After spending the school year preparing their third-grade students for high-stakes state testing, school districts received raw scores for the TCAP reading test late Friday afternoon. Those scores show that 60% of third-graders across the state failed to meet proficiency levels required to be promoted to the fourth grade.
According to a Monday news release from the state, those numbers do still include students who may qualify for exemptions if they are English language learners, have a reading disability, or have already been retained in the past.
Districts then had to contact parents and notify them of the results and provide them with options. Students were given the chance to increase their score in a retake of the test, with some of those retakes occurring as soon as Monday morning.
If scores do not increase, students will have to attend a summer learning camp, where they will be tested again at the conclusion of the summer, or they could opt for year-long tutoring throughout the fourth grade. Parents did have the option to appeal those results.
Governor Lee calls this year’s testing a success. The 40% proficiency rate is almost a 5% increase over last year’s scores.
