JACKSON — Although there were not two schools in the state top 10 of this year’s district-level passing rates for the first administration of the Third Grade Reading Assessment, all of the county’s three public schools were above the 90 percent threshold.
Newton County and Union Public School Districts were among the 60 districts in the state that had pass rates of 95 percent or higher. NCES had 149 third grade students take the exam in the spring.
Union Elementary School had a 95 percent passing rate for its 65 third grade students. Both schools were above the state’s overall passing rate of 93.2 percent.
Newton Municipal had a 90.3 percent pass rate for the 72 third grade students who took the exam. Newton Elementary improved from last year’s passing rate of 85.7 percent.
Aberdeen School District was the top performing district in the state followed by Enterprise and Ocean Springs.
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.
More than 60 school districts had a pass rate of 95 percent or higher.
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.
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.
The reading portion of the Mississippi Academic Assessment Program English Language Arts is used to determine 3rd grade promotion, in addition to meeting the district’s academic requirements for promotion.
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.
