Math scores and students in lower grades showed the biggest increases. Test scores improved the most in grades 2 and 3, where class sizes are smaller. Johnson also praised new, additional news showing that smaller class sizes help test scores. His conclusion is based on a new report by a group of five organizations that monitor education. It finds that CTA's efforts to reduce class sizes in kindergarten through third grade has paid off with better test scores for third-graders in the smaller classes.
State schools face numerous hardships.
There are 5.7 million students in California's K-12 public education system attending about 8,000 schools. For the second year in a row, the STAR test was given this spring to all California students in grades 2-11, and covered reading, writing, mathematics, history and science. The test was augmented with additional, unusually difficult questions that, unlike most of the test questions, are actually related to the new state academic standards. But students' answers to these additional questions are not ranked or compared to how other students in the nation would answer them, unlike the answers to the bulk of the test, which are ranked. But the norming sample, while representative of the nation, does not reflect the huge diversity of California's students.