They might still be figuring out what a mean score means. They're not quite sure whether their students' raw scores are good or bad, or somewhere in between. And they don't yet know whether any of it means high-schoolers will succeed once passing the new high-stakes exams becomes a graduation requirement.

But one thing school officials in Carroll County do know is that they'll be able to do a lot more with the High School Assessment results released last week than they ever could with the more nebulous scores of the state's now-defunct assessment examinations for elementary- and middle-schoolers.

That's because the new high school tests report individual students' scores. The Maryland School Performance Assessment Program, which state education officials abandoned this year and will replace in March, was designed to appraise schools rather than individual children.

"The High School Assessments will determine how our students are doing ... and help us determine what work we have to do to make sure all of our students are achieving at the level they should," said Gregory Eckles, high schools director for Carroll County schools. "We'll be able to see how each student is doing and compare that with students around the county and the state in a way we've never been able to before. One issue with high schools has always been that we don't have much data on them."

Not all students take the PSAT or the SAT, standardized tests typically taken by college-bound juniors and seniors that are used to gauge students' potential for success in their first year of college. Even fewer students take Advanced Placement courses and the corresponding exams administered at the semester's end. And none of those tests align with the curriculum taught in Carroll schools.

"The value of these state assessments is that they'll measure how well students are learning the curriculum we are teaching," Eckles said. "We expect, after all, that we're teaching the curriculum, students are learning it, and they ought to be able to demonstrate that on an exam like this."

The first results

In the first batch of test scores released from the High School Assessments, Carroll ninth-graders outperformed all but a handful of school systems across the state.

Their percentile scores in English and government were beaten only by students in Montgomery and Howard counties - powerhouse school systems that are among the best-funded and highest-performing in the state. (Carroll County ranks 19th this year in per-pupil spending among the state's 24 school systems, budgeting $7,055 for each student, compared with Howard's $8,432 and Montgomery's $9,464.)

Carroll students finished fourth on the biology test, and their math scores - weakened by the absence of the county's brightest students, who take advanced math classes in middle school - ranked eighth and 10th, respectively, on the algebra and geometry tests.

State officials won't set passing and failing scores until this summer for the new exams, which were taken mostly by ninth-graders last winter and spring in five subjects. Earning a high school diploma could soon depend on passing the tests, perhaps beginning with next year's incoming freshmen.

In the meantime, this year's test data include only raw scores on a scale of 200 to 800 points, percentile rankings for students and mean percentile rankings that indicate how schools performed compared to others in Maryland. Parents will get that information for their children this week when individual results are sent home.

Gregory Bricca, supervisor of accountability and assessments, is gearing up for several weeks of number-crunching to make sense of the data for administrators, principals and teachers.

"It's the first of anything we've gotten back on the High School Assessments ever and it is so skeletal in nature. But I think the most important thing we can get from these scores - as opposed to looking bigger and as opposed to comparing where the county falls and ranks in the state - is to look more specifically at individual students and at the classroom level," he said. "The most useful information can come when teachers look at how their students did last year, when one teacher can measure how her Level 3 geometry class did compared to the Level 3 geometry class down the hall."

'Best practices'

From that localized snapshot of data, Bricca said, educators will be able to better pinpoint the most successful teaching methods.

"We can see if there are best practices out there when you see groups of kids scoring significantly better than another group of kids and better than you'd expect to see them score," he said. "What did that teacher do to get those results?"

Most principals and school administrators interviewed said that this year's data will provide a baseline from which future results will be measured.

"It's a starting point," said Francis Scott Key High Principal Randy Clark. "It's certainly something we're looking at to see where we are and where we need to go."

Liberty High Principal Florence Oliver said the test results will help faculty members decide what types of remediation would be most helpful to students who don't do as well.

Eckles, the school system's high schools director, said the tests could provide an opportunity for schools to take greater advantage of the online courses the system launched this past summer to help students who need to make up a failed course.

For South Carroll High Principal George Phillips, the real work won't come until state education officials set passing and failing standards.

"The big question we'll have to look at then is what we'll do for students who don't pass," he said. "Until we get those benchmarks established, it's all relative. We can't make too much judgment or change until then. This is just the first round."