Two of Pike County’s three school districts have D grades and Amite County’s school system received an F under new school accountability ratings released Thursday by the Mississippi Department of Education.
The North Pike School District fared the best in Pike County, receiving a C rating, while McComb and South Pike received Ds.
The school ratings reflect students’ performance on the new Mississippi Assessment Program test taken in the 2015-16 school year.
Under the district-level grading model, state education officials award districts and individual school campuses points based on factors such as students proficiency, student improvement — known as “growth” — and graduation rates.
Districts had been able to accept higher grades for their previous performance on state tests for the past two years thanks to waivers from the Mississippi Department of Education after the state switched a test known as the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Career to the MAP exam.
But the waivers are gone, and the new district-level grades will be used to hold school systems accountable for continued student performance, as districts that fail to show progress from year to year face the threat of state intervention.
Here’s a look at how each district fared:
North Pike feels squeeze
from previous success
Test scores and accountability ratings were expected to fall for many school districts this year, and that was true for North Pike.
The district rated a C overall, while the individual schools varied from a B rating for the elementary school, through a C rating for the high school, to a D for the middle school.
“We’re working to identify our low points and put emphasis there, while keeping our strong points strong,” Superintendent Dennis Penton said this morning. “Knowing what the tests are like now will help with that.”
The new model, according to a report from The Parent’s Campaign, puts more emphasis on growth in student achievement than achievement levels.
“The model is especially harsh to schools that have high achievement and maintain it,” Penton said. “It’s cruel. ... It’s not a very balanced evaluation. Growth is weighted too heavily, and high-performing schools are penalized.
“You can have schools that move students up in the bottom levels, and they’ll rate better than schools with high achievement.”
North Pike had bright spots in both achievement and growth.
Reading achievement among the lowest 25 percent of students grew, with 55.5 percent of students in that category showing at least a minimal level of growth.
Middle school students in that category had 40.9 percent showing growth, while 88.6 percent of those elementary students and 71.7 percent of those high school students showed growth.
Math in that category showed 51.4 percent overall grew in that subject, with 53.3 percent growing at the middle school, 42.1 percent at the high school and 43.2 percent at the elementary.
Overall growth rates for the districts were more than 50 percent. The only areas where schools fell short of that mark were the 48.3 percent growth in reading at the middle school, and the 48 percent growth in math at the high school.
Proficiency levels overall in reading and math were all below 50 percent, thanks in part to higher cut scores on the MAP. Those marks were below 30 percent in both subjects at the middle school.
The district boasted an 81.3 percent graduation rate, the same as South Pike and slightly less than McComb’s 83.4 percent rate.
“We’ll focus more on growing more of our bottom students,” Penton said. “We always work to advance all of our students, but there are things we can do to work in the model.
“I’m not complaining. We will do better,” he said. “Our teachers are professional and capable, and they will make adjustments.”
With waiver gone, McComb falls — or holds steady — at D
The McComb School District dropped from a C to a D under the new accountability results for the 2015-16 school year.
Otken Elementary and Denman Junior High schools both earned Cs, while Summit Elementary, Higgins Middle and McComb High schools all had Ds.
In reality, though, the performance wasn’t all that different from the year before, as McComb managed to keep its 2014-15 C rating based on its 2013-14 grade because of a waiver from the Department of Education after the state switched to the new tests.
Superintendent Dr. Cederick Ellis said that even though the district’s D rating is not where it wants to be, McComb students are showing progress.
Denman Junior High, for example, went from an F to a C.
“Some of our schools maintained their rating except for a the high school, which went from a C to a D. Two of our schools are rated C, the rest are rated D,” Ellis said. “We seem to be on the right track. If you look at our growth category, we are growing students.”
At Denman, for example, barely 15 percent of students are considered to be proficient in reading, and just 16 percent were rated proficient in math, but 64 percent of students improved in reading and 51 percent of students did better in math. On the lowest-scoring levels from the previous year, 71 percent showed improvement in reading and 70 percent showed improvement in math.
