Harwood Posts Best Istep Jump

By JOHN MARTIN and BRYAN CORBIN, Courier & Press staff writers 464- 7594 or martinj@courierpress.com (317) 631-7405 corbinb@courierpress.com

The students’ chant bounced off the auditorium’s concrete walls: “Har-WOOD! Har-WOOD! Har-WOOD!”

And the students have created an excellent reason to be proud.

Harwood Middle School, which this year adopted a stringent dress code and a philosophy that second-year Principal Franzy Fleck calls “The Harwood Way,” boasts this year’s largest percentage increase in ISTEP scores among Evansville-Vanderburgh schools.

Eighty-five percent of Harwood’s students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch.

The students were told the news, which was hardly a secret, during a Thursday afternoon assembly program.

As Assistant Principal Mike Raisor showed the school’s percentage increases on a screen, the students, who were given new red T- shirts with “Harwood” across the front, erupted in applause and cheers.

Fleck said Harwood has battled negative perceptions in Evansville for years. He believes those are being changed.

Among eighth-graders, Harwood’s ISTEP pass rates grew from 32 percent to 50 percent in language arts and 32 percent to 53 percent in math.

Other grade-levels also saw increases in both subjects.

“Nobody else in Evansville has these kinds of numbers,” Fleck said. “It didn’t just happen. It was hard work, commitment and attitude.”

What exactly is the Harwood Way? It’s more of a feeling than a policy, and it’s based on hard work and emphasis on discipline, Fleck said.

Fleck told his students that they should be proud, “but tomorrow we start again. We’re not satisfied.” He credited the schools’ teachers and staff. WTVW-Fox7 gave its “Teacher of the Month” honor to the whole Harwood staff.

State Superintendent for Public Instruction Suellen Reed made the official release of 2006 ISTEP scores on Thursday. All schools’ numbers are available online.

Statewide results were basically flat over the previous year. Younger students generally fared better. Reed noted that 74 percent of this year’s fifth-graders passed the language arts portion of the exam, but only 66 percent of 10th graders did.

In math, 80 percent of this year’s sixth graders passed, but only 65 percent of 10th graders did.

“This shows kind of a national trend, where we find students achieving in the earlier grades, and then as things become more complex, they have more difficulty there,” Reed said during a news conference Thursday in Indianapolis.

Students in the earlier grades did well on the more basic exam tasks, Reed said. “But as the questions become more complex — or even the science, where they transfer the skills they learned in math class to be able to solve some science problem — we find that’s more difficult for them.”

A preliminary analysis by the Indiana Department of Education, tracking the same class or “cohort” of students over three years, found that most students have little difficulty with tasks requiring basic reading comprehension or literary analysis.

But many struggle with writing applications that require them to organize their thoughts and convey them clearly, a department document said.

“Our kids start out behind; and the longer that they’re in school, the more behind they get,” Reed said. “And finally, when the work becomes even more complex, then those holes in their learning really begin to show up. And that’s when we see signs of kids who aren’t going to finish (and graduate) on time, or aren’t going to finish.”

The ISTEP+ exam is the graduation qualifying exam for high school sophomores. Of the 10th-graders who took the exam for the first time, 30 percent did not pass the English portion, assistant superintendent Wes Bruce said.

Also, 32 percent of sophomores failed the math portion of the exam the first time. The overlap of sophomores who failed both portions on their first attempt was 22 percent, about 17,000 students, Bruce said.

Students have the opportunity to re-take the graduation qualifying exam.

Younger students have to learn to read while older students have to “read to learn,” Reed said.

On the ISTEP science test, 66 percent of fifth-graders passed the test, compared with 54 percent of seventh-graders. The science portion of the ISTEP+ is administered in grades 5 and 7.

Locally, ISTEP results showed:

e Diocese of Evansville pass rates were in the 80-90 percent ranges at all grade levels. At Memorial and Mater Dei, more than 95 percent of 10th graders passed the language arts test and more than 83 percent passed the math portion.

e Sophomores at Signature School, a public charter high school, had a 96 percent pass rate on language arts and 87 percent on math.

e Evansville Day School, a private K-12 school, had 100 percent of 10th graders pass the English section of ISTEP and 93 percent pass math.

e Joshua Academy, a K-5 charter school with 94 percent minority population, had a 61 percent pass rate among third-graders in language arts and 58 percent among third-graders in math.

e Fourth-grade pass rates at Joshua were 56 percent in language arts and 59 percent in math, although in the fifth-grade, pass rates slid to 33 percent in language arts and 47 percent in math.

(c) 2006 Evansville Courier & Press. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.