2016 Tuscaloosa Education Summit
Tuscaloosa’s annual Education Summit, organized by the Chamber of Commerce of West Alabama, was held on Wednesday, June 8th at the Bryant Conference Center at the University of Alabama. The summit, titled “Chamber in Session: State of Education,” focused on local education and the performance of the Tuscaloosa City and County Schools. PARCA kicked off the morning with a presentation […]
2015 WorkKeys Assessments for Alabama Schools and Systems
Click here to print this post In 2015, for the first time, all high school seniors took a new assessment test, WorkKeys, designed to determine whether students are learning the skills they need to enter the workforce. The results from that first WorkKeys assessment are in and are now available for local systems and schools. […]
2015 Aspire Results for Systems and Schools
Want to explore how your local public school system or school performed on the statewide benchmark test, the ACT Aspire? Using Aspire results, PARCA works with local school systems to analyze performance, building comparisons with similar systems and with the state as a whole. In grades 3-8, students are tested in reading, math, and science. In […]
College-Going Rates by High School
The Alabama Commission on Higher Education has produced a new set of data that gives a more complete picture of the college-going rate statewide and for individual high schools. According to the data, of the 45,760 students who graduated in the spring of 2014: – 33 percent enrolled in two-year colleges – […]
Alabama Brings Home Disappointing Results on Nation’s Report Card
The National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) is a battery of tests given every two years to a representative sample of students in all 50 states. The test is designed to serve as a national scorecard, allowing comparison of educational performance across the states. The 2015 results are out. They’re disappointing for the nation at large, […]
Alabama Statewide ACT Results for 2015
Alabama’s 2015 graduating class was the first in which all students took the well-known college readiness test, the ACT. New state-level reports on the 2015 results provide a wealth of information that can be useful to parents, students, and educators. Before we take a closer look at Alabama’s results, it’s important to understand the benefits […]
Alabama Strategies for National Problem of Teacher Shortages
PARCA’s new Teachers Matter report, commissioned by the Business Education Alliance, identifies Alabama-specific strategies for recruiting and retaining teachers. The report’s release comes in the midst of rising concern over a local and national shortage of teachers. As children headed back to the classroom this month, several Alabama school systems reported difficulty filling vacancies. The […]
PARCA Briefs BCA on Teacher Quality and Progress in Public Education
Alabama public schools have made substantial progress in raising high school graduation rates, but must continue to improve student performance on measures of college and career readiness. To do that, the state must sharpen its focus on the quality of public school teachers. That means recruiting talent to the profession, supporting existing teachers in a quest […]
The Poverty vs. Performance Challenge
PARCA continues to explore the results of the state’s new standardized test, the Aspire, and is developing new ways of looking at the data. Aspire was developed by the same testing company that offers the college readiness benchmark test, the ACT. From grades 3-8, Aspire measures student progress at each grade level toward an eventual […]
Setting the Course for Continuous Improvement in Tuscaloosa City and County Schools
Thanks to Plan 2020, the state’s strategic plan for improving the state’s public schools, schools and the communities they serve have increased access to data on school performance measures. Local systems are examining how their students perform on the Aspire, the new benchmark test given to student in grades 3 through 8. Systems are also […]