What it means when test scores plummet
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| Was There |
Last Thursday, D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray and officials from D.C. public schools and the Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) held a news conference to crow about results on tests administered in April. Proficiency rates on both reading and math sections of the D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System exams were up slightly for many grades in schools across the district, the mayor said.
He took credit for those improvements – a 2.8 percentage point jump from 2011 to 2012 in the number of children proficient in math, a 0.5 point increase in reading proficiency. The results “are proof positive,” he said, that a program he introduced to make pre-kindergarten more widely available is already having an impact.
Over the past five years, proficiency gains are even larger – up 18.1 percentage points in math and 9.5 percentage points in reading since 2007. But when you look closely at the school-by-school results also released last week, some are discouraging, particularly at the very schools celebrated in 2008, 2009 and 2010 for their soaring proficiency