"No time to pop the champagne cork..."
That's Governor Gray Davis' comment about the latest round of California's STAR scores. I don't have a link to the email I received, which is entitled, "Monday Morning Memorandum", and is authored by Senator Ray Haynes. It looks like a reprint of a snail-mailing for political purposes - the party affiliation of Senator Haynes is not given, but it's not hard to guess from the contents of the article.
Here's the high points, which are actually low points:
The California Standards Tests, implemented widely this year, are the true barometer of student learning in the state. How did our students fare on these tests?
Two-thirds of the state's students scored below proficient in "language arts" (what used to be called "English"), and only half of our students were considered proficient in other core disciplines such as math and earth sciences. And that's just the good news. Even these red-flag scores mask some pockets of failure that are eye opening.
According to the California Standards Test results, nearly 90 percent of California's 11th graders aren't proficient in algebra or geometry. In U.S. history, 70 percent of our high school juniors are considered below proficient. Science scores fell dismally in the middle of math and history. If you wonder why more than half of all California State University freshmen need remedial classes, this may clear things up.
Abysmal, indeed. The explosion of remedial courses in Cal State schools merely disguise the problem and do nothing to solve it. The Senator also take a few swipes at Govorner Davis:
Governor Davis vowed earlier this year to fight a "war on mediocrity" in our public schools. Looking at these test scores though, it's apparent that he is having a problem identifying the enemy....
The Democrat-controlled legislature and administration are lobbing grenades at the wrong targets. First you have the Superintendent of Education intimidating home-schoolers, and you have the legislature threatening charter schools, trying to suffocate them with the same regulations that smother other public schools...In recent years, the legislature has tried to put charter employees into the local teachers' union and restrict charter schools from running certain independent and home-study programs (home-schoolers), a move that affected 27,000 students in these innovative plans....
Governor Davis, the man who made education his "first, second, and third priority," needs to wage war against the status quo. If he does so, mediocrity will disappear along the way. Defending and promoting charter schools is a must. They will help raise our children's test scores and better their chances for success as adults.
I'll see if I can find these STAR numbers on the web to take a closer look at them.
Update: Mike McKeown of Mathematically Correct, who I'm going to start referring to as the "InstaNumberMan", needed a mere two hours to find my post and put in a comment with a link to the STAR data. It's here, and Mike's of the opinion that the test scores are one of the few things that Governor David didn't really screw up. By keeping the testing system in place, Governor Davis has made it clear which programs are working and which aren't. As Mike puts it,
It will be hard to move kids up in high school, after all, they spent K-5 in Whole Language and the worst of fuzzy math (MathLand and TERC, with CPM when they hit Algebra). There may be hope that those who were just starting school in 98 or 99, when the new books started hitting the schools, will do well. Certainly, LA Unified, formerly one of the worst, is doing an excellent job of building reading and math scores in elementary school. They use Open Court and a standards aligned math text.