Commitment To Kids Helps Test Scores Students Score High On Standardized Tests Despite Poor Funding For Schools, Local Educators Say

The dilapidated state of some North Idaho school buildings has not hurt test scores, local educators say.

Why? School officials say it comes down to a few things, like the dedication of teachers, a high level of parent participation and students who are enthusiastic about learning.

In Idaho, the state doesn’t provide any money for the construction of school buildings. That financial burden falls entirely on local taxpayers. A coalition of school districts is suing the state, saying inadequate school buildings fail the state’s constitutional requirement to provide a thorough public education system.

David Rawls, superintendent of Coeur d’Alene schools, said his district is outperforming better-funded, better-resourced, better-salaried districts in Washington. He compared recently released scores from the Coeur d’Alene School District with those of several districts in the Seattle area and found generally higher scores at home.

Coeur d’Alene students’ overall scores were at least four points above the national average in all grades.

“Commitment to children is so high that it overwhelms any of these other issues,” he said, referring to the advantages Washington schools have over Coeur d’Alene schools.

“We’re hiring good teachers who care about kids,” said Rosie Astorquia, principal of Canfield Middle School in Coeur d’Alene. “It’s an entire group working for kids and that makes a difference, whether you’ve got a lot of funding or not.”

Parent involvement, too, boosts how well children in Kootenai County perform on standardized tests, educators said.

“It’s an overall attitude by parents and the community that these things are important,” Astorquia said.

At Canfield and other local schools, teachers enjoy a high level of turnout for parent-teacher conferences, many said. That helps, particularly in subjects like reading.

“If they are read to at an early age, research shows that there’s a lot to be said about that,” said Bob Sloyka, principal of Ponderosa Elementary School in Post Falls.

“We just have a really good home-school relationship, and that shows in the test scores,” he said.

All Idaho students in grades three through 11 took tests on math, language and reading in October. Grades three, five, seven and nine additionally took tests in social studies, science, math computation and information processing, which included gleaning information from maps and diagrams.

A score of 50 is meant to be the average score across the nation. Scoring in the 50th percentile means the student scored better than 50 other students out of a group of 100.

While educators said they were pleased overall with the scores, there were some weak points.

Coeur d’Alene district third-graders scored seven points lower than the national norm in spelling and nine points lower in capitalization. On the other hand, all the students in Coeur d’Alene who were tested in science scored at least 14 points higher than the national average. And all the grades tested had average student scores in math that were at least three points above the national average.

Other districts had similar highs and lows. Lakeland fourth-graders scored 11 points below the national average in math while eighth-graders scored 10 points above it in the same subject. Science scores were all at least seven points above the average. Reading scores were all above average, while language scores in third, fourth and fifth grades fell just below average.

In Post Falls, in all the tested grades but ninth and 10th, students scored higher on advanced math skills - such as problem solving, estimation, data interpretation, concepts and mathematical thinking - than they did on math skills overall.

They did the same with language. They all scored higher on advanced skills - usage and expression - than they did when spelling, capitalization and punctuation were included in their scores.

Not everyone is pleased with the scores.

Eileen Cox, who says she’s a watchdog of sorts of the public schools and sends her children to private ones, said the schools should be performing better.

“To me, there’s no excuse for anything below the 50th percentile,” she said. “Sixty percent, to me, is not high. To me, it’s mediocre.”