La. students' scores show gain

• By WILL SENTELL
• Advocate Capitol News Bureau
• Published: Oct 14, 2009 - Page: 1A

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While short of Louisiana’s decade-long goal, public school students showed their biggest gain in four years on the annual snapshot of student performance released Tuesday.

“No matter how you slice this data, this data looks good,” state Superintendent of Education Paul Pastorek told reporters.

The results are called school performance scores. They show how students in about 1,300 public schools in Louisiana fared on key tests, graduation rates and attendance.

See list for East Baton Rouge, Baker, Central, Zachary, Ascension, Lafayette and Livingston school accountability results.

The state score is 91, up from 86.3 last year and one of the biggest increases in the past decade.

However, this year’s score also showed that about 30 percent of students are performing below grade level.

The East Baton Rouge Parish School District has a score of 79.8, up from 74.1 last year.

The Zachary Community School District remained tops in the state with a score of 116.8, which is already near the state’s goal of 120 by 2014.

Ascension Parish public schools finished fourth in the state and the Central Community Schools finished fifth.

The goal that leaders set 10 years ago was a state score of 100 by now. The score in 1999 was 69.4.

This year’s mark is a turnaround from 2007, when schools overall failed to show improvement.

That set off alarm bells among state educators, and scuttled any chance that the state would reach its 10-year target.

“It is not as great as we would like, but it is true progress,” Walter Lee, a member of the state’s top school board, said of this year’s score.