A scoring error at the state level has area school districts waiting for their final School Performance Profile scores for the 2015-16 school year.

Pennsylvania State Standardized Assessment scores are rock solid, however, and Lehighton Area School District reviewed the data at its board meeting this week.Tim Tkach, Lehighton’s director of curriculum, instruction and grants, compared the percentage of the district’s students scoring advanced or proficient on the tests to the state average when explaining the scores to the board and public.Tests are administered to students in third through eighth grades for math and English language arts, and fourth and eighth grade for science.Lehighton’s students were above the state average on the third, fourth, seventh and eighth grade English language arts exams; third and eighth grade mathematics exams; and fourth and eighth grade science exams.“In the grade levels that we were below the state average, we have already begun addressing that and looking at some intervention methods,” Tkach said. “We use what was formerly the Response to Intervention and Instruction and is now called the Multi-Tiered System of Supports. Students are grouped into the appropriate areas to determine if tier 2 or tier 3 intervention is needed. We’ve added a paraprofessional at the elementary level for math. We’re also looking at some math software interventions as a supplement to help teachers.”Lehighton will continue to drill down into specific student data, Tkach said, to help the district give “more self-prescribed instruction to each individual student.”The PSSA results mark the second year that the tests were aligned to the more rigorous Pennsylvania Core Standards.“It’s a new style of format as to how students answer the questions,” Tkach said. “They are more open-ended now and you have to prove what you are putting down as an answer.”Pedro Rivera, state secretary of education, said the Pennsylvania Core Standards are more challenging and better reflect the college and career ready skills that students will require to be successful when they graduate.“The 2015 administration of the PSSA set a new benchmark for student performance,” Rivera said. “The results from 2016 assessment show student performance is trending in the right direction, but also that more needs to be done to help students who aren’t yet achieving proficiency.”While Superintendent Jonathan Cleaver said the knee-jerk reaction is to look at Lehighton’s fifth and sixth grades and think they’re not doing as well because they’re below the state advanced or proficient average, Lehighton Middle School’s School Performance Profile score has remained level.Though a data error occurred statewide, SPP scores are not expected to change drastically. The middle school scored a 75.7 based on the initial release.“The School Performance Profile takes a holistic approach where the PSSA tests are just that snapshot,” he said. “In fact, we’ve had schools contact us asking us what we’ve done to be able to keep the SPP score where it is.”School administrators across the state have been critical of how much standardized testing takes place during a student’s school career and how much stress is put on the exams.According to Tkach, by the time a student graduates, they will have lost almost a full year of instructional time to standardized tests such as the PSSA and Keystone exams.Cleaver said there is a consensus that something needs to be done about it.“Our school performance profile scores are directly tied to teacher evaluations,” he said. “The teachers take this information to heart. All year, our students and staff work hard getting ready for these tests and there is a lot of pressure. There have been kids that cry during these tests because it’s a lot to deal with. Our eighth-graders who take the Keystone Exam are tested for 15 days out of, we say 180, but with all the activities it’s really 165, days of the school year.”The state Department of Education had released School Performance Profile scores for all school districts but pulled them back due to a data error.“The data processing error was confined to the district- and school-level Keystone Exam growth calculations,” Rivera said. “These scores, in turn, are part of the School Performance Profile growth measures. The data in question was supplied by SAS, the department’s contractor for Pennsylvania Value Added Assessment System reporting for Pennsylvania’s Local Education Agencies.”The scores are based heavily on state assessment scores, but also includes college readiness tests, industry standards-based assessments, graduation, promotion, and attendance rates, as well as evidence of offering rigorous courses as other factors in the calculation.Districts hope to have their final scores within the next month and Lehighton plans to make another presentation to its board at that time.