Berlin Superintendent Happy But Not Satisfied With CMT and CAPT Scores

Superintendent David B. Erwin said that while he is happy with the CMT and CAPT scores that were released but he and the school district will never be satisfied. The Berlin Board of Education and the school district take the motto of constant student improvement seriously.

"We obviously will look at the scores and put them in some kind of context to analyze all the information," Erwin said. "We are well above the state average and we should be in a school district like this.

"I like some of the CAPT scores at the high school and the gains we had there. We have some really nice gains in reading and writing at the high school level. I also see big gains in fifth grade reading and that is nice because we made a concerted effort to improve writing. We participated in the writer's workshop and to see gains there was nice. We put in more work and participated with the Teacher's college at Columbia in reading and saw improvement at the high school and middle school."

The town well exceeds the state averages in both CMT and CAPT scores. CMT scores were mixed. Some grade levels saw significant increases, while a small few saw drops in individual testing areas.

Berlin administrators will give a detailed analysis of the town's test scores to the school board in the fall, likely in the first BOE meeting in September.

"Even in places where we improved by 0.10, it validates what we are doing," Erwin said. "On the whole we are going to look to do even better. While we're pleased with the gains, we will look at places where we were down.

"We will work with our literacy coordinator and math coordinator and the good thing about these tests is that we can look at individual performance. In areas where we did fall down a little bit we will look to see if it is an aberration or a trend we need to fix."

"While student performance increased in all content areas when compared to the CAPT baseline year of 2007, it decreased in some areas when compared to last year," the department said in a news release. "As compared to 2011, performance increased slightly in writing, remained relatively constant in science and reading, and decreased in mathematics."

 

Berlin CMT test scores

Grade 3 Math % At/Above Goal Math % At/Above Proficiency Reading % At/Above Goal Reading % At/Above Proficiency Writing % At/Above Goal Writing % At/Above Proficiency 2011 70.6 92.5 70.5 82.5 69.3 88.6 2012 73.4 93.1 59.7 82.3 67.5 88.6 State 2012 66.8 85.8 59.2 74.5 62.7 83.2 Grade 4





2011 70.6 91.4 76.5 87.4 80.8 95.7 2012 80.2 91.6 72.1 87.1 77.3 91.6 State 2012 68.2 85.8 64.1 78.3 65.3 83.7 Grade 5





2011 88.7 97.0 
82.8 90.5 82.3 95.4 2012 83.0 94.0 81.5 92.2 83.2 95.8 State 2012 71.8 85.7 67.7 79.7
68.1 88.5 Grade 6





2011 80.4 95.2 87.6 93.8 82.5 94.9 2012 79.6 94.8 90.4 96.1 83.6 95.0
State 2012 69.5  
87.2 74.2 84.8 67.5 84.9 Grade 7





2011 84.3 95.6 91.2 97.6 80.5 92.2 2012 86.9 97.4 90.7 96.0 80.4 92.8 State 2012 68.3 86.7 79.9 87.4 65.6 83.9 Grade 8





2011 82.1 95.6 90.0
96.5
76.8 90.3 2012 84.2 98.0 92.1 96.8 82.2 94.6 State 2012 67.4 87.1 76.8 86.2 68.4 86.4

 Berlin CAPT Scores

The full results and comparisons of the scores:

Percent at/above goal, math Percent at/above proficiency, math Percent at/above goal, science Percent at/above proficiency, science Percent at/above goal, reading Percent at/above proficiency, reading Percent at/above goal, writing Percent at/above proficiency, writing 2011 64.8 94.9 57.6 92.2 59.5 92.9 77.8 96.5 2012 63.6 93.5 56.8 92.7 68.3 94.3 84.5 
97.0 2012 state average 49.3 78.8 47.3 80.2 47.5 80.9 63.1 88.8

The entire CMT and CAPT scores report from the state is attached to this article as a PDF.