Barrow CRCT results: Just mediocre

In addition, the issue of test scores is fraught with political and emotional overtones. The numbers aren’t just numbers, they represent something much larger. The AYP results are largely dependent on test score results and the general reputation of a school revolves around test results.

This week, the Barrow Journal is reporting the local and state system CRCT results. In a few weeks, we’ll be reporting on the local individual school results.

That’s two sets of data and news stories on the same subject, a situation that is incredibly confusing to many parents and citizens.

In some ways, this week’s system results serves to mask problems. The data is for all schools in the county, but that’s a little distorted. Some individual schools may have done very well on the CRCT while other schools didn’t do well. The overall scores average that out, masking individual schools’ weaknesses and strengths.

On the other hand, comparing all of Barrow’s students in total to other area school systems gives the community an overall context for how Barrow students are performing related to their peers.

When looking at test score data, however, you have to consider a lot of information:

• School officials love to tout how much their students have “improved” in testing, but they often fail to tell the entire story. For example, this year Barrow students mostly improved on their CRCT scores, but in reality, so did just about every other school system in the state. That means one of two things: Either every school suddenly got better (very unlikely), or the state changed some of the criteria, in effect dumbing-down the test so that a higher percentage of students would pass. That can be done by either making the questions easier, or by moving the cut mark lower so that what’s considered “passing” is an easier goal to hit. (Why would the state do that? Because so many politicians complain about high failure rates that make the state look bad. State education officials know how to play politics.) So while it’s true that Barrow students “improved” this year, in the context of all the schools in the state, Barrow remained in the middle one-third of systems and didn’t break into the top one-third. For example, in 8th Grade Math, Barrow was 99th out of 187 school systems; it was 70th in 5th Grade Science and 96th in 8th Grade Language Arts. By looking at where a particular school system falls compared to other state school systems, you can get a pretty good sense of the level of quality in that system. Barrow is in the middle, around average. So while Barrow did see better scores this year, relative to other school systems in the state, it really didn’t see much of a change. Just talking about year-over-year “improvement” sometimes doesn’t mean very much.

• With the CRCT test, one has to consider that it’s a minimum achievement test, not a measure of excellence. Unlike the SAT, ACT and some other tests, the CRCT is a measure of basic skills. While some school systems like to brag about how many of their students “excelled” on the CRCT, that’s really not a true measurement of success. What’s important to know about the CRCT results is how many kids failed. The rate of failure tells the real story; if a high percentage fails, that’s a problem. (Of course, schools don’t report failure rate, they report passing rate — it sounds better to say 80 percent passed a test rather than 20 percent failed. That is just semantics designed to spin the results.)

• There can be many reasons for a high failure rate and for other gyrations in the data. For example, comparing this year’s 8th Grade results to last year’s 8th Grade results is somewhat of an apples-to-oranges comparison. Those are two different groups of kids and some classes are just smarter than other classes. That does level out some in these system level reports, but at the individual schools, the gyrations from year to year may be due to an especially talented class or an especially dumb class. But the most common reason for high failure rates in a particular subject is that local schools have failed to create a strong curriculum in that subject, or there are weak teachers in a particular grade who don’t follow the curriculum. That’s a school leadership issue and really shows up in the individual school reports.

Standardized test scores aren’t the total measure of a school. There are other aspects to consider, such as extracurricular offerings in music, art and athletics, none of which get tested. And there are intangibles, such as the attitude of a school and its community.

Still, standardized tests, if evaluated correctly, do tell us something about the academic performance of our children’s schools. Schools that post low failure rates year after year are top tier; schools that post high failure rates each year are bottom tier; and schools like Barrow that are always somewhere in the middle are mediocre.

That may be simplistic, but it’s accurate based on these tests.

Barrow has the potential to be better than just mediocre, but achieving that will take a change in the community’s mind-set. Too many parents and school officials are content with being “average.”

Moving the BCSS into the top tier (that is, the top one-third of school systems in the state and well above average) on standardized testing should be Barrow’s goal.

It can be done. The question is, will the community do what it takes to get there?

Mike Buffington is co-publisher of the Barrow Journal. He can be reached at mike@mainstreetnews.com.