CHARLESTON, W.Va. — A West Virginia education official said the latest results from WESTEST 2, the state’s yearly assessment of student skills, serve as proof that major improvements are still needed within the state’s education system.
“We’re showing some improvement but, really, the improvement is not moving fast enough,” said Juan D’Brot, executive director of the Department of Education’s Office of Assessment and Accountability. “Part of the challenge is that it is a really big problem.”
D’Brot was a guest on Monday’s MetroNews “Talkline.”
Results from WESTEST 2 were released on September 4 and showed 49 percent of the state’s students are proficient in reading while 46 percent are proficient in math. New data, though, showed that many of those proficient students are not improving their skills at expected rates.
Based on those results, each West Virginia school is now in one of five categories: success, transition, focus, support or priority. It’s a system that is designed to more effectively identify struggling schools and better directs resources to those schools.
Schools are only labeled success schools if the majority of students met annual academic goals in math and language arts and the school has met goals in attendance or graduation rates, student academic growth, student success on WESTEST 2 and learning gaps between student groups are small.
The results of WESTEST 2 are available at http://wvde.state.wv.us/esea/performance/.