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My personal musings about anything that gets on my radar screen--heavily dominated by politics.

2008-05-02

Preliminary CSAP Scores Are Released 

The state department of Education released the first batch of test scores from this year today, with the release of the "unofficial" 3rd grade reading test scores.

Once again this year, I feel compelled to urge everyone out there not to get too worked up over this one set of scores. This is but a snapshot, and really tells you very little about the school. Even comparing this years' scores to last years' tells you very little, because it's a completely different set of kids taking the test. Long-term trends may be useful to look at, but PLEASE don't go overboard looking at this.

That said, a couple pieces of data jumped out at me:

(by the way, you can get the scores in Excel spreadsheet format by going to the link on this page; once you have the spreadsheet, its easy to manipulate the data)

: there are five schools that had EVERY 3rd grader reading at or above grade level this year--four of them are Charter Schools. Coincidence? But hat's off to Haxtun Elementary School in little Haxtun, CO: I don't care how small the school is, when every single kid can read, you're doing something right.

:across the state, only 70% of third graders can read at or above a 3rd grade level--really? That's it? That bodes very ill for the future

:related question: of the 30% who are NOT proficient, how many of them do you suppose will be blithely moved up to 4th grade in a month, as if nothing at all was the matter?

:there are 41 schools that scored less than 33% proficient--that is to say, there are 41 schools that have less than 1/3 of their kids reading; of those 41, 22 of them are Denver elementary schools. That should be an embarrassment to every single person even vaguely associated with DPS.

But I bet their "cultural awareness" and "diversity" programs are strong and well-respected.
Posted by: Michael / 5/02/2008 01:36:00 AM

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