COVENTRY — Lately the people who run School Department are not very popular around town.

They are in the midst of a financial crisis. They are facing criticism about their proposal to covert Oak Haven Elementary School into an early-learning center. And there is general public distrust on a number of issues ranging from questions about teachers’ pensions to whether it’s legal to lease out school buildings for profit.

But there is one thing they can brag about: test scores. And they are good this year.

Overall, Coventry public schools showed significant gains in math and English proficiency on the New England Common Assessment Program or NECAP tests. The standardized test and barometer of how students are doing is administered in October to grades 3 through 8. The test was created in an effort to comply with the federal No Child Left Behind Act, which mandates proficiency in English and math for all students by 2014.

So far, the Coventry public schools are on track.

Four of the seven public schools, including the Tiogue, Blackrock and Washington Oak elementary schools and Knotty Oak Middle School, showed significant gains in proficiency in math, reading and, especially, in writing, bucking the state trend in which many schools lost ground in the writing portion.

Three Coventry schools did have a drop in the writing scores. Hopkins Hill went down 20 percentage points in writing, to 43 percent. At Oak Haven, writing dropped by 11 points, and at Western Coventry the writing scores for students fell to 58 percent, from 75 percent.

Schools Supt. Kenneth R. DiPietro said yesterday that the bottom line was that Coventry schools have improved.

“Everyone focuses on the rating,” DiPietro said. “The schools improved. That is absolutely everything to us. Whatever we were doing last year is working. We are not the lowest in the state and we are not the highest, but we improved.”

He said because the writing portion of the tests vexed almost every district in the state, there could have been a problem with the test itself.

The success stories at three schools in particular — Blackrock, Washington Oak and Knotty Oak Middle School — showed significant increases in scores, up more than 10 points.

At Blackrock, reading numbers jumped from 65-percent proficient to 80 percent; in math, scores went from up 10 points to 74 percent proficient. In writing, students had a 20-point gain, to 69-percent proficient.

“I’m really proud of all the efforts and the support within the community,” said Blackrock Principal Susan Stambler. “I’m proud of the progress. I don’t think it’s an accident. I think it’s the result of hard work over the years.”

During Stambler’s tenure, the teacher teams began looking at old tests and analyzing them and test-taking strategies. She said teachers met frequently to discuss student performance and looked at teaching methods and curriculum. They gave students many opportunities to work on practice versions of the tests, which Stambler thinks made a huge difference.

“The kids are more familiar with the language of the test. We have made kids more familiar with the format. We are teaching them how to manage the test,” Stambler said.

She said the school established longer blocks of instructional time in the school day.

“We eliminated smaller recesses in the afternoon. There was less interruption to the instructional day,” she said.

Finally, there were changes in the teaching methods, including allowing children to choose some of what they read, which usually results in their reading more.

“I don’t think it’s a magic packet that we can bring in and you follow steps A to Z and all the students improve. I think it’s a combination of many factors coming together,” she said.

Washington Oak Elementary School, like Blackrock, saw significant gains across the board. In reading, students achieved a 19-point gain to 81-percent proficiency. In math, the increase was 11 points, to 68 percent. In writing, again the gain was considerable, going from 37-percent proficiency to 72 percent.

Principal Donna Raptakis, at Washington Oaks for just two years, gave credit to the hiring of a consultant at $12,000 a year for two to three days a week to work with teachers and students.

“When I came here, the school was very low performing. We needed to work as a team. There were areas [in instruction] to me that were weak. I hired a reading consultant to work and model lessons,” Raptakis said. “There was no direction before. She was like a coach. The gains that were made in this year were unbelievable.”

Raptakis also used practice and sample tests to help students become familiar with the process. She said the work preparing children actually begins properly in first and second grades.

At Knotty Oak Middle School, scores improved in all areas. Principal Michael Convery says students are coming in better prepared from the elementary schools. In math, students were 64 percent proficient, up from 57 percent in 2005; in reading, students increased their proficiency by 14 points, to 75 percent. In writing, the gain was also good, going from 54-percent proficient to 67 percent.

Convery credits a change in instruction format, two years ago, that gave the students dozens of extra hours of reading classes. In those reading classes, teachers read aloud to students the books that interested them. In the English classes, teachers followed up the readings with questions and writing assignments.

“We did have some pretty good gains. A lot of the [writing/reading] test is asking comprehension questions and analyzing literature,” Convery said. “Having that literature block for two years, we now are starting to see results. The key that we found is letting the students have some choice over what they can read.”