Friday, December 20, 2002
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Friday, December 20, 2002 |
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Test scores on the rise Many of Coweta County's test scores in the school system are on the upswing. The state Office of Education Accountability released its annual report card for public schools Monday, including test data for the Coweta County school system by school. "It's a breakdown of the testing data from the 2001-2002 school year, and it's a way for parents to review test scores by school," said Dr. Judy Robinson, Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum in Coweta County schools. The report can be found online at http://reportcard.ga-oea.org/ and provides test data from the 2001-2002 school year broken down by a variety of subgroups. The data on test scores and enrollment comes from the state Department of Education, which also releases a report card in January of each year. Robinson said that the OEA report shows good news for Coweta County schools, in that testing data for the Coweta school system continues to be higher than school systems statewide, and that testing data for which there are previous years continues to show an overall trend upward, such as in 4th, 6th and 8th grade Criterion Reference Competency Tests (the state curriculum test). "We've seen this data before, but the value of the OEA report is that it breaks all of the testing data down in subgroups, and it helps you focus on that disaggregated data ... and there are some obvious disparities in the subgroups, such as between males and females and between ethnic groups," she said. The report shows that - while Coweta County tends to exceed performance statewide - it also shares some of the same problems with the state of Georgia. "We're most definitely making progress in all areas, but this does help us analyze overall performance," she said. "It helps us find areas we're having problems with." "And it helps us as we go through the process of aligning the curriculum," said Pre-K-fifth grade Curriculum Director Susan Wareham. That process of curriculum alignment matches local curriculum guides and materials to the broad categories of information tested for in state and national exams. Robinson, Wareham and sixth through 12th grade Curriculum Director John Dunn note that the report is useful for analyzation, but says that the report also offers only a "snapshot" of student testing. "You can't measure either a school or a child by one test score in a single year," said Robinson, rather a student's and parent's daily school experience and student and school progress are the best measures of effectiveness. As part of the school system's ongoing school improvement process, the OEA Report Card information and other testing and report card data is being studied closely over the coming months.
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