Metro high school students did something last year that most school districts only dream of — 80 percent reached math proficiency, or better, as compared with 69 percent the year before.
Definitions of proficiency aside, some testing experts call the 11-percentage-point jump unprecedented.
“If the numbers are accurate and represent the change in learning, that’s a tremendous gain,” said David Silver, a statistician at the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing at UCLA.
“For comparison, over the past five years in California, we saw a total increase of eight points in mathematics in grades 2 to 7,” he said. “The biggest gain we ever saw in that time from year-to-year was four percentage points.”