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By Gerald Ochs
Rappahannock News Special Writer
Despite the Virginia Department of Education’s past promise to avoid detailed assessment of school performance based upon Standards of Learning (SOL) tests, the Fall 1999 School Performance Report Cards do just that . . . and the Rappahannock County School Board is steamed. The Report Card accredits schools based upon the percentage of students passing the standardized tests - a 70 percent pass rate is the established norm. Those schools that meet this criterion are granted a “Fully Accredited” status; those that do not meet the pass rate requirement but show improvements in all categories over the previous year’s tests are given a “Provisionally Accredited” label; and those that did not meet the pass rate requirement and failed to show improvement in all of the core academic areas are slapped with an “Accredited with Warning” tag.
“Accredited with Warning” is what the elementary school was branded, in spite of its relatively high pass rate and its apparent success in meeting “Provisionally Accredited” criterion. The elementary school Report Card clearly shows that in the eight testing categories (four each for the third and j fifth grades), pass rates did improve in all areas for the 97-98 to the 98-99 | school years and, in fact, shows that the students exceeded the 70 percent pass rate in five of the eight categories and surpassed State averages in seven of the eight categories.
The high school Report Card, oddly enough, received a “Provisionally Accredited” status, even though published results show a failure to improve in one of the j eight categories (four each for the j eight grade and high school), and the scores are not nearly as high as are | those of the elementary school. One 1 obvious conclusion is that the report | cards are misleading due to the fact that the eight grade results, because of their physical location in the high school facility, are included in the high school report card, but tallied with the elementary school results.
See BOARD, Page A10
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