Thursday, August 13, 2009

Virginia AYP scores released today

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The Virginia Department of Education releases the AYP/SOL results for all schools today, including Loudoun. As I mentioned a couple of days ago, Loudoun School Board members got a sneak preview yesterday of the results. I haven't been able to dive in to them in detail so I'm not providing much analysis, just some facts and links.

LCPS as a division made AYP again this year. AYP requires at least 79% of students in various demographic categories and ages to pass Math tests and 81% of students to pass English tests. This is a higher bar than last year, when the goals were 75% in Math and 77% in English.

Press Release from Virginia Department Of Education
Memo from Sharon Ackerman, LCPS Assistant Superintendent for Instruction
Press Release from LCPS Public Information Office

There will be ambivalent reactions from the LCPS establishment. You will hear and read repeated assurances that everything is going well and that the test results indicate broad success, and this is true. More quietly there is concern about the large number of schools that did not make AYP. Resources and attention will be shifted to those schools and students who did not pass their SOLs, and there will be warnings to the Board of Supervisors when budget time comes around that continued classroom crowding due to lack of new schools and larger class sizes is not going to help the situation.

I counsel my fellow parents with children at LCPS to look first at your own child's results. Did your own children pass their SOLs, and whether they did or not are you pleased with their individual progress? If not, focus on them for this school year. Is you are satisfied with your child but worried about your school, volunteer to work with children in one of the areas where your school is struggling.

Post your thoughts in the comments section.

Update: In-depth story in Loudoun Independent
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2 comments:

  1. I have blogged about how happy I am with my child's teachers, so I was surprised to get his SOL scores and find that he barely passed the 4th grade reading test. He was reading about a year above grade level when he started 4th grade and I'm wondering if this test is representative of his end of the year skill or any of a dozen other factors that could have been in play the day he took the test.

    Overall, the 4th grade Virginia Studies SOL scores are distressing. I have checked our school's scores and they seem in line with last year's scores. Haven't tracked down if it is specific schools yet.

    Guess No Child Left Behind, really means no child if a single student's score can affect the AYP for the entire school.
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  2. Mom,
    There are a variety of factors that impact any one student's SOL score--the test itself is not always an accurate indicator of someone's reading ability. It is just a BRIEF snapshot of how your son performed on that specific day. The SOL test cannot measure true reading ability. Readers make connections with the text they are reading to their own experiences. How can a multiple choice test adequately measure someone's life experiences? You may interpret an event one way but the author or test maker intended it to be interpreted in a different way. A person's interpretation of text is not always black/white or right/wrong.
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