Dorchester School District 2 posts gains on 2025 state and local assessments, officials say

Dorchester School District 2 officials presented assessment results to the school board on Sept. 8 showing improved student performance on several statewide and district tests for 2025.

Thad Schmink, the district's director of data analytics, told the board that the district saw a “slow and steady movement in the positive” on math and that the percentage of students meeting expectations in English language arts rose this year. “Nationwide, we can see that our our achievement has slid a little bit to the left,” Schmink said, putting local results in the context of national re‑norming of the nationally normed MAP Growth assessment.

Schmink and assistant superintendent for teaching and learning Katie Barker stressed that some assessments are not directly comparable to prior years. For example, the SC Ready ELA assessment changed to a three‑part field test in 2025 and uses revised 2024 standards; the state also returned formal science results after a prior field test year. Schmink said those test‑format and standards changes mean comparisons should be made cautiously.

Nevertheless, the district reported specific gains: a drop in the lowest SC Ready category and a rise in the “meets” category, steady improvements in math (from about 30% in 2022 in the lowest category to 22% in 2025), and science results that ranked above neighboring districts on the district slide decks. On high school end‑of‑course exams, Dorchester 2 posted gains in biology, English II and U.S. history while recording a small decrease — about 0.9 points — in algebra mean score.

Career readiness measures also improved: the district said 74% of the graduating class earned a WIN credential (the state’s career readiness assessment that includes reading, data and math components). On the WIDA assessment for multilingual learners, the district reported that its percentage reaching the proficiency threshold (4.4 or higher) exceeded the state average.

Barker attributed improvements to district efforts over the previous year, including strengthening professional learning communities, renewed instructional observations and feedback, expanded use of district common assessments and use of MAP growth data to set goals and measure student progress. “We spent a lot of time last year really fine tuning our professional learning communities and our practices with our district common assessments at the schools,” Barker said.

Board members and staff said they expect the state school report cards to be released around the state’s Oct. 15 deadline and described ongoing work — new math standards implementation, content specialist deployments and partnership pilots such as the Zearn math platform — aimed at sustaining gains.