PENNSYLVANIA Schools' assessments fall short

Basic math proficiency is one factor of the 'No Child Left Behind' law.
STAFF/WIRE REPORTS
HARRISBURG -- About half of Pennsylvania's public schools are not making sufficient progress toward meeting the federal government's expectations for student achievement, according to a report released by the state Education Department on Tuesday.
The report provides the first comprehensive assessment of how well the state's schools are faring under the mandates of the "No Child Left Behind" law signed by President Bush last year. The law requires all pupils to be proficient in math and reading by 2014.
The majority of schools in Mercer and Lawrence counties met state standards. Only a handful fell under the warning and needs improvement categories, which means education officials want improvement on test scores, but few, if any, state sanctions are imposed.
No schools in the two counties fell under the state's corrective actions plans that would allow parents to move their children to new schools.
States are responsible for setting their own goals in the intervening years to ensure that schools eventually reach that target. Pennsylvania officials have determined that schools should start with at least 35 percent of their pupils proficient in reading and 45 percent proficient in math on the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment tests.
"I think we can as a state move virtually all of our kids to much, much higher levels of performance," Education Secretary Vicki Phillips said. "We ought to be at 85, 90 percent [proficiency] across this state ... and I think unless you set a pretty audacious goal and strive to work toward it, you do not get very far."
Improvement factors
Other factors that define whether a school is making "adequate yearly progress" include improving four-year graduation rates and attendance rates from kindergarten through eighth grade, as well as making sure that at least 95 percent of pupils are taking the required state assessment tests.
Although the department determined that 1,428 of 2,786 schools have not met all of the "adequate yearly progress" requirements, most of those schools do not face immediate sanctions. More than 1,000 will receive only a warning that they need to improve because it is the first time they have fallen short of the mark, Phillips said.
The rest, however, face consequences of varying severity, depending on how many consecutive years they have failed to improve their scores, attendance, graduation rates and test participation rates.
At a minimum, those schools will be required to offer parents the option of transferring to another public school in the district or to a school in a neighboring district if that district is willing to accept new pupils. Low-income pupils would be given priority.
Schools that have failed to improve for five consecutive years face significant changes in the way they are governed, including privatization or conversion to charter schools. All of the nearly 140 schools in this category are in the Philadelphia School District, which was taken over by the state in December 2001.
The state does provide an exception for significant test score improvement that nevertheless falls short of the "adequate yearly progress" mark, Phillips said. Eleven schools got a reprieve from the school-improvement list simply for reducing the proportion of pupils scoring "below basic" by at least 10 percent.