Webster County third-graders ranked ninth in the state on the first administration of the third-grade reading assessment.
The Mississippi Department of Education released school- and district-level passing rates for the test on June 5. More than 60 school districts had a pass rate of 95 percent or higher, including Eupora and East Webster elementary schools in the Webster County School District.
The Literacy-Based Promotion Act requires third-graders to pass a reading assessment to be promoted to fourth-grade. Students are provided with three opportunities to pass the test.
The reading portion of the Mississippi Academic Assessment Program English Language Arts is used to determine third-grade promotion, in addition to meeting the district’s academic requirements for promotion.
The MDE’s passing rate report shows the pass rate for the WCSD and each of its two elementary schools as 95 percent or higher. Webster County came in at No. 9 among the Top 10 highest-performing school districts in the state. The others were (Nos. 1-8) Aberdeen, Enterprise, Ocean Springs, Tishomingo County Separate Municipal, Clinton, Union County, Western Line, Monroe County and (No. 10) North Tippah.
“(I am) very proud of our students and teachers and their hard work on performing great on the third-grade MAAP ELA assessment!” Superintendent Brian Jones of the Webster County Schools stated. “This is something we can be very proud of.”
Statewide, 93.2 percent of third-graders passed the test. The initial pass rate has increased every year since the test was first administered, rising from 85 percent in 2015, to 87 percent in 2016, to 92 percent in 2017.
Literacy Support Schools, which had literacy coaches assigned to them to provide support and training to teachers, had a pass rate of 88.4 percent this year, up from 87.5 percent in 2017, 78 percent in 2016 and 73 percent in 2015.
Since the 2014-15 school year, Mississippi’s Literacy-Based Promotion Act has required that a student scoring at the lowest achievement level on the third-grade reading assessment be retained in third grade, unless the student meets the good-cause exemptions specified in the law. Local school districts determine which of their students who did not pass qualify for one of the good cause exemptions for promotion to fourth grade.
The law was amended in 2016 to require students starting in the 2018-19 school year to score above the lowest two achievement levels in order to be promoted to the fourth grade. This means students need to score at level 3 or higher on the reading portion of MAAP. Based on preliminary data for 2018 for the first administration of the test, 73.8 percent of students scored at level 3 or higher, up from 69.6 percent in 2017.
Also starting in 2018-19, alternate forms of the Questar-developed MAAP English Language Arts test will be used for retesting instead of the Renaissance-developed reading test that had been in use since 2015.
For more information about the Literacy-Based Promotion Act, visit www.mdek12.org/literacy.
