Recently, I attended a School Site Council meeting for my daughter's future school, Ohlone Elementary. I commented to the council that I was concerned by the recent test scores, specifically those for science. Some SSC members agreed that they were very disappointed by these results in which the science scores had gone from 80% proficient to 40% proficient.
The Principal commented that we should not focus on "spilled milk". I truly appreciate her positive attitude! While I agree with looking forward and keeping a positive attitude, isn't the job of the Principal, and Superintendent, and School Site Council, to review and attempt to explain such results? In my line of work in a highly regulated laboratory, we would treat such scores as an incident and review all items that could have produced such a result so as to prevent recurrence.
In this case, we might review teacher turnover and coaching, availability of materials, scheduling changes, class size, etc. With "spilled milk", we know what happened. There was a spill. It was cleaned up. We moved on. With this situation, do we really know what happened? Shouldn't we want to know? Is it me? Am I expecting too much from our schools? Are test scores spilled milk? You can find the original report at
http://www6.cde.ca.gov/schoolqualitysnapshot/sqsreport.aspx?id=E31E49EA-B58F-4098-91FA-6812D0E2B95C