Coeur d’Alene School District’s first-year Common Core scores low

The switch to Common Core is having a predictable outcome right out of the chute: Far fewer students are passing the demanding statewide tests aligned to the rigorous new educational standards.

It’s the big dip in scores educators expected in the first year of the exams. Instead of the usual pass rates of 70 percent to 90 percent, students in the Coeur d’Alene School District dropped to the low 60s and 50s, and in a few cases below 40 percent, preliminary results show.

“When you have a new assessment that’s a new benchmark, you basically are expecting about 50 percent of the students to pass,” said Mike Nelson, director of curriculum and assessments for the district.

It also happened 15 years ago when Idaho moved to the previous testing program. After a few years, the scores came back up, “and then we were the highest-achieving district in the state for five straight years,” Nelson said. “And I have no doubts in the capacities of our district and our teachers to take it there again.”

The first year’s scores may be jarring for students and parents, but district leaders take some comfort in how well they compare to statewide averages. With the exception of 10th-graders, all outperformed the state in both math and English. They also did quite well compared to statewide averages in Washington and Oregon.

Nelson said he wants to assure parents that “your students’ abilities haven’t changed, our teachers’ abilities haven’t changed. The way those students are being assessed has changed.”

Idaho moved to the Common Core standards in 2013 and chose the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium to develop the exams, called the Idaho Standards Achievement Test, or ISAT. Students got a taste of what the math and English tests entail in a dry run in 2014, and this past spring the assessments were required for grades three through 10.

The tests emphasize critical thinking, real-world applications and keyboard skills. Unlike the multiple-choice tests used for years, students must explain their answers, compose essays and show how well they apply knowledge. The exams on average took students six hours to complete over several days.

Nelson described them as “really an extension of the classroom.”

“Our kids are doing a lot of writing in the classroom, they’re doing a lot of great thinking, they’re doing a lot of targeted activities,” and the new ISAT measures them in a similar way, he said.

Many students will struggle during this transition, and the scores show it, especially at the middle and high school levels. Only 38 percent of Coeur d’Alene sixth-graders had passing scores in math. The pass rate was 40 percent in grade 8, 33 percent in grade 9 and 28 percent in grade 10.

More students were proficient on the English exams. The pass rate ranged from 57 percent to 63 percent between the grade levels.

“These students for years have taken assessments that really asked them fairly low-level questions,” Nelson said. “Now they’re being asked to really demonstrate their answers, and so it is a learning curve for our teachers as well as our students to be able to do that.”

The class of 2017 – juniors this year – is the first required to pass the new ISAT to graduate. Students can try again next spring and once more their senior year. Alternatively, they can use their SAT or Preliminary SAT scores to earn a diploma.

The focus is how to help teachers and students grow from here, Nelson said.

“We now know where our students’ capacities are,” he said. “Certainly, we’ve got a couple of years to get back to where we want to be.”

Those efforts will be supported by a greater level of detail on where students falter on the tests.

“Now we have more of a prescription,” Nelson said. “We can even bring it all the way down into the classroom level if we want to so we can really work with teachers who may be struggling with teaching an individual concept. It’s going to empower us a lot more as a district to improve quickly.”

The school-level ISAT scores will be released this fall, but parents may pick up their child’s scores now at the district’s central office at the corner of Northwest Boulevard and Ironwood