'Proficient' Just Doesn't Cut It in Maryland

Students Pushed To Be 'Advanced'

For a school with one of the most economically disadvantaged populations in Montgomery County, Highland Elementary in Silver Spring is remarkably competitive on standardized tests.

Of all of the elementary schools in the seven-county Maryland suburban region, Highland had the most low-income students rated "advanced," the highest of three performance levels, on this year's Maryland School Assessment exams.

Three-quarters of Highland students qualify for federal meal subsidies because of low family income, a factor often statistically associated with lower achievement. Of those students, two-fifths rated advanced on the tests: 45 students in math and 88 in reading.

Schools throughout Maryland continue to push students into the top performance tier on the statewide tests, which measure progress under the federal No Child Left Behind Act. The law requires schools to plot annual growth in the share of students who pass the test by scoring either proficient or advanced on reading and math assessment tests. Students who are rated basic, the lowest performance level, are deemed to have failed.

Whether students are rated proficient or advanced on the tests is irrelevant to federal law. School system leaders, however, have come to regard advanced performance as a goal in itself. An advanced rating indicates a student has mastered much of the material covered at grade level.

Montgomery school officials monitor advanced performance as a measure of a school's rigor. As proficiency rates reach 80 to 90 percent of students throughout the region, school systems focus increasingly on advanced performance as the next pedagogical goal.

"The bar is no longer 'proficient is okay.' The bar is 'advanced,' " said Mary Wagner, principal of Anne Arundel County's Richard Henry Lee Elementary, a school where 28 percent of low-income students rated advanced on the statewide test. "One of [Superintendent] Kevin Maxwell's slogans is 'going from good to great,' and we aren't going to get to great if we focus only on proficient."

The percentage of Maryland students rated advanced in grades 3 through 5 (tests are also given in middle schools) rose from 27 percent last year to 32 percent this year, according to data released this summer. The share of elementary students rated advanced reached 45 percent in Howard County, 44 percent in Calvert County, 40 percent in Montgomery, 39 percent in Anne Arundel, 37 percent in St. Mary's County, 27 percent in Charles County and 19 percent in Prince George's County.

A chart that accompanies this report ranks the top 100 elementary schools in the seven-county region, according to the share of students rated advanced. The schools represent roughly the top quartile of all elementary schools in the region reporting complete test scores, 427 schools in all. The analysis is limited to grades 3 through 5 and omits schools that did not report scores in all of those grades.

Seventy-one schools this year have half or more of their students rated advanced, up from 51 last year and 38 in 2006. The top-rated school in the region, Cold Spring Elementary in Potomac, had 77 percent of students rated advanced, up from 72 percent two years ago.

Education leaders say the steady increase in advanced performance illustrates that schools are not content to focus on mere proficiency. Opponents of the No Child Left Behind mandate have said that the singular goal of proficiency could fuel a "race to the middle" at the expense of acceleration and rigor.

"The students who are proficient, we want to make them advanced. And the students who are advanced, we want them to maintain that level," said Cecelia Jones-Bowlding, principal of Glenarden Woods Elementary School in Prince George's. One-third of students at Glenarden Woods qualify for meal subsidies. Of those, 35 percent rated advanced on the MSA exams this year.

Although many schools work hard to elevate the performance of students who are not quite proficient on the test, Jones-Bowlding said, Glenarden Woods teachers work equally hard to raise the game of students who are proficient and aspire to advanced performance.

At Highland, 44 percent of all students tested were rated advanced this year, well above the county average, an achievement for one of Montgomery's most economically disadvantaged schools. The scores are driven by particularly strong performances among low-income students and English-language learners who make up a majority of Highland students.

Disadvantaged students are "going to need a lot more phonics and word work than their more affluent counterparts," said Raymond Myrtle, Highland's principal. "You don't need to do anything special; they just need a lot more of it. They need more support. They need more practice."

Calvert's Appeal Elementary School ranks just behind Highland in low-income students rated advanced on the statewide test this year, with 42 students rated advanced in math and 41 in reading. Twenty-eight percent of students with meal subsidies at the school rated advanced on the tests.

Yet, the Lusby school is seldom mentioned in the same breath as, for example, Mount Harmony Elementary, a Calvert school that ranks eighth in the suburban region for overall advanced performance on the MSA exams. Appeal Elementary serves a population of mostly low- and middle-income families that is atypical in one of Maryland's wealthiest counties; one-third of students qualify for meal subsidies.

"We feel pretty competitive," said Bernadette Stephenson, who was promoted from vice principal to principal this year. "I still don't like it that we're in the lower echelon as far as our colleagues in this county."