But Ellis made it clear the scores are not acceptable.
“A ‘D’ rating is unacceptable for our schools and it’s unacceptable for our district,” Ellis said. “We’ve changed assessments in the past three years and we’ve shown trajectory progress. We’ve shown incremental progress.”
Ellis said he believes student-centered learning is working.
“Right now it’s at the Summit and Kennedy Elementary. Next year we will roll it out to Otken Elementary and Higgins Middle School,” he said.
Ellis said the new test is more rigorous than what students have taken in the past, and the method in which students are rated is different.
“In the past, we had four levels. Now we have five levels. We had five levels last year with the PARCC. Before Level 3 was passing but with new assessment proficiency is when students score in levels 4 to 5,” he said. “The majority of our students scored from level 3 to level 4. We must increase our proficiency.”
He said McComb’s not dropping to an F means teachers are becoming familiar with how to teach and assess the new standards.
“Research does show that when there is a switch in assessments, there is going to be a dip in students progress. When states or schools go to new assessments, the scores seem to somewhat plummet,” Ellis said.
South Pike’s D ‘unacceptable,’ superintendent says
South Pike earned a “D” rating overall and the same grade for each of its individual schools.
Particularly dismal are its reading and math proficiency scores at both the district and school level. District-wide, fewer than one in five students exhibits proficiency at grade level. Students fare slightly better in the upper grades, but at the elementary level scores are near the bottom in southwest Mississippi.
An encouraging glimmer, however, is the so-called “growth rate” at which students are improving. South Pike students rank in the middle range of area districts in reading and math growth rates.
“A ‘D’ is simply unacceptable,” Superintendent Johnnie Vick said Thursday.
Careful not to make excuses, and on the job only a few months, he offered several possible explanations for his district’s lackluster performance.
He noted that some degree of regression is common when students take a new kind of test, which was the case this year.
There has also been high turnover among teachers and administrators, a trend Vick intends to slow.
The district has also purchased several new reading and math software programs to help teachers engage with students at their individual levels.
Amite County officials
searching for answers
When Amite County schools had failing grades two years ago, officials put into place a variety of improvement plans, and the efforts worked, with the district pulling itself up to a C the next year.
Thinking they had the right formula for improvement, the district continued those same efforts. But it didn’t do the trick this past year. The district received an F in the state accountability rankings released this week.
The elementary school rated an F, and the high school a D. Reading proficiency across the district was 21 percent, and math was 14.3 percent. District proficiency in history was 43.1 percent and in science it was 38.5 percent. The high school graduation rate was 76.9 percent.
“It’s hard for me to understand,” said district superintendent Scotty Whittington. “We kept all those programs in effect, and we went from a C to an F. It worked when we went from an F to a C but it didn’t work this time.”
Whittington said he and his team of administrators are scrambling to figure out what went wrong. He noted, however, several hurdles the district had to jump.
Last year was the first year of a new accountability measurement test, the state’s third in as many years.
“Last year was the third new test in a row, so I can’t figure out how they figured growth,” Whittington said.
Along those same lines, he said a lot of students who scored high already didn’t meet growth measurements.
“And last year was the first time our elementary students had been tested totally on computer, not with paper and pencil,” Whittington said. “A lot of our students don’t have computers at their homes and aren’t familiar with them.”
To help surmount that, the district is increasing its number of computers.
“We’ve added a lot more,” he said, including labs. “Our kids will have a lot more experience with computers when they take the test next time.
“We’ve been working pretty feverishly over the last week or so to get things straight here,” he said. “We are working to make sure to align our pacing guide with career and college standards and make sure we are teaching what we are supposed to be teaching.”
Whittington said the district also is at a disadvantage when it comes to testing special education students.
“We’re working with our SPED teachers and department to really up the ante,” he said. “Their grades hurt us terribly, and we have one of the largest percentages of SPED students in the state.”
Whittington doesn’t want the failing grade for the district to hurt morale at the schools.
“We’ve just got to work harder,” he said.
