Yesterday, the Office of the State Superintendent of Education released the first high school results of the PARCC assessment used to measure student proficiency based upon the Common Core Standards.  In the District, only 10 percent of students demonstrated that they have mastered the skills that would lead to success in college in math; that number is at 25 percent for English.  The last time the DC CAS was utilized to gauge proficiency the statistic for each subject area was at around 50 percent.

The results were staggering for our Performance Management Framework Tier 1 charter high schools.  Here are the proficiency scores with the 2014 DC CAS percentages for math and reading in parentheses.  Capital City PCS Upper School, 33 percent (54.9 percent, 52.8 percent); Cesar Chavez PCS Parkside Campus, 8 percent (72.8 percent, 50 percent); KIPP DC PCS College Preparatory Campus, 18 percent (95.4 percent, 71.0 percent); SEED PCS, 64 percent (62.9 percent, 38.2 percent); Thurgood Marshall Academy PCS, 57 percent (84.4 percent, 69.8 percent); and Washington Latin PCS Upper School, 63 percent (70.2 percent, 62.7 percent).

It will be most interesting to see how the PCSB handles these results when it comes to the PMF tiering.  Now, its seems that the board should have listened to the over 20 high performing charter school leaders who had requested that schools not be ranked in 2015 due to the use of the PARCC assessment for the inaugural year.  Yesterday, the PCSB said that the PMF measure would be released in January; usually these documents are made public in November.

In carefully constructed press releases both OSSE and the PCSB described the standardized test score results as a start on the way to the future academic progress of our students.  Of course, this is true and anyone who follows public education knew that these scores would be much lower that those in the past.  Still, it was not a good day in the District of Columbia.