Washington students improved
their scores in reading, writing and math on the Washington Assessment of Student Learning last spring, but only about one in three children is meeting state standards.The smiley-faced press release from the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction says:
Washington student achievement is up by any measureWithout the new federal accountability rules, who could have figured out that "breakthrough performance" would be needed? Those who get past the content-free press release and read the linked Powerpoint presentation [3MB] should notice the spoor of massive system-wide failure.
WASL scores show gains for all grades in reading, mathematics and writing, and new federal accountability rules punctuate the need for breakthrough performance in the years ahead
We learn, for example, that only 39.4% of all 10th graders meet the state's standard for proficiency in mathematics (only 14.4% of Black 10th graders meet the standard) which is an improvement over last year's results -- 37% of all 10th graders and 13% of all Black 10th graders met the standards in 2002. But it's not much of an improvement. It also falls well short of the "No Child Left Behind" "Adequate Yearly Progress" targets, which were for 24.8% of every subgroup of 10th graders to meet the math proficiency standard last year, and 31.1% to meet the target this year.
All this testing and measurement has been a valuable exercise. Now it's time to let parents opt out of failing schools. Vouchers, please.
Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at August 29, 2003 07:00 AMI agree. Let there be vouchers.
But I was very surprised by this story which I blogged about on August 22nd.
Edison (which seems to get nothing but bad press)was only given the crappiest schools, the ones that had been flatline for years. It is making some good progress.
I was then happy to see a private company clearing all the bird nests out of school management, but I never expected them to imporve academic achievement in those areas.
Posted by: John Rogers on August 29, 2003 01:53 AMInteresting thing, though, we learned at a staff meeting here in California Wednesday, that the Adequate Yearly Progress standards were only set this summer (even less than a month ago, after all the various tests were taken), and were 5 points higher than what the "acceptable" standards on those same tests are for the API (Academic Performance Index). So, all numberes taken with the grain of salt that the bar is still moving.
Posted by: Sharon Nicholson on August 29, 2003 06:31 PMSo your kid (somehow)gets all the way to the tenth grade and (somehow)you don't know that he can't do high school math?