The delay in getting those MEAP scores out, and the missing results, makes the test appear that much more expendable to Michigan educators. The test now costs $15 million; some suggest replacing the test would cost a third as much.
Those educators who are looking at MEAP scores are worried about the score gap between white students and almost everyone else. Refreshingly, none of the educators quoted cited "test bias" as the reason for the gap, nor did they claim that minority kids were doomed to do poorly on the MEAP. Instead, the teachers and administrators all seem determined to root out the true causes of the score gap - lowered goals, deprived eduational backgrounds - and correct those negative influence. A few schools are already succeeding in this:
The MEAP test results were not all bad news. Minorities outscored whites in some schools.
For example, black fourth-graders did better than white classmates at Port Huron's Cleveland Elementary School in the math and language arts tests. In the Anchor Bay district, black students did better overall than white students in math.
Posted by kswygert at October 15, 2003 09:21 AM