BATON ROUGE, LA (AP) — Superintendent of Education John White said the first glimpse of how Louisiana students fared on Common Core tests will be released Oct. 12.
Those statewide results will show how 320,000 students in grades three through eight did on the exams in March and May, and eventually how they compare with their peers in other states.
Students will be placed in one of five categories: advanced, mastery, basic, approaching basic and unsatisfactory.
The Advocate’s Will Sentell reports that once 10 other states and the District of Columbia release their own results, comparisons will be possible on the math, reading and writing assessments.
White made his comments Monday, the same day education department officials began sharing preliminary results of the tests with roughly half of the state's 70 local school superintendents.
Some local leaders, including the president of the Louisiana Association of School Superintendents, had complained they need to see the results now for teachers to help students improve their performance.
White said the only results being shared include how many questions students answered correctly of the total, without any scaling that sheds light on how they performed overall.
"We do not have information that is even close to a final score for students," he said.
The issue of how to handle the release of the scores has sparked debate and criticism from some local education officials.
