Three Carroll County schools miss the mark

HILLSVILLE — Carroll County schools missed four of their testing targets under No Child Left Behind, but educators pointed to some significant gains in math scores in this year’s results.

The federal educational accountability effort sets up 29 standards for each school and the entire school division to meet as part of “adequate yearly progress.” Director of School Improvement Beverly Parker noted that each of the schools and the division met 313 out of 319 of those standards.

That amounts to achieving 98.12 percent of the benchmarks as a whole, she said.

But Parker offered an analogy that it’s like an electrical circuit where all 29 switches have to be thrown to operate. Missing one switch means not making it.

Standards for English and math scores will continue to increase each year until 100 percent of students are supposed to pass testing in the subjects by 2013-2014, Parker noted.

The required percentage of students passing in order to make AYP stands is 77 percent this year in reading and 75 percent in math, she said. Each of those will rise by four percentage points in next year’s testing.

“The bar always goes up,” Parker said. “If you look at our schools if we had stayed at the same target they had last year, they would have made AYP....”

Seven of Carroll’s schools made all 29 benchmarks needed in order to meet the federal standards, she reported.

Carroll County Intermediate School and Gladeville Elementary each missed one benchmark. For both schools that was the English performance in the disadvantaged subgroup, according to information from the school system.

Parker said the intermediate school’s test results missed making the benchmark by only 1.4 percentage points. The elementary school missed by 4.2 percentage points.

Woodlawn School missed in English and math performance for the disadvantaged category, she said. The score for English was 76.34, only .7 of a point away from making the benchmark.

As a division, schools missed the English performance for Hispanics and for the number of limited English proficiency students who graduated.

None of the Carroll schools faces sanctions under federal law, Parker said.

Parker stressed some positive results from the No Child Left Behind findings.

“Results from testing in 2007-2008 showed that high school students increased their achievement on all Standards of Learning tests in English reading, English writing, mathematics, history and science required for graduating with a standard or advanced studies diploma,” the information said.

Algebra I scores rose by 5.7 percentile points to 92.7 percent, 17 percentile points in geometry to 90.1 percent passing and 20.6 percentile points in Algebra II to 92.6 percent of students passing.

Sixth and seventh graders also significantly improved their math scores, Parker told the school board.

Sixth graders improved achievement levels by 14.9 percentile points and seventh graders improved by 10.5 percentile points.

Results by “grade cluster” showed lots of strength by students in reading, according to the handout. K-5 pass rates reached 85.92 percent, 6-8 grade reached 82.98 percent and 9-12 grades reached 94.69 percent.

No Child Left Behind standards apply only to public schools, not to private school or to home schooling, Parker said.

AYP accreditation information from Grayson County schools will be available in October.

• AYP ratings and student achievement data for all Virginia public schools and school divisions are available in the Virginia School Report Card section of the Virginia Department of Education Web site, www.doe.virginia.gov.