Reading scores improve
District schools pilot Spanish-language test
"Generally, [those scores] are what we expected.
In fact, they’re better than we expected."
Blake Walsh, Blaine County School District testing
director
By TRAVIS PURSER
Express Staff Writer
Most Blaine County public school students in grades one
through three read as well or better than their statewide peers and read
better than they did at the beginning of this school year, according to
the winter scores of the Idaho Reading Indicator, released last week.
Winter test scores indicate 81 percent of kindergartners,
88 percent of first-graders, 87 percent of second-graders and 78 percent
of third-graders are reading at or above the levels at which the State
Department of Education expects them to read.
All those scores, except for the third grade, are up from
the scores of the fall IRI, which indicated that 73 percent of
kindergartners, 79 percent of first-graders, 77 percent of second-graders
and 82 percent of third-graders read at or above grade level.
"Generally, [those scores] are what we
expected," Blaine County School District testing director Blake Walsh
said during an interview Monday. "In fact, they’re better than we
expected."
He attributed the improvements to "good
teaching."
Across the state, scores also improved from fall to winter
with 77 percent of kindergartners, 65 percent of first-graders, 80 percent
of second-graders and 73 percent of third-graders reading at or above
grade level.
Administered for the first time during the 1999/2000
school year, the IRI lasts 10 minutes and tests all students’ reading
skills in the fall and winter, and in the spring tests remedial students
who may be required to take summer school classes to catch up.
The state department of education created the test to
comply with an Idaho law passed in 1999 that requires the department to
identify students reading below grade level so that teachers can help
struggling readers.
After working with the test for nearly two years, Walsh
said it is "one of the best things that Idaho has done" for
students, because it draws attention to reading, acts as a "measure
of accountability to teachers" and is packaged with a resource manual
that instructs educators on how to teach the skills the test measures.
"Reading is the most basic tool for education,"
he said. "It’s almost impossible to be successful in school without
it."
Test scores may also be useful to parents, who can attend
one of the regularly scheduled parent-teacher conferences or call schools
to find out how their children did.
"If parents are concerned about their student’s
progress, they should make an appointment with a teacher," he said.
"I think any teacher would say, ‘Read to your child every night.’
" But also, each teacher has a manual to direct parents in helping
their children with the specific skills the IRI indicates need work.
Parents of students whose first language is not English
may see scores that are lower than average.
Overall, Hispanic students’ scores were lower, with 51
percent of kindergartners, 70 percent of first-graders, 65 percent of
second-graders and 53 percent of third-graders reading at or above grade
level.
Walsh said that children’s ability to read a language
usually lags a few years behind their ability to speak it. So if they don’t
begin learning to speak English until after age 2, they could play
catch-up for a while learning to read English.
Testing those readers with the English-language IRI is
useful, Walsh said, because it gives teachers a diagnostic tool for
helping them. But Walsh was glad the school district piloted a new
Spanish-language version of the IRI this school year, because "it’s
not fair to make comparisons with English-first students."
If the school district begins using the Spanish-language
test regularly, Walsh said, "we would still want [Spanish-speaking]
students to be good readers of English, but we would give them a fair test
in their own language." For example, Spanish-speaking students may
pronounce "v" as "b" but the English-language test
would unfairly mark them wrong for that.
Also, he said, some school districts, like Blaine County’s,
include Hispanic’s scores in the overall scores, but some districts do
not. That makes it meaningless to compare scores among schools across the
state.
