At the beginning of the school year, new Superintendent Charlie Milligan brought on the back-to-basics curriculum as a way to bolster the district’s lagging math scores. Although Milligan is leaving, the curriculum will stay in kindergarten through eighth grades. It didn’t work out as well as hoped in the high schools, deputy superintendent Ethelda Burke said.

District-administered tests show Tacoma’s kids are getting better at the basics in an often bedeviling subject, said Pat Cummings, the school district’s director of research and evaluation.

For example:

 • 32 percent of fourth graders answered at least half the questions correctly on Tacoma’s Math Basic Skills Assessment test, or MBSA, in September. By May, 74 percent of fourth-graders fell into that group.

 • Fewer than 10 percent of fourth-graders got three-quarters or more of the answers on the test right in the fall. By May, close to 35 percent of fourth-graders scored in the top quartile.

What does that mean?

It’s a reflection of how well kids are learning and retaining the basics, Cummings said.

That’s crucial, because statistics show four out of five Tacoma students who meet standards on the fourth-grade WASL will pass the state test three years later.

Seventy-five percent of students who passed the fourth-grade WASL will also meet standard in 10th-grade, Cummings’ calculations show.

“Having weak math skills in elementary school is very predictive of continuing to struggle with math in upper grades,” Cummings said.

THE STRATEGY

Tacoma’s math scores have much room for improvement.

Though they’ve gone up over the last 10 years, they still lag behind the state. Only about a third of Tacoma’s 10th-graders met state WASL standards in 2006; 51 percent of 10th-graders statewide passed the test.

Improving math scores across the 29,000-student district was the main mission School Board members gave Milligan when they hired him as superintendent a year ago.

Milligan didn’t last more than a year in the job, recently reaching a severance agreement with the district. But he said last month he thinks changes made under his leadership will yield dividends for years.

Those include putting Saxon math fundamentals in classrooms, creating a test-score database to help teachers pinpoint problems and giving periodic basic skills tests.

There is at least one hitch in the Saxon strategy, but the skills tests are going well, administrators said.

Saxon, added as a supplement in some cases to the more conceptual Interactive Math Program, didn’t mesh well with the high school curriculum, and some students struggled with the “spiral nature” that makes it difficult to connect one day’s lesson with the next, Burke said.

Some teachers said students didn’t find the work interesting or engaging, she added.

The district is negotiating with Saxon for a refund on some of the materials, but administrators don’t know what that might amount to, she added. The Saxon program wasn’t bought for second-year algebra and pre-calculus courses.

While students took the Washington Assessment of Student Learning this spring, districtwide results haven’t been calculated.

But educators have plenty of data available.

‘IT’S A REAL VALUABLE TOOL’

Third- through 10th-graders were tested regularly on what they knew about math during the school year. Tacoma teachers administered more than 77,000 tests, Cummings said.

Math facilitators Patrick Paris and Dan Herforth worked to design the tests with strands similar to the WASL.

The strategy: Test students on basically the same mathematical concepts – but on different sets of questions – at several points over the year. Make the tests short, 24 or fewer multiple-choice questions, so they can be taken in about 30 minutes.

“It’s a snapshot of the things that kids need to know,” Paris said. “It’s a real valuable tool.”

The test results, along with historical assessment data by student, school, district and state, are loaded into a Web-based database.

The information is detail-laden and color-coded.

By looking at recent test scores on the database, a teacher can spot holes in the knowledge of the entire class or pinpoint the problem-solving difficulties of a particular student.

A teacher could quickly see, for example, that his class was doing well at multiplication of fractions but needed work on division of fractions.

“Teachers need to know if a number of kids picked the same wrong answer,” Paris said.

STUDENTS SEE THE IMPROVEMENTS

Denise Parrish’s sixth-graders at McIlvaigh Middle School charted their progress through the year.

Seeing scores go up “helps you learn and motivates you,” Jysal Rouzan-Price said. “It lets you know you can achieve.”

He’s so motivated by his success in the subject, he did the unthinkable for a middle-school boy. He got a book from Parrish to review his skills during summer vacation.

“When the test scores go up (on boards around the classroom), we start cheering, because we feel like we just won a million dollars,” Alex Knaggs said before school let out last month. “We are aware that we are increasing our intelligence.”

During the school year, Vita Arigova progressed from a student with little likelihood of doing well on the WASL to one expected to do well on the test.

Having 77,000 recent math test scores in the system helps district-level administrators do their jobs better, too, Cummings said. When you count information on other tests and subjects, the assessment database contains about half a million records.

Detailed information guides everything from course materials to how they’re taught to what questions are asked on tests.

One aspect of Cummings’ crew’s homework this summer is assessing the assessments and rejiggering the tests where needed.

That means ensuring kids are being tested on the right material and that the questions are written in such a way that they’re easily understood, Paris said.

Measuring how well a group of students does over the course of a year can be challenging because so many students move from school to school or district to district, said Mark Jewell, chief academic officer of the Federal Way School District.

It would be difficult to say how well Tacoma’s self-assessment program is working without knowing a number of variables, Jewell said. But in general, learning as much as you can about how well your students met grade-level knowledge expectations is good practice.

“The strength of the model, as I see it in Tacoma, is that they’re doing repeated assessments of students to see if they’re improving, and that gives you important information.” Jewell said.

Cummings said Tacoma’s research shows there’s a correlation between doing well on the district’s own test and passing the math portion of the WASL.

“We want the tests to be a tool that parents and teachers can use. If you’re doing well, then there’s a high likelihood that you’ll pass the WASL. And if you’re not doing well, then teachers and students and parents can talk about intervention strategies,” he said.

Kris Sherman: 253-597-8659

kris.sherman@thenewstribune.com