Statewide proficiency rates on the annual end-of-year standardized tests for West Virginia public elementary, middle and high school students increased from the 2014-15 school year to last school year in nearly every tested grade on all tested subjects, according to preliminary data.
But even with the proficiency rate increases, the fact remained that less than half of the roughly 180,000 tested Mountain State students scored "proficient" or higher in English language arts, and only about a third were deemed proficient in math and science.
In a conference call this week with reporters, Vaughn Rhudy, executive director of the West Virginia Department of Education's Office of Assessment, said the state will use the Smarter Balanced exams again this spring. Those tests have made up most of the end-of-year standardized testing for the past two school years.
That move might anger members of state schools Superintendent Michael Martirano's Commission on Assessment. A majority of the members - who included Dale Lee, president of the West Virginia Education Association teachers union, and heads of school principal and superintendent associations - favored moving away from Smarter Balanced, but Martirano, who originally tried to keep the public out of the commission's meetings before reversing course, never released official "final recommendations" from the group.
The move also might prompt backlash from the West Virginia Legislature, which passed a bill this year to ban Smarter Balanced, although Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin vetoed the legislation.
Smarter Balanced is aligned with the Common Core math and English language arts K-12 education standards that have garnered controversy across the nation. Common Core is a national standards blueprint adopted by more than 40 states.
West Virginia's revised standards, taking effect this school year, greatly resemble Common Core, down to the exact same wording and examples, despite Martirano's statements that the state standards no longer are Common Core based.
Heather Hutchens, general counsel for the education department, said the department submitted paperwork sometime between late May and early June to renew the annual contract with the American Institutes for Research to provide Smarter Balanced tests, but she didn't know late Wednesday when the separate annual contract with Smarter Balanced was renewed.
Martirano said Wednesday that, even while the assessment commission was meeting, he never expected to dump Smarter Balanced for the upcoming school year.
"The Legislative session was occurring," Martirano said of the time the commission was meeting. "If they would have voted to remove Smarter Balanced, I would have had a tremendous amount of work to do to get a [request for proposals] to get a new assessment in place for this school year, which would have been extremely disruptive, so we started making our investigations and planning."
But when asked if the commission was only meant to help chart another direction in case the Legislature succeeded in stopping Smarter Balanced, he gave multiple purposes: "If we decided that there was something better out there, if the legislation was going to force us to do it, like a lot of this is very volatile conversations."
The commission hasn't met since January, and Martirano said he has no reason to reconvene it now, because "we're moving forward with the assessments that we're using." In February, he said he favored end-of-course exams, instead of Smarter Balanced at the high school level, but has said they could take years to develop.
Rhudy wrote in an email that the education department is still exploring the alignment of the revised standards to the "Smarter Balanced assessment targets." "Even though one standard may have [to] move to a different grade level, it still may align to an assessment target at that grade level," Rhudy said. "It is important to remember that Smarter Balanced provides the items, and we work with our testing vendor, the American Institutes for Research, to ensure the assessment we deliver follows the Smarter Balanced testing blueprint."
While they improved their math proficiency rates from 2014-15, Mountain State high-schoolers saw the least math proficiency rate improvement of all tested grade levels, and only about a fifth of high-schoolers were deemed proficient in math last school year. Education department spokeswoman Kristin Anderson noted there's a lack of "highly qualified" math and science teachers in the state.
The exams have no time limit and don't count toward students' grades, although scoring proficient and above can exempt students from remedial courses in high school and college.
The average time spent on the exams was below the amount Smarter Balanced estimated students would take in every grade level last school year, most significantly in high school math - despite the fact that the state education department highlighted the same problem after the 2014-15 data release.
The ninth-, 10th- and 11th-grade math exams are each estimated to each take 210 minutes, but ninth-graders took only 80 minutes, 10th-graders took 67, and 11th-graders took 78, all about the same amount of time they spent in 2014-15.
"That is a great concern to us," Rhudy said. "We want to make sure our students are spending as much time as necessary."
Last school year was the second statewide administration of Smarter Balanced.
The overall scores and increases or decreases in scores on those tests, given in the spring, will be the primary factors in what grades schools receive on the state's A-F scale for entire schools, which debuts this fall.
The preliminary results that the education department presented Wednesday to the state Board of Education don't yet include school-by-school breakdowns, which are expected to be released later this year. Anderson said the state will release county-level data Aug. 17, to allow time for local school boards to first hear presentations on their own districts' scores.
The rates are preliminary, because they don't include results from the roughly 2,500 students who took the West Virginia Alternate Assessment, which is given to the students who have the most significant cognitive disabilities.
Also, the department is still calculating results for accountability purposes. Students who have been enrolled at a school for at least 135 days have their test results used in accountability calculations, so Anderson said there might be small changes before final results are released in November.
"We don't have any specific evidence of what is exactly leading to the increase," Rhudy said.
He said a number of factors could play into it, including students and teachers becoming more familiar with the Smarter Balanced tests and more "rigorous" education standards affecting learning.
Clayton Burch, the education department's chief academic officer, said there's been a focus on pre-kindergarten through third grade for the past six years, plus younger students are the only group whose education standards haven't been "messed around with" and they've only known online assessment.
Third- through 11th-graders take the math and English exams. Proficiency rates rose in every tested grade in both these subjects, except for the fifth-grade English exam, where fifth-graders maintained their 51 percent proficiency rate from 2014-15.
Just like in 2014-15, the fifth-grade English exam remained last school year as the only exam in any tested grade level in any tested subject in which more than 50 percent of students scored proficient or better.
However, high school juniors' English proficiency rate edged closer to a majority, rising from 47 percent to 49 percent. Last school year, high school freshmen again had the lowest grade-level English proficiency rate, but it increased from 38 percent in 2014-15 to 41 percent.
The biggest annual English increase came in the prior grade level: Eighth-graders' proficiency rate rose from 43 percent to 47 percent.
In 2014-15, third-graders had the highest grade-level math proficiency rate at 44 percent. Last school year, they extended their lead with the largest annual improvement, rising to 50 percent, a proficiency rate second only to the third-graders' English rate.
Again last school year, math proficiency rates trended significantly downward as grade level increased. Fourth-graders' rates rose from 35 percent to 40 percent, but that's still 10 percentage points less than the grade before.
Seventh-graders' rates rose from 25 percent to 30 percent, still 20 percentage points below the third-graders. Tenth-graders also saw a relatively large jump of 4 percentage points from 2014-15 to last school year, but that only brought their rate to 19 percent, still the lowest proficiency rate of any tested grade in any tested subject.
The smallest math uptick went to the students closest to college: high school juniors' proficiency rates rose from 20 percent to 21 percent. That maintains the chasm between juniors' math rate, which is among the worst of all grade levels, and their English rate, which is among the best of all grade levels.
West Virginia's science tests aren't based on Common Core, because Common Core doesn't contain science standards.
Also, West Virginia only gives statewide science standardized tests in fourth, sixth and 10th grades. While the state used to give the science tests in grades three through 11, it now only complies with the minimum federal requirement to report science testing in three grades.
The fourth-grade science exam was the only exam in any tested subject in any tested grade level that saw a proficiency rate drop from 2014-15 to last school year. The fourth-grade rate dropped from 36 percent to 32 percent, while the sixth-grade rate held at 39 percent and the 10th-grade rate inched up from 35 percent to 36 percent.
Reach Ryan Quinn at ryan.quinn@wvgazettemail.com, facebook.com/ryanedwinquinn, 304-348-1254 or follow @RyanEQuinn on Twitter.