State science test set St. Paul school apart from the rest

Students at St. Anthony Park Elementary in St. Paul have the same science curriculum as students at the district's Bruce Vento, Longfellow Magnet and Maxfield Magnet elementary schools. They all use the same hands-on approach to science, and they all took the recent state science tests via computers.

But when the results of the tests were released last month, school officials in St. Paul did a double take: St. Anthony Park had the highest proficiency level in the metro area, while the other three schools didn't have a single student reach the proficiency bar set by the state.

"We can't believe it," said Darrel Rivard, principal at Bruce Vento Elementary.

School officials are quick to point out that they don't yet have the answers for why such a large disparity exists. They need to further analyze the data, see if the science curriculum at the schools differed, and find out what they can do better next time.

But their hypotheses of what went so right for one school and so wrong for three others is an interesting study of how the make-up of the students in a school can sometimes make all the difference.

Last fall, the St. Paul schools implemented a new, district-wide science curriculum. It is supplemented by the popular "Full Option Science System" (FOSS) kits, which provide a way for teachers to integrate hands-on learning into the science curriculum.

The curriculum is inquiry-based, which means students construct their own experiments and learn the "why" and "how" of their work.

The three schools that didn't have any of the students reach the proficiency standard, all have student populations where about nine out of 10 students come from low-income families. High poverty levels mean increased student mobility -- about half the students at Bruce Vento move each year -- and it also means students are probably less fluent with the use of computers than their peers elsewhere who are likelier to have computers at home, or to be sent to science-type enrichment camps when they are young.

But, "we've got to address those challenges, and accept no excuses," said Linda Parker, assistant principal at Bruce Vento.

As Silva put it, "every student that comes to our buildings can learn, and that's what really matters to us."

Some school officials are baffled by the low results for the three schools, saying that they might have projected the scores would be lower than St. Anthony Park, "but zero?" asked Rivard.

When Mark Vandersteen, principal at Longfellow Humanities Magnet School first saw his school's results, "It was pretty sad," he said. "It's not something that we want to see, it's not something we feel good about, and something needs to be addressed."

"But I don't want to get into making excuses," he said. "We need to find out how we are going to come up with strategies to help our kids navigate this."

At St. Anthony Park, where a quarter of the students come from low-income families, students in grades 1-3 come to family science nights during the school year. A parent group, as well as the St. Anthony Park Community Foundation, helps raise money so students can go on field trips such as the one to the Wolf Ridge Environmental Learning Center in Ely.

The school was "pleased and proud of the kids" when they saw their results this year, said Principal Ann Johnson, but "everybody knew the piece of reality that it's just one day and one test and a small group over time."

District administrators and teachers plan to further analyze the results to find out what is working at St. Anthony Park and other schools, and what can be shared with lower-performing schools in the district.

"This is a lesson learned for us," said Silva, "as it always is with a new test."