"The achievement gap between white and black students in Charlottesville schools on the state’s Standards of Learning tests has, in most instances, narrowed in grades 3, 5, 8 and in high school overall since 2004, the Charlottesville School Board was told Thursday night.

Economically disadvantaged white students have passed at higher rates than economically disadvantaged black students, reported Harley Miles, the city schools’ supervisor of assessment.

Walker Upper Elementary has been the most successful in narrowