Principal’s Corner by Steve Kovach

We have concluded our testing season in Minnesota.

State testing may very well rank up there in popularity with road construction season in our state, but April is an important time of the year for our schools. I urge everyone to look deeper into the scores that will be published in the papers over the coming months and keep our students and their needs in mind.

There are plenty of things we can complain about or find wrong with standardized testing, but the reality is that we are working very hard to make our classroom and grading practices standards-based (many Minnesota schools have done this for many years).

So, a measure of how well we are teaching the standards makes sense. I am choosing to share some positives with our testing experiences over the past weeks (without telling you actual numbers, because everything is embargoed until summer).

This year, a majority of our Southwest students tested on Chromebooks. Testing on laptop computers made us worry about technology issues, but all this worry was for naught. Our fabulous tech support, along with our teachers and support staff, helped make our testing very smooth this year. When I say smooth, I mean it took minimal time away from instruction and students were much more relaxed.

Why do we care if they are more relaxed? When students are relaxed, they are less stressed, and work hard to show us all they know in regards to the learning they have done leading up to this grade level test. So far, the results we see are positive!

Keep your eyes peeled for our overall results in the near future. When you do see them, please keep some things in mind (this is the looking deeper part).

Over my first three years in Albert Lea, Southwest students have been consistently below the 50-percent proficient mark — that means over half of our students are not meeting grade level standards.

There are also categories titled “exceeding,” which is demonstrating meeting grade level and much more; “partially meets,” which means they were darn close to meeting; and “does not meet,” which is not anywhere near where we want students to be.

Not only are we looking at how many meet or exceed standards, but we are working very hard at moving kids up a level of achievement.

The state of Minnesota gives us credit for this improvement, but by the time that number is published in October, most people have forgotten about the MCA report cards.

Improvement leads to success and we need to celebrate students who increase their level of achievement.

Not being able to mention numbers, I can share that we have had many increases in achievement this year. A great individual example is one student who improved 13 points. This is significant. This is proof that our students can rise to the level of our rigorous expectations and they can achieve at high levels.

We have to stop attacking the whole testing process and focus our time and energy on higher levels of learning!

All of this comes from us looking deeper at the scores you’ll see soon. Our kids need a measuring stick to be ready for local, national and international competition with their peers. We have to keep improving and always expect the best.

Steve Kovach is the principal of Southwest Middle School.