New London - Responding to students' low scores on recent statewide standardized tests, school administrators Thursday outlined a number of strategies the district will employ in the coming school year to improve them.

Speaking at a special meeting of the Board of Education, Superintendent of Schools Nicholas A. Fischer said the district "has to up the ante in the classroom."

The superintendent said teachers at the beginning of the school year should lay out their expectations for students and then test them.

Fischer said educators must also do a better job in checking for comprehension in all disciplines.

"We have to demand more," Fischer said. "It's not good enough to just ask what 8 + 8 is. We have say, 'Show me how you think about that.'"

Fischer also advocated more out-of-school experiences for city students.

"We have kids that have never been to the beach or north of New London," Fischer said. "When kids go to a place they talk about it, and they write about it."

The superintendent also pressed for more funding for professional development for teachers.

"Our teacher prep schools are not doing the job," Fischer said.

The board also discussed a memo written by New London High School Principal Tommy Thompson stating how the school will focus on literacy and improve math skills this academic year.

The school will establish a double period of literacy and a literacy coach will work with teachers to develop their expertise in the area.

"Students will have one less elective," Thompson said.

Thompson said the school will commit to establishing reading expectations in all of the disciplines, not just the humanities. Each week, he said, students will write response pieces to subject matter in all courses.

Data teams will monitor instructions, and students in the eighth and ninth grades who are not proficient must take an extra literacy intervention class along with their normal course load.

The school will direct students to take classes that will better prepare them for geometry on the Connecticut Academic Performance Test.

"Twenty-five percent of the CAPT is geometry," Thompson said.

Board member Bill Morse requested that the school administration provide progress reports on the improvement strategy on a semester basis.

"We can't wait until the end of the year," Morse said.

Last month, the city got the news that, aside from two small schools, New London High School's 10th-graders had the lowest reading scores in the state this year on the 2011 CAPT test.

Only 37.4 percent of the students reached the "proficient" level and only 8.9 percent reached "goal" in the reading part of the annual achievement tests.

"Proficient" is the standard the state uses to measure whether districts are making adequate progress in accordance with the federal No Child Left Behind law. "Goal" is a higher standard set by the state of Connecticut.

New London students' scores also were disappointing in math, science and writing.

In math, 43.4 percent scored at the proficient level and 15.5 percent scored goal. In science, 45.9 percent were proficient and 15.9 percent achieved goal. And in writing, 52.5 percent were proficient and 15.4 percent were at goal.

The school district was hit by more bad news the following day, when the scores of New London students in grades 3 to 8 on the Connecticut Mastery Test were released.

For example, of the 224 New London fifth-graders who took the writing portion of the test, 38.4 percent were at or above goal level, a drop of 19.6 percentage points from last year.

In mathematics, the fifth-graders tested 71.7 percent at or above proficiency level, but only 43.4 percent tested at or above goal, still 15.9 percentage points lower than the state average.

s.chupaska@theday.com

k.robinson@theday.com