Though results from the first round of high school assessment tests and the final round of Maryland School Performance Assessment Program tests have been in for nearly three weeks, the Howard County school system has just begun to make sense of them.

"This is going to be one of those things that unfolds over the next two to three months," said Leslie Wilson, the school system's director of student assessment and program evaluation.

The delay with scores from the first wave of high school tests is largely because Howard school system staff members weren't given computer programs by the State Department of Education to run the test result data or templates for the required parent reports. Individual student scores haven't arrived.

"We're creating stuff from scratch here," Wilson said. "The state says it wants all parents to have results by Jan. 15, but there's no way. We don't have the tools to do it. The whole state is probably going to be a little late. We just weren't prepared."

Faulty findings

But the data have allowed the school system to reach a few early conclusions -- the first that the results from the now-retired MSPAP test are useless.

"They don't make sense," said Robert Glascock, assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction. "You don't have schools who have been steadily improving their scores over the past three or four years suddenly drop 10 to 15 points [as results indicated]. Those things just don't happen."

Glascock, as well as other county and state education officials, have written off the MSPAP results -- which cost Howard County more than $8,400 per pupil to generate -- as invalid and flawed.

"We're not going to do anything with them," Wilson said.

Staff focus is on the high school assessment scores, which Wilson said show the county to be about 15 points above the state median percentile rank of 50 and to have the highest scores in English in Maryland.

However, they also show that African-American and Hispanic students still trail their white and Asian counterparts.

"We did very well, but we're not pleased with where some of our groups of students fell," Glascock said. "We want all kids to improve, but we're going to be targeting those subgroups very aggressively."

Closing the gap

School board member Patricia S. Gordon said the board is encouraging school staff to develop more creative ways to close the gap.

"If you do the same old thing the same old way, you get the same result," Gordon said, quoting the Howard school system's public information officer.

"The number of minority students is increasing and the fact that there is that gap affects our overall scoring. ... If we devise a way to close the achievement gap, we are really going to be sought after as consultants across the country. We're really going to stand out," she said.

Officials have high hopes for the applications of the High School Assessments results.

"They provide us with individual data for students, which is something that we need," Wilson said. "We'll be able to look at the correlation between a student's grade in a course and the performance on a test ... which will give us good information about whether or not our curriculum standards are aligned with the state standards."

MSA on horizon

As for the lower grades' testing, all eyes are turned toward the Maryland School Assessment test, which replaces the MSPAP and the Terra Nova/Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills.

The MSA, which will be given in March, will offer a score for each child, unlike the MSPAP, which offered only school scores.

"The MSA should give us a normative reference and a criteria reference each year," Glascock said, "and that helps us refine and enhance our curriculum and change instructional approaches if we need to."