Despite allowing schools to retest students, student performance (using state measures) was not so impressive.
State testing folk warn that comparisons of the 2008-09 test results with those of previous years are a bad idea.
“In 2008-09, retest results were incorporated into the ABCs performance composite, which makes these results not comparable to those of previous years.”
The media will ignore this warning and make comparisons anyway, so I will hesitantly do the same.
The percentage of public schools making high or expected growth decreased from 82.1 percent last year to 80.8 percent this year. There was a dramatic decrease in the percentage of schools making high growth from 55.0 percent last year to 39.4 percent this year.
On the other hand, there was a huge increase in the percentage of schools labeled as “Honor School of Excellence,” the top designation in the testing program. The percentage jumped by 3.7 percent from 2007-08 to 2008-09.
