MCAS Results Released

The 2012 MCAS results are in.

District-wide, North Andover showed some improvement from last year, though not much and not nearly as much as from 2010 to 2011. In 2012, there is more room for improvement in math and science than in English.

• ENGLISH/LANGUAGE ARTS: 79 percent tested proficient or advanced (54 percent proficient and 25 percent advanced). That is the same as 2011. 15 percent tested in need of improvement (down from 17 percent last year) and 5 percent tested failing (same as last year).

• MATH: 67 percent tested proficient or advanced (37 percent proficient, 30 percent advanced), up from 66 percent last year. 23 percent tested in need of improvement (down from 25 percent last year) and 9 percent tested failing (same as last year).

• SCIENCE: This year, 61 percent tested proficient or advanced (40 percent proficient, 21 percent advanced. 30 percent tested in need of improvement, and 9 percent tested failing.

How Are Things Looking?

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 mandates that every student be proficient in English language arts and math by 2014. In Massachusetts, this proficiency is measured by the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS).

A school must improve in proficiency each year based on adequate yearly progress (AYP). In Massachusetts, AYP is determined by student performance on various parts of the MCAS.

In Student Growth Percentile, the district remained the same in English -- 56 percent -- and went down in math from 54 percent to 52 percent.

In the Cumulative Performance Index (a measurement used to calculate AYP but is being phased out for the Student Growth Percentile) the district went down from 92.1 to 91.9 in English and rose slightly from 85.6 to 85.7 in math. For science this year, the district's CPI was 84.1 percent.

Grade Highlights

• All grade levels had higher percentages of students proficient or advanced than the statewide totals and lower percentage of failing students than the statewide totals.

• In Grade 10, 95 percent of students tested proficient or advanced.

• Only 47 percent of students in Grade 8 tested proficient or advanced in science. This may be a general problem statewide, as the state number was 43 percent.

• 82 percent of students in Grade 6 tested as proficient or advanced in English. That is much higher than the state number, which was 66 percent. In math, 77 percent of that grade tested proficient or advanced while only 60 percent of the state's 6th graders did.

• 72 percent of North Andover third graders tested proficient or advanced in Reading, while only 61 percent of sixth graders in the state did.

• In science and technology, 88 percent of students in Grade 10 tested proficient or advanced, while only 69 percent of 10th graders in the state did.

• More than half of all the tenth graders tested advanced in both math and English.