How Are Indian River Students Really Doing? What the Just-Released Data Shows Us
August 30, 2026
By Dr. Michelle Parsons, District 4, Indian River School Board Member
The views expressed are those of the author and do not represent the Indian River School District or the Indian River Board of Education.
I recently received Indian River School District's Academic Assessment Summary, and it is a lot of information, about 70 pages of test scores, trends, schools, grades and student groups.
Since many of you have also asked me about or commented on the recently released student test results, this is my attempt to work through all of that information, understand what it is telling us, and explain it in plain English and share with everyone.
It sounds like a simple question: How are our schools doing? Unfortunately, there isn't one simple number that gives us the answer. What I have learned is that there is no single national standardized test taken by every student in America that would allow us to directly compare Indian River School District students with students in every other school district in the country.
Instead, we have different measures at different points in a student's education.
In grades K–5, Indian River uses DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills) to measure how students are developing important reading skills.
In grades 3-8, students take Delaware's statewide English Language Arts (ELA) and math assessments.
Multilingual learners in grades K–12 also take ACCESS, which measures their progress in learning English.
And in 11th grade, all students take the SAT as Delaware's statewide assessment in reading/writing and math.
As students move through and finish high school, we can also look at attendance, graduation, and college and career readiness.
That gives us a lot to work with. Instead of looking at one test score and deciding we're doing well or poorly, we can ask much more useful questions: Are we improving? How do we compare with other Delaware districts? Where are our strongest schools? Where are students struggling? And are the programs we are investing in actually working?
First, What Are We Measuring?
Before we dive into the numbers, it helps to understand what each assessment actually measures, at least that was helpful to me to try to decipher first.
In grades K–5, Indian River uses DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills) to measure the development of basic reading skills throughout the school year. Because students are tested at the beginning, middle, and end of the year, DIBELS also helps us see how much progress they are making.
DIBELS is not unique to Indian River or Delaware. It is a nationally used reading assessment developed through the University of Oregon's Center on Teaching and Learning. This gives us something particularly useful: national benchmarks that allow us to compare our students' performance and growth with students across the country.
And these are not based on a small sample. The University of Oregon's 2021–22 national DIBELS sample included nearly 2.9 million students from all 50 states. A more recent national analysis included more than 4.6 million students from all 50 states. The University of Oregon continues to update its DIBELS national percentile ranks and growth benchmarks.
That means we can compare Indian River not only with our own previous DIBELS results and national benchmarks, but also with other schools and districts using the same DIBELS assessment when they make their results public. The challenge is that there isn't one national public database containing every district's results, so those comparisons have to be found individually. (Again, WHY can't we have standardized national testing??!!)
Though not readily available, those comparisons do exist. Other districts around the country publicly report DIBELS results, and Appoquinimink also uses DIBELS in grades K–5. So DIBELS gives us something particularly valuable: the ability to look at our students' reading growth against a national benchmark and, when the data are available, against other districts using the same assessment.
In grades 3–8, students take Delaware's statewide English Language Arts (ELA) and math assessments through the Delaware System of Student Assessments (DeSSA), using the Smarter Balanced assessments. These tests tell us whether students are meeting Delaware's grade-level standards. Because students across Delaware take the same assessments, we can compare Indian River with the Delaware statewide results, with other Delaware school districts, and even school against school within Indian River.
Multilingual learners in grades K–12 take ACCESS, which measures their progress in learning English through listening, speaking, reading and writing. ACCESS is part of the WIDA assessment system, which is used across many states. That gives us common English-language proficiency standards and benchmarks beyond Indian River and Delaware.
In 11th grade, all Delaware students take the SAT as the state's assessment of ELA and math. This gives us another measure of reading, writing and math skills as students approach graduation. Because several other states also give the SAT statewide, it can also give us some useful comparisons beyond Delaware, which we'll look at later in this report.
At the national level, Delaware participates in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), commonly called the Nation's Report Card. NAEP is particularly useful because students in every state take the same assessment, allowing us to compare Delaware with the rest of the country. But NAEP tests representative samples of students rather than every student, so we get a Delaware NAEP score, but not an Indian River or individual school NAEP score, which is why districts often push back on being held accountable to NAEP results. The Nation's Report Card provides Delaware's results and national comparisons.
That's why we need several levels of comparison: IRSD against its own history, our schools against one another, IRSD against Delaware and other Delaware districts, Delaware against states using the same or comparable assessments, and finally Delaware against the rest of the country through NAEP—the one common national assessment.
There's more! Click HERE to read the full article on the 38th District Republican Club website,
