the achievement gap between white and minority students.
Both of these challenges are more pronounced in the lower grades of the county’s schools.
“There’s nothing here that really surprises us, because we look at the data even before these things come out,” RCS Director of Student Testing and Accountability Dr. Steve Lear said Thursday afternoon. “What this does is make it so that anybody in the state of North Carolina can access this information.”
Lear characterized the data shared in the report cards as “informational rather than analytical.”
“We do a lot of analysis of the numbers throughout the year,” he said. “The data shared in the school report card is of more of an informational nature.”
He did say parents and community stake holders can compare the academic performance at any particular school
The report cards are intended to provide parents and guardians important information about school and student performance, class sizes, attendance, school safety and teacher quality, among other things, as a release from RCS earlier this week noted.
The information was released Thursday by the state Department of Public Instruction, and can be found on the Internet at www.ncreportcards.org.
Each student in the county will have a hard copy of a two-page summary of the school’s report card sent home with them, and copies are also available at each school’s front office.
However, when each of the 19 individual school report cards are taken together as a whole, they also offer some information about the RCS school district during the 2008-09 school year.
For instance, 100 percent of RCS’s students had adequate access to technology, there were zero acts of violence or crime reported per 100 students in the school district and 95 percent of the teachers in the district’s classrooms were considered highly qualified.
As has been previously reported, the school report cards also share the fact 11 of RCS’s 19 schools made “Adequate Yearly Progress” by helping more students to achieve proficiency in end-of-grade and end-of-course testing under federal evaluations.
“Part of the success we experienced last year, quite honestly, can be attributed to the ability to count retesting scores on end-of-grade testing,” Lear said. “We benefited from that, and so did many others in the state, but it’s also reflective of good instruction and student performance.”
RCS Spokesperson Ashley Simmons attributed much of the success of last year to the realignment of the school system.
“This all kind of goes back to the purpose of reconfiguring the schools,” Simmons said. “Previously, we had every possible configuration of schools you could have.”
She explained breaking down numbers from schools that had Kindergarten through third, while some had Kindergarten through sixth grade, and seventh through ninth grades, made data harder to track across student populations, and made instruction less centralized.
Class sizes also appear to consistently be within the same range as the state average throughout RCS.
The rate of students attaining grade level proficiency in RCS also still lags behind the state’s average in most ethnic, gender and economic status sub-category of students, however.
There is also strong evidence of an achievement gap between Caucasian and African-American and Latino students, particularly at the elementary and middle school levels, in the school district and the state.
In RCS’s elementary and middle schools, the rate of students who are “on grade level” is more than doubled for Caucasians than for students in the two largest minority populations.
In order to be considered “on grade level,” students must pass end-of-grade testing in both reading and math curriculums.
Throughout RCS primary and middle schools, 63 percent of Caucasian students passed both Reading and Math end-of-grade testing, while 31.3 percent of African-American students and 34.2 percent of Hispanic students did so.
The state level reflects the same gap in proficiency, with 76.7 percent of Caucasian students passing both the reading and math end-of-grade testing, while 43.6 percent of the African-American students in the state did so and 48.9 percent of the Hispanic population did.
Elementary School Level
At the elementary school level, L.J. Bell, Cordova and Fairview Heights Elementary are all designated “Schools of Progress,” because they have at least 60 percent of students testing on grade level.
L.J. Bell and Fairview Heights both earned “High Growth” distinctions, while Cordova met “Expected Growth.”
Several schools are listed as “Priority Schools,” meaning between 50 and 60 percent of their students test on grade level. These include Mineral Springs, Monroe Avenue, Rohanen Primary, Washington Street and West Rockingham.
Only Ashley Chapel, which will be phased out along with Cordova and Rohanen Primary next year as its students begin attending West Rockingham Elementary, was considered a “Low Performing School.”
End-of-grade testing results show 51.4 percent of the district’s elementary students tested at grade level in Reading, compared to 67.6 percent at the state level.
In Math end-of-grade testing, 68.9 percent of RCS students tested on grade level, while the state average was 80 percent.
Middle School Level
At the middle school level, Rockingham Middle is the only one of the county’s four middle schools considered a “School of Progress.”
Hamlet, Ellerbe and Rohanen middle schools are each designated as a “Priority School,” under federal No Child Left Behind regulation. This means each of these three schools meets the criteria of having 50 to 60 percent of its students at grade level.
In order to be considered “on grade level,” students must pass end-of-grade testing in both reading and math curriculums.
Rockingham, Ellerbe and Rohanen middle schools each made “Expected Growth,” under the guidelines, however, a three-year trend of student performance on end-of-grade testing in Reading and Math shows improvement at all four of the district’s middle schools in 2008-09 from the previous school year.
In the 2007-08 school year, both Hamlet and Rockingham middle schools were able to improve math scores from the 2006-07 year, but both Ellerbe and Rohanen experienced a slight dip in 2007-08, before surpassing their 2006-07 figures last year.
Reading end-of-grade testing was instituted at the middle schools in the 2007-08 school year, and each school improved their scores in the second year of testing.
High School Level
The achievement gap is slightly less pronounced in the RCS district at the high school level than at the lower levels.
In grades nine through 12, 74.8 percent of Caucasian students tested on grade level, while 49.2 percent of the African-American student body did and 65.7 percent of the Hispanic student population did.
These figures are roughly in line with the state average, which has 81 percent of Caucasian students testing on grade level, 53.2 percent of the African-American student population and 63.6 percent of the Hispanic student population.
At Richmond Senior High, student proficiency on end-of-course testing matched or topped the state average in Algebra II, Biology, Physical Science and U.S. History.
The school’s figures on Civics and Chemistry end-of-course testing also came close to the reaching the state average, while Geometry proficiency was about 10 percent below the state average at 63 percent.
Another thing that stands out at the high school level is the student performance at Richmond Early College High School, where more than 90 percent of students demonstrated proficiency in English and more than 80 percent of students did so in both Algebra I and II.
This compares with about 60 percent of the students testing on grade level in English at the Ninth Grade Academy, and about 42.6 percent in Algebra I.
Lear and Simmons encouraged anyone with a question concerning the school report cards to contact the RCS Central Office at 582-5860.
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