MOSES LAKE – The Moses Lake School Board met Sept. 18 to discuss recent state and local test scores in the district. Both the SMARTER Balance Assessment and the science assessment are done at the state level. The district does local testing called iReady to see if students are at or above grade level for English and math.  

“First of all, we're going to look at some standardized testing data, and they tell us how we as the school system are doing, and they inform our decisions about instructional focuses and materials,” Superintendent Carol Lewis said. “Standardized test data should not be used to make really important decisions about individual students that would affect their education long term.” 

Lewis also said the data should not be used to criticize instructional staff but instead should be used as a way to analyze how the district is doing as a whole.  

SMARTER Balance  

Previously SMARTER Balance test results only showed the students meeting college and career readiness standards, level three or above standards, level four. However, the state has started to include the students who are meeting foundational standards, level two, in the results.  

“It used to be that when we would see information and it would say the number of students meeting standard always looked pretty low because it was only level three and level four students,” Lewis said. “Now the state has started including level two in the data.”  

Lewis said she pulled numbers from the district’s website to include the level two students. 

“It is different from the (Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction) website because we wanted to be able to make an apples-to-apples comparison,” Lewis said.  

English language arts showed mixed results in the district.  

“You can see across the board, how are we doing with our kids that are currently third graders in those years. So, it's not comparing how the kids are doing or growing over time,” Lewis said.  

For sixth and eighth grade, there was growth in the number of students at standard between 2024 and 2025. However, third, fourth, fifth and seventh grades showed a decrease in the number of students at standard between 2024 and 2025. Grade 10 had around the same amount of students at standard between 2024 and 2025.  

Math also had mixed results with fourth graders, fifth graders, sixth graders and eighth graders showing growth in the number of students at standard from last year to 2025. However, third graders, seventh graders and tenth graders showed a decrease in the number of students at standard between the two years.  

“It's kind of nice to see that even though we've had some struggles over the last year, we haven't had a major decline even in either English language arts or math,” Lewis said.  

Science 

The district showed growth in grades eight and eleven for students at standard or above for science. However, fifth graders had a slight decrease in the number of students who are at standard from last year to 2025.  

iReady 

“Then we have iReady that we use, that's not a state assessment. That's a local assessment that we choose to use with our elementary students. We do use it with our third, fourth and fifth graders, but I only included kindergarten, first and second grade in the status, since we already looked at third, fourth and fifth grade with the SMARTER Balance,” Lewis said.  

For testing reading early, at or above grade level, the district showed growth in both Kindergarten and first graders. The second graders did not show an increase or decrease from 2024 to 2025. 

For math, at or above grade level, kindergarten and first graders once again showed growth. The second graders stayed steady, with no change between 2024 and 2025. 

“With our kindergartners, you can see, really with all the grade levels, we're holding steady, or doing a little bit better as time goes on,” Lewis said. “That is good news.”  

Additional coverage of the MLSD School Board meeting is in development and will be published in our Wednesday edition.