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While high stakes testing continues to be the main focus of US public schools as mandated by the federal government's NCLB, the following example shows the pitfalls of this approach to gauging student success:
In the 2007-08 school year, Westinghouse High School was lauded as one of the PPS "pockets of excellence" due to a dramatic increase in both reading and math PSSA scores. However, as noted below, this success was very short lived and begs the question "How did the sudden increase and subsequent decrease happen?"
The numbers below refer to the percentage of students that scored proficient and advanced:
The very best place to talk about the performance of your child's building on the PSSA is the first PSCC or PTO meeting of the year at the school. If you can only attend one meeting this year, it should be the one.
In the Westinghouse example, those 11th graders of 2007-08 were exceptionally well prepared either by the staff that year using whatever prep they did for PSSA or because they came from feeder schools that taught them well or because they were motivated or incentivized in the direction of success or...
There doesn't seem to be a major change in the feeder schools for that one class compared to the feeder schools for the prior or next class.
But if there was some exceptional preparation and motivating technique that was put in place in 2007-08 and abandoned the next year, that decision should definitely be revisited.
3 comments:
While high stakes testing continues to be the main focus of US public schools as mandated by the federal government's NCLB, the following example shows the pitfalls of this approach to gauging student success:
In the 2007-08 school year, Westinghouse High School was lauded as one of the PPS "pockets of excellence" due to a dramatic increase in both reading and math PSSA scores. However, as noted below, this success was very short lived and begs the question "How did the sudden increase and subsequent decrease happen?"
The numbers below refer to the percentage of students that scored proficient and advanced:
2006-07
Reading- 21.9%
Math- 13.4%
2007-08
Reading- 38.3%
Math- 28.4%
2008-09
Reading- 24.5%
Math- 13.3%
The very best place to talk about the performance of your child's building on the PSSA is the first PSCC or PTO meeting of the year at the school. If you can only attend one meeting this year, it should be the one.
In the Westinghouse example, those 11th graders of 2007-08 were exceptionally well prepared either by the staff that year using whatever prep they did for PSSA or because they came from feeder schools that taught them well or because they were motivated or incentivized in the direction of success or...
Definitely, someone should follow up.
There doesn't seem to be a major change in the feeder schools for that one class compared to the feeder schools for the prior or next class.
But if there was some exceptional preparation and motivating technique that was put in place in 2007-08 and abandoned the next year, that decision should definitely be revisited.
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