SPRINGFIELD — The results are in, and there’s room for improvement.
The Oregon Department of Education released its summative assessment data this month. The data gauges students’ education levels across three core areas: English and Language Arts (ELA), Math, and Science.
If a student is proficient for their grade level in one of those areas, they would have scored a 3 or 4 on the state summative test. According to the data, proficiency among students in the state has gradually increased since the pandemic, mainly in areas such as math and science.
However, for ELA, the years have not always brought an increase in proficient students; this year, there was a .5% decrease in students proficient in ELA.
Less than half of the state’s students are considered proficient for their grade level in all three of these categories, and the numbers are also similar on a local level.
In our coverage areas, Cottage Grove, Creswell, Pleasant Hill, and Springfield, there is a trend toward higher proficiency rates among elementary students in ELA and Math.
However, the science state summative is only polled from 5th graders, making the population pool for elementary schools smaller.
Very few schools in our coverage area have over 50% proficient students in any of the three subjects. In the Springfield Public Schools District (SPSD), only Douglas Garden Elementary School and Thurston Elementary School have over 50% proficient students in ELA (Douglas Garden at 56.5% and Thurston at 62.2%).
Thurston Elementary School is also the only school in all three districts to have over 50% of its students reach proficiency in math. Academy of Arts and Academics is the only high school in SPSD to have over half its student population achieve proficiency in ELA, at 62.5%.
In the South Lane School District, only the Academy for Character Education reached 50% proficiency in one area, ELA. No schools in either the Creswell School District or the Pleasant Hill School District reached the halfway mark for proficiency, but both high schools scored better in Math than any of the Springfield or South Lane high schools.
Some notable lower scores were at Springfield High School, where less than 5% of students scored proficient in Math, and Hamlin Middle School, where only 14.9% scored in the proficiency category. Mt. Vernon Elementary School and Riverbend Elementary School had low scores in both math and science, ranging as low as 10%.
Some key takeaways from this data are that even among the same schools districts, proficiency rates can be vastly different. In SPSD, the difference in proficiency rates can be more than 40% between some elementary schools. There is also no indicator that different school districts struggle in certain areas, as it appears to be more of a school-to-school basis for what areas students struggle in reaching proficiency.
