Elementary School Report Card

Yesterday we received a fascinating piece of mail.  It's the Oregon Department of Education's annual evaluation of Jasper's local elementary school and school district.  It was certainly eye opening for a number of reasons.  The above chart shows "the percentage of students in your school at the indicated grades that met or exceeded the state standards on Oregon Statewide Assessments during the last two school years.  District, state, and comparison schools are displayed.  Comparison schools are Oregon schools with similar demographics."

Please note that it does not indicate what the "standards" are.  But one out of every four kids in his school is testing below them in reading.  Math is worse, at 68%.  I'm sure they are proud that they have made improvements since last year, but they certainly have a long way to go.

Science scores across Jasper's school district (black) as compared to Oregon (white).

I find the science scores for this school particularly disturbing.  Not only are they at 38%, but they apparently only test for science in Grade 5 of elementary school.  (I am wondering in which years they actually teach any science?)  Elsewhere in the report, it shows that throughout the district, 73% of the kids in grade 5 met the science standards, which means this school has  particularly awful scores within the district.  The district tested 8th graders to receive a 66% average,  and tested 10th graders to receive a 57% average. The older the kids get, the worse the scores get.  Yikes!  Science is Jasper's particular passion.

There are other interesting statistics thrown in. I am thrilled to see that they had no expulsions due to weapons last year at this particular school.  There were 245 expulsions in elementary schools throughout Oregon.  Whether you believe that the "Zero Tolerance" policies are ridiculously overzealous (Johnny forgets to take out his pocket knife), or that the fact that kids are bringing weapons to elementary school is a bad sign for the entire community, expulsions due to weapons are not good.  

Another statistic they shared was that Jasper's local elementary school has 43% of all students in ESL programs.   Jasper does not speak any Spanish.  If he went to this school, I would assume that the language barrier would be very polarizing socially, and I would definitely be giving him Spanish lessons.  

Are you curious about your local school?  All the annual report cards can be found online here:  http://www.ode.state.or.us/data/reportcard/reports.aspx