Ask an Expert: Judy Goddess
Using California School Law To Advocate For Your Kids

USING TEST SCORES TO EVALUATE THE EFFECTIVENESS OF TEACHERS

We parents have noticed that all our kids' math scores decline yearly as our kids move from sixth grade through eighth. We suspect that our middle school teachers are just weaker at math instruction than the math faculty at other schools in the area. How can we use the Stanford-9 test score results to make these comparisons properly?

Your hunch can be verified in two ways. Neither of them are purely scientific proofs. But both can provide indicators of the validity of your suspicions. The first approach is limited to an anlysis of results within your school alone. Assemble a history of as many students' math test scores as possible, starting with their fifth grade scores. On graph paper, plot the national percentile rank of each student's score, using fifth grade as the starting point or baseline, and progressing through as many grades as each student has completed. Try to get at least ten students' scores plotted this way. This is a small sample, but one which should give you reason to meet with the principal, and request that she extend your analysis to cover all of the students who have been at this middle school for at least two years. If the trend lines for a majority of the children in your sample point downward, indicating declining scores, you have some evidence to support your hunch.

The second approach requires a comparison of math test scores among middle schools in your district. You'll be comparing results by grade level over at least three years for each school in your district. This assumes that you have at least three middle schools for this comparison, and that they all administered the same standardized tests at the same time of year in each of the prior three years. The more years and schools you can include in your analysis, the better. As with the student analysis above, plot the sixth grade scores of kids in the 1995-96 school year, those students' seventh grade scores in the 1996-97 school year, and their eighth grade scores in the 1997-98 school year. Do the same with the class of the prior year. This will give you two trend lines for each school. If your school's trend lines show a drop while other schools show stable or increasing scores, you have strong clues that the students at other schools are holding their own, while your students aren't faring so well.

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