Tuesday, February 07, 2006

School Performance

Digging around in the 2004-05 New Jersey School Report Card database, I ran across some interesing data that I thought I would share. First, the bad news. The Access database is as poorly organized as always, so extracting information from the data is going to be a long, hard slog.

But, there's also good news, and in a surprising location. I stumbled into the vocational school districts while looking to confirm the trends from last year's post on this subject. In the vocational districts, about 3600 students take the High School Proficiency Assessment each year. Their performance has been increasing steadily since the 2002-03 school year, as shown in the table below:

Subject YEAR Fail Proficient AP
Lang 0203 25% 61% 13%
Lang 0304 23% 63% 13%
Lang 0405 19% 62% 18%
Math 0203 45% 37% 17%
Math 0304 38% 39% 22%
Math 0405 29% 46% 25%

What's causing this improved performance? Hard to say, but ... could this be measurable impact from the No Child Left Behind Act?

Tags: New Jersey, Education