ITBS & math in Irvington

So.

First piece of potentially useful information to emerge from the ITBS.

I have a kid who is scoring in the top 12th percentile of the entire country in math, but the school can't guarantee him a seat in the accelerated math class come fall.

They can move him down.

Moving him down would be no problem.

They can print finds subject matter difficult on his report card.

They can tell us "Christopher is the only child having a problem."

These things they can do.

They cannot "guarantee" him a seat in the accelerated (that's accelerated, not "Honors") course come fall.

Eighty-eighth percentile.

We'll be discussing this with the district.

We won't just be talking about our child, either. Everyone else gets the same treatment. We have dozens of very bright kids who are easily capable of learning this material not learning this material because they've moved to the non-accelerated course.

The "accelerated" middle school math class has been structured and taught as a wash-out course.

This is the course that's supposed to separate the men from the mice.

Teacher was instructed by her superiors to "hold down the number of As."

It's time for the district to offer norm-referenced standardized testing to families who are interested.

Let's find out where Irvington kids stand compared to their peers in the rest of the country.

Then the district needs to explain to parents and taxpayers why kids scoring at the top of the country cannot take algebra in 8th grade in Irvington, NY.


still in the game

The ITBS scores were incredibly good news.

I'm saving the reading score for its own separate post; that's how good it was.

But the math scores were a cause for joy.

After all this....after being tracked out of algebra-in-the-8th-grade to begin with, after failing 1/3 of his course in fourth grade, after suffering through nearly two years in a supremely bad "accelerated" course....he is scoring in the top 12th percentile of the country.

In fact, he may be higher than that, because he scored quite low on "probability & statistics," I presume because he hadn't studied the topic when he took the test. (I had him take every sub-test.)

We can fix the computation score (75th percentile).

And we'll carry on working on his math education, with the goal of moving him as far into the 90s as possible.

I think we can do it.

We have friends - more than a few - whose kids reached high school with SAT math scores in the 500s. One of these kids scored nearly a perfect 800 on verbal; after months of SAT tutoring I think he only made it to the low 600s on math. Months of tutoring. By the time you reach junior year in high school, it's just too late.

On the SAT the 88th percentile is a score of 660. (pdf file)

The ITBS has a less selective test-taking population than the SAT. I don't know how to adjust for that statistically.

Still.

What these scores tell me is that he's still in the game.

That's good news.