Schools

Schools Get Varied Marks on Report Card

Nonprofit organization grades schools, district on student achievement and lessening the achievement gap.

A state non-profit organization has distributed report cards for every school and district in Connecticut and Farmington’s marks are down from last year, slightly lower than its neighbors and difficult to decipher.

The grades come from Connecticut Coalition for Achievement Now (ConnCan), which aims to reduce the state's achievement gap through education reforms. The organization calculates an overall grade based on percentage of students’ meeting or exceeding grade level expectations on the CMT and CAPT tests. ConnCan also generates minority subgroup scores based on the results of low-income, Hispanic or African-American students and relative to their white peers.

First, the numbers for overall student achievement:

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  • West District: A-, ranked 43 among 571
  • Union School: A-, ranked 60 of 571
  • Noah Wallace: A-, ranked 42 of 571
  • East Farms: B+, ranked 70 of 571
  • West Woods Upper Elementary: A-, ranked 37 of 298
  • Irving A Robbins Middle School: A, ranked 14 of 297
  • FHS: B+, ranked 9 of 190

Consistency between each school’s ranking is hard to follow. At East Farms, though the overall score was lower than the other three, it scored an A for performance gains over last year, as did Union School. For Noah Wallace and West District, the category is not applicable, according to the results.

ConnCan gives West Wood a C- for achievement gap “between the performance of low-income and minority students and their non low-income and white peers.”

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The fifth and sixth-grade school ranked 55 of 138 similar schools, with a B- in student performance subgroups, with numbers still higher than the district and state averages.

Irving A Robbins meanwhile earned an A in overall student performance from the nonprofit but got a C+ in subgroup performance. Still, the school ranked 37 of 211. And though it fell fairly high on the list — ranking 23 of 138, the school got a D- for achievement gap.

Farmington High School, on the other hand, topped the list of high-scoring, low-income students, with 61 percent scoring at or above goal.

The Farmington Public School District was ranked fifth overall. Avon was first, Canton fourth and Simsbury 11th. Glastonbury, which is in Farmington’s DRG, was ranked number 28.

An org that has an agenda but appears trying to do some analysis on fairness of educational opportunity. They do have an anti-public education bias,” said Mike Galluzzo, Farmington Assistant Superintendent of Schools. “They’re very much for charter schools and choice.”

Galluzzo said it would be difficult to draw any conclusions from the study without further study of the group's methodology.


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