Rating reading levels
The Post and Courier began working with Berkeley and Dorchester 2 school districts more than a month ago to compile the same information that Charleston County schools provided to the newspaper for a story May 17 on its students' grade-level reading ability.
Dorchester 2 and Berkeley school officials complied with the newspaper's request for the information but took issue with the way the newspaper decided to use scores from a diagnostic test to determine students' grade-level reading skills. They said the test was not meant to be used in that manner.
How we did it
Berkeley, Charleston and Dorchester 2 elementary and middle school students take the Measures of Academic Progress exam, a diagnostic test that teachers use to help guide their instruction. Schools typically don't summarize the results on this test because its purpose is to show an individual student's strengths and weaknesses so teachers can know where and how each needs help.
The MAP exam provides students' Lexile levels, and certain ranges of Lexile levels correspond to reading or grade levels. There's no single number that defines specific grade levels. And multiple ranges could be used to define grade level.
After the newspaper questioned Charleston County schools Superintendent Nancy McGinley about why the district hadn't used its MAP scores to determine students' grade level reading skills, McGinley decided to analyze students' test results that way.
Charleston County officials used a Lexile cutoff score they felt defined each grade. The district included students who had disabilities, as well as students who are English Language Learners. Charleston County did its analysis on eighth-graders who likely will be ninth-graders in the district this fall, and it used eighth-graders' MAP scores from this fall because spring test scores weren't available yet.
The newspaper asked Berkeley and Dorchester 2 to complete the same analysis, and officials said they needed time to compile students' scores according to the newspaper's specifications.
Berkeley officials gave the newspaper a document June 2 that compiled its students' test scores in a way that they felt was most accurate. But the district's analysis of its students' test scores was done in a different way than Charleston County and made it impossible to make comparisons between the two school districts.
The Post and Courier repeated its request for students' test scores to be compiled in a comparable manner to Charleston County, and the Berkeley school district agreed.
Objections to method
In a letter to the newspaper, Dorchester 2 Superintendent Joe Pye wrote that the MAP exam never was intended to be used in this manner, and there is no direct link between a specific Lexile score and a specific grade level.
Pye also said he was concerned that the newspaper requested the eighth-grade fall MAP scores but identified those students as rising ninth-graders.
"Since fall MAP tests are administered in the month of September, we are really analyzing seventh-grade scores in this instance," he wrote. "Fall scores of current eighth-grade students are not reflective of their competencies after a year of instruction in that grade."
Berkeley Superintendent Anthony Parker agreed, and in a letter to the newspaper wrote that using the fall scores disregards a full year of instruction.
"To superimpose the data of high schools has inherent fallacies often leading to interpretations about the high schools when in fact the students have not actually enrolled in those schools."
Pye and Parker took issue with the Lexile score cutoff chart used by the newspaper to determine students' reading grade level. Changing the cutoff scores could affect the corresponding grade level for students' reading ability.
