After years of declining scores and hard questions about pupils' performance on the state's annual tests for elementary and middle schools, Carroll County educators got mixed news yesterday.

Elementary pupils' test results fell for the fourth straight year, but Carroll ninth-graders outperformed all but a handful of school systems across the state in the first batch of test scores released from Maryland's new High School Assessments.

Their percentile scores in English and government were beaten only by students in Montgomery and Howard counties - well-funded and top-performing school systems that are widely considered to be among Maryland's educational leaders. Carroll students finished fourth on the biology test, behind Howard, Montgomery and Frederick counties.

And their math scores - diluted by the absence of the district's brightest students, who take advanced math classes in middle school - ranked eighth and 10th, respectively, on the algebra and geometry tests.

School officials were not about to turn aside the good news, but they accepted it cautiously.

"As we look at where we rank, it's very positive, but as far as how it means our students will do when this test is a graduation requirement, we have no sense," said Gregory Bricca, the school system's supervisor of testing and accountability.

"It's nice that we finally have some information about our students' performance on these assessments, but it doesn't really mean a whole lot. Without a proficiency level and without a cutoff score, we have a ranking that says that our students are doing better than the median in the state but no sense of what that means."

State education officials won't set passing and failing scores until this summer for the high-stakes exams, which were taken mostly by ninth-graders last winter and spring in five subjects. The State Board of Education intends to make passing the High School Assessments a graduation requirement, perhaps beginning with next school year's incoming freshmen.

Instead, this year's test data includes only percentile rankings. A student who scores in the 60th percentile has done as well or better than 60 percent of all students in Maryland who took the test. A school ranking in the 60th percentile means that the average student at that school scored as well as or better than 60 percent of all test-takers.

Yesterday's release of test scores also included results from the last round of the much-criticized Maryland School Performance Assessment Program, which state education officials will abandon and replace this spring with a new test in reading and math at grades three, five and eight and in reading at grade 10. Fourth-, sixth- and seventh-graders will be added to the testing regimen in 2004.

School officials played down the significance of MSPAP results that showed a fourth consecutive year of decline in Carroll County, with elementary pupils' test scores falling in eight of 12 areas. The slide has taken the county from a fourth-place ranking in 1999 among Maryland's 24 school districts to ninth place last year, prompting parents to question school board members and administrators about their plans to steer the 28,000-student system back on track.

It was not possible to rank the performance of the Carroll school system this year because eighth-graders there did not take the MSPAP exams this spring, while eighth-grade pupils in other counties did take the test.

Across the county, third-graders performed the worst, with test scores dropping 2.2 points to 10.2 points in all six testing areas: reading, writing, language, math, science and social studies. Despite continued efforts to shrink elementary class sizes and to improve reading scores among the school system's youngest pupils, third-graders' reading scores fell more than last year - 7.1 points.

Fifth-graders' results dipped slightly in the two areas that state educators want school districts to focus on - reading and math - while scores in writing, language, science and social studies climbed 1.6 points to 10.8 points.

But puzzling scores, skyrocketing and plummeting from elementary school to elementary school and within the same schools, cemented questions that school administrators had last year about the test's validity.

"As the state is suggesting, we need to look at these scores cautiously this year," Bricca said. "Keep in mind that when it was administered last year, we knew MSPAP was on its last legs. It also was scored differently this year, which is not to say the scores aren't valid and reliable, but certainly that could have some influence."

MSPAP scores

This table shows reading and math scores for Carroll County elementary schools for 2001 and 2002 under the Maryland School Performance Assessment Program. The score represents the percentage of children who scored satisfactory on the MSPAP tests.

Third Grade Fifth Grade

Reading Math Reading Math

02 01 02 01 02 01 02 01

Maryland 30.7 36.5 28.7 37.8 42.1 44.6 39.8 42.6

County Average 32.5 39.6 33.5 43.6 44.9 48.0 48.7 47.6

Carrolltowne 49.0 38.3 43.5 45.8 55.2 52.5 53.2 53.5

Charles Carroll 15.6 42.3 17.9 38.9 42.6 40.3 59.7 50.0

Cranberry Sta. 37.7 31.6 35.4 34.5 41.9 50.0 46.9 44.3

Eldersburg 34.6 49.0 57.4 27.1 53.3x 49.5 62.7 46.5

Elmer A. Wolfe 26.2 49.5 26.7 39.6 38.0 32.6 31.6 31.3

Freedom District 40.2 34.7 41.0 40.2 43.1 56.8 52.0 65.9

Friendship Valley 20.7 48.9 25.0 45.4 46.3 46.6 45.8 55.8

Hampstead 14.7 27.9 16.0 26.2 43.8 55.3 52.9 50.9

Linton Springs 35.8 42.5 42.9 57.4 43.2 45.7 44.0 41.4

Manchester 18.5 30.7 19.7 30.3 29.1 50.0 38.6 46.1

Mechanicsville 52.7 32.2 44.3 55.3 54.2 58.0 53.1 49.6

Mt. Airy 30.1 46.0 44.3 45.6 54.2 62.2 49.3 54.5

Piney Ridge 42.5 48.4 40.0 55.1 60.4 43.9 53.0 54.5

Robert Moton 32.0 21.0 22.2 26.3 39.1 38.9 37.9 26.6

Runnymede 27.4 41.7 31.9 38.7 44.9 43.3 50.9 34.7

Sandymount 21.3 37.1 34.4 44.1 39.4 40.0 45.3 44.6

Spring Garden 57.0 40.7 54.0 47.1 58.2 43.7 66.7 67.2

Taneytown 23.3 29.8 23.7 25.3 29.4 42.6 30.7 20.0

Westminster 22.6 42.5 32.2 41.7 30.7 41.7 59.3 62.1

Wm. Winchester 33.3 45.8 21.9 42.2 40.0 51.4 32.5 46.2

Winfield 28.0 45.1 31.8 65.5 44.2 52.4 46.0 44.8 Source: Maryland State Department of Education