City schools still seeing achievement gaps in black, white students
Most elementary and middle school students in the Pittsburgh Public Schools saw small improvements in English standardized test scores and similar results in math and science over the previous year.
But it was another year of stark achievement gaps between the district’s white and black students taking the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment that school board president Regina Holley called “unacceptable.”
“Even though we’ve done better this year with some of our subgroups, the problem just keeps rolling over as we go from elementary to middle to high school,” she said at a board meeting Tuesday.
PSSAs are given each spring in grades 3-8. Students can land in four performance categories: below basic, basic, proficient or advanced.
More students in those grades and across subgroups — white, black, English-language learners and special education — scored at or above grade level compared with last year. The exception was seventh grade, in which white and black students saw decreases.
Deb Friss, the district’s director of research and evaluation, said some of the increases in reading scores “were pretty significant.”
In third grade, she said, almost 10 percent more black students were at or above grade level in reading than the previous year. Still, nearly 44 percent of black students were considered proficient or advanced, and 71 percent of white students landedin those categories.
Ms. Holley pointed out a large gap that existed between black and white students in fifth grade, in which reading scores showed a 34 percent difference. She said she would like the district’s curriculumdepartment to provide the board with data showing “what [it] is doing differently to help narrow the achievementgap.”
In math, three grades improved and three grades slipped. Changes weren’t as “dramatic” as those in English, Ms. Friss said.
More students across subgroups were at or above grade level in math inthird grade and in all but one subgroup in grades 4 and 5. Seventh- and eighthgraders saw increases in proficiency across all subgroups over last year, and sixth-graders had some smalldecreases.
The percentage of fourth-graders proficient or advanced in science was similar to the previous year and down slightly for eighth-graders.
Overall, the Keystone Exam results for high school students showed a steady decrease in literature from 2014-15 on, slight improvement in math and flat scores in science.
The scores also include results of the Pennsylvania Alternate System of Assessment, a modified test for the district’s severely disabled students.
Subgroup level state data isn’t available yet. For the third year, the PSSAs were based on new standards known as the Pennsylvania Core, the state’s version of the national Common Core State Standards.