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Schools and Tests
The Rappahannock public schools were back in the news last week, singled out by the Richmond Times Dispatch for having the most dramatic drop in the percentage of sixth graders who passed all three of the state’s Literacy Passport Tests.
In 1993, about 83 percent of local sixth graders passed all three tests. In 1996 only about 47 percent passed all three, a 43 percent drop.
Statewide the percentage who passed all three tests was increasing from 65.6 percent in 1995 to 69.5 percent last spring.
When the Literacy Passport tests were first introduced, Rappahannock students trailed the statewide passing rate but surpassed all the surrounding school districts. This year, not only did county students dramatically trail the statewide passing rate, but for the first time all the school districts around the county had a higher rate.
It is hard to know what accounts for that. The 1993 passing rate, when county students were eighth best in the state, was not typical for the county. Neither was the 1996 passing rate, when county students were fifteenth from the bottom in the state.
With a small school population, Rappahannock schools can be expected to show more variation from year to year than larger school systems, but the trend has been steadily down since 1993.
However, test scores are not the whole picture. For the past two weeks county schools have been a beacon of excellence as the high school has hosted a Governor’s School for the gifted. The mountains program at SummerQuest has been a resounding success.
There are other pockets of excellence in county schools, but they are becoming rarer. Too often the county loses its outstanding teachers. Too often the school administration is left trying to explain away bad results.
The county schools are neither as bad as last year’s Literacy Passport Test results would indicate nor as good as the ones from 1993 would indicate.
Frankly, it seems there is too much emphasis on Total Quality Management and forming Quality Teams and not enough on “quality teaching” and “quality learning.”
95.8%