McGilvra still scores high

The beginning of the new school year provides a good excuse for an update on the academic ranking of our own McGilvra Elementary School. Last year, as you may recall, the State ditched the controversial WASL (Washington Assessment of Student Learning) test. The newly elected schools superintendent, Randy Dorn (who was promptly arrested for drunken driving soon after assuming his new leadership/role model position) had campaigned against the WASL. So at the end of the last school year third through eighth graders took a different set of tests, the MSP (Measurements of Student Progress), which covers four academic disciplines: reading and math for all grades; writing for fourth and seventh grades, and science for fifth and eighth grades. With the exception of the writing test, MSP will ultimately be an online test for each of the six grades tested, though last year none of McGilvra’s students took the tests online.

The results are now in for all of the State’s schools for the 2009-10 academic year—and it’s no surprise, given the school’s consistently high scores on the WASL tests, that McGilvra again proved to be a high-achievement school under the new testing regime. Last year, as we reported, between 83 and 95 percent of McGilvra students passed the various WASL tests. This year, McGilvra’s passing scores ranged from 79 to 93 percent on the MSP.

On average, McGilvra outperformed the Seattle Public Schools by a 23 point margin on the eight tests, while the School beat the State’s overall passing scores by an average of 28 points. Looking at these numbers another way, the average passing score for all of Seattle’s 3rd, 4th and 5th graders was 64%, versus 87% for McGilvra’s. That equates to 36% more of McGilvra’s students having passed the MSP than passed in the Seattle Public Schools overall.

The biggest achievement gaps were seen for the fifth graders, who at McGilvra passed their three tests with an average rate of 87%, versus an average passing rate of 57% for the Seattle Public Schools. Notably, McGilvra fifth graders scored very high on the science and math tests (84 percent passing on both tests). There was a huge 50-point gap between the passing scores of McGilvra students and those of Washington students on the MSP fifth-grade science test.

Reading proved to be one of the strongest subjects for McGilvra students, with 91% of the third and fourth graders and 93% of the fifth graders passing the MSP. The average number of McGilvra students passing the math tests was 85%. Writing, however, proved a tougher subject, with only 79% of McGilvra fourth graders passing this test, just 14 points higher than for the City as a whole. This is an area that the McGilvra staff has been working on for several years, but 91% of its fourth graders passed the WASL writing test the previous year. It is likely, given the new MSP data, that special emphasis will continue to be placed this year on this crucial subject.

Interestingly, McGilvra’s teachers were slightly less experienced than for the Seattle Public Schools as a whole (11 years on the job versus 12 years), but they are more educated (72% have master’s degrees or higher, versus 53% for the Seattle Public Schools overall). The student/teacher ratio is also better at McGilvra than for the City as a whole (14 students per teacher at McGilvra versus 18 for all Seattle schools on average).

Finally, it is worth noting that the composition of McGilvra students is different in several ways from that of Seattle’s schools as a whole. Only 23% of McGilvra’s 257 students were classified as minorities in the last school year, versus 56% for the Seattle Public Schools. And only 8% of McGilvra’s students were receiving free or reduced-price meals, a low-income-family measurement. For the Seattle Public Schools that figure is 43%.