Who scores lowest on the state standardized exams?
The Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program (TCAP) will now release scores disaggregated by race, gender, and income. The change is necessary because, "Federal legislation signed in January requires Title I schools — which have enough children on the free and reduced-price lunch program to qualify for additional federal funds — to show that students in all categories are progressing". Low-income kids scored lowest, regardless of race.
In Montana, however, state officials are examining for the first time how American Indians and whites differ on Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS) performance. While white students tend to do better, "Indian students in mixed-race schools scored two points higher than the national average in the 11th grade. The average scores for fourth- and eighth-graders in mixed-race schools were in the 50th and 43rd percentiles, respectively - good scores for that test".
Wanna know how your school is doing, and how well it's reporting how it's doing? Go to the Heritage Foundation's "Report Card Report" and click on your state.
Meanwhile, Phillipsburg (NJ) Middle School is doing something right. The percentage of sixth-graders deemed "proficient" in reading on the NJPass standardized tests jumped from 38 to 71 percent. Not to sound cynical, but this is so big as to be almost unbelievable. Any NJ readers out there who know of any behind-the-scenes reasons for this - e.g., a big chance in the scoring scheme of the test, or in the content, or in the population taking the exam? Looks like this is a genuine improvement, though, because there were score gains for every age group, in every subject, and Phillipsburg principal John Milone notes the following changes that preceded these new, higher scores:
This past year, middle school officials implemented a zero tolerance policy for failure. Milone said that may be the main factor...Before this policy, he said, a student could have failed math from the third through eighth grades and went right onto high school without the problem being detected...This is no longer possible, Milone said. Now, if a student fails any subject, they're required to attend summer school. If the standards still aren't met, school officials will hold back the student for another year.
So what's more astonishing, these huge gains in test scores, or the fact that a student previously could have made it to high school in this school district without having passed a math course since the third grade?