By Daniel de Vise
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 8, 2008; PG02

Middle schools, forever castigated as the weak link in public education, have made steady progress on Maryland's standardized test, and well over half of the students at the top campuses in the state's Washington suburbs have earned the highest rating on the exam.

An analysis of 2007 Maryland School Assessment scores for suburban middle schools finds ample evidence of improvement, with some schools posting dramatic gains and comparatively few losing ground. The results defy conventional wisdom, which portrays middle schools as laggards in the field of school reform.

At Herbert Hoover Middle School in Potomac, 71 percent of students who took the MSA last spring scored at the highest of three performance levels, advanced, and 25 percent scored in the middle level, proficient. In 2006, by contrast, at no middle school in the eight-county region did more than 63 percent of students score advanced on the MSA.

The numbers of students scoring proficient and advanced on the MSA are added to measure "proficiency," the standard by which schools are judged under the federal No Child Left Behind law. The lowest-scoring level, basic, does not count toward proficiency.

At 13 schools in Montgomery, Howard and Anne Arundel counties, half or more of the students scored advanced on last year's test. Fourteen schools, representing those counties and Frederick, saw at least 90 percent of students attain proficiency.

"Those are not weak links," said Stephen Bedford, chief school performance officer in Montgomery.

The analysis was conducted by The Washington Post to synthesize voluminous test results into two overall scores for each school, representing the proportions of students who scored advanced on MSA tests in reading and math in the middle school grades, 6 through 8, and those who scored proficient or advanced and therefore attained proficiency.

The eight counties included in The Post's comparison are Anne Arundel, Calvert, Charles, Frederick, Howard, Montgomery, Prince George's and St. Mary's.

The analysis omitted some schools, notably in Prince George's, that serve one or more middle grades but not all three.

Maryland middle schools have made consistent, albeit small, gains on the test in each of the past two years. The share of students statewide scoring advanced has risen from 22 percent to 25 percent from 2005 to 2007, while the share attaining proficiency has grown from 62 percent to 67 percent.

That is not to say middle schools have quite kept pace with elementary schools, which are generally regarded as superior performers. In the elementary grades, 27 percent of Maryland students rated advanced in 2007, and 81 percent were counted as proficient.

In Montgomery, the share of students scoring advanced in middle schools rose from 33 percent in 2006 to 37 percent in 2007. In Prince George's, the share attaining proficiency rose from 51 percent to 55 percent. St. Mary's County had a three-point gain in both advanced and proficient performance.

Among the 20 schools with the largest percentages of students scoring advanced in 2007, only three experienced a year-to-year decline in performance.

A wave of change is sweeping the middle grades, prompted by concern that they were not teaching with the same rigor or yielding the same results as elementary or high schools.

The most noticeable change is a dramatic increase in students taking accelerated math classes in the middle years, an initiative that seems to have spread to every school system in the region. Educators view math acceleration as a gateway to advanced study in high school and, in turn, to college. Higher-level math classes have helped middle schools cultivate a community of students similar to those in honors and Advanced Placement high school classes.

At Samuel Ogle Middle School in Bowie, the number of students taking Algebra I, a high-school-level course, has doubled from 60 to 120 in the past two years.

"We're looking at their MSA scores . . . their report cards, their class work, their homework, we're talking to their parents, and then we're placing them in as challenging a class as possible," said Kathleen Brady, the principal.

The share of Samuel Ogle students scoring advanced on the MSA increased from 22 percent in 2006 to 29 percent in 2007. Those rating proficient rose from 69 percent to 78 percent.

At Hoover Middle, only 20 of 345 eighth-grade students will study grade-level math in the fall; everyone else will take advanced classes. The share of students scoring advanced on the statewide test at Hoover rose from 62 percent in 2006 to 71 percent in 2007, the strongest performance of any middle school in the region.

"We are at a student-by-student . . . basis of who we think we can move" into accelerated study, said Billie-Jean Bensen, the principal.

Another initiative that has boosted performance in elementary and middle schools is the increasing use of data to evaluate students on specific skills, such as geometry, probability and reading comprehension.

Kingsview Middle School in Germantown hosts frequent "data chats" involving teachers, students and parents to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of individual students, with a particular focus on children who are on the cusp of moving from one performance level to the next on the MSA.

"We identify specific children, those who are not doing well, those who are doing better, those who are capable of much more," said Dennis Queen, the principal.

In St. Mary's, school officials conduct oral reading assessments of all students who score below proficient on the statewide test and place them in tightly focused remedial programs. Last year, the county introduced the sixth grade to a block of reading instruction called Literacy Lab, with students divided into small groups according to reading level and assigned work appropriate to their skills.

Elizabeth Cooper, the school system's supervisor of reading instruction, credits the approach with generating double-digit growth in sixth-grade reading scores for students in special education and from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, gains "that we couldn't explain in any other way."