"It's

a breakdown of the testing data from the 2001-2002 school year, and it's

a way for parents to review test scores by school," said Dr. Judy

Robinson, Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum in Coweta County schools.

The report

can be found online at https://reportcard.ga-oea.org/ and provides test

data from the 2001-2002 school year broken down by a variety of subgroups.

The data on

test scores and enrollment comes from the state Department of Education,

which also releases a report card in January of each year.

Robinson said

that the OEA report shows good news for Coweta County schools, in that

testing data for the Coweta school system continues to be higher than

school systems statewide, and that testing data for which there are previous

years continues to show an overall trend upward, such as in 4th, 6th and

8th grade Criterion Reference Competency Tests (the state curriculum test).

"We've

seen this data before, but the value of the OEA report is that it breaks

all of the testing data down in subgroups, and it helps you focus on that

disaggregated data ... and there are some obvious disparities in the subgroups,

such as between males and females and between ethnic groups," she

said.

The report

shows that - while Coweta County tends to exceed performance statewide

- it also shares some of the same problems with the state of Georgia.

"We're

most definitely making progress in all areas, but this does help us analyze

overall performance," she said. "It helps us find areas we're

having problems with."

"And it

helps us as we go through the process of aligning the curriculum,"

said Pre-K-fifth grade Curriculum Director Susan Wareham. That process

of curriculum alignment matches local curriculum guides and materials

to the broad categories of information tested for in state and national

exams.

Robinson, Wareham

and sixth through 12th grade Curriculum Director John Dunn note that the

report is useful for analyzation, but says that the report also offers

only a "snapshot" of student testing.

"You can't

measure either a school or a child by one test score in a single year,"

said Robinson, rather a student's and parent's daily school experience

and student and school progress are the best measures of effectiveness.

As part of

the school system's ongoing school improvement process, the OEA Report

Card information and other testing and report card data is being studied

closely over the coming months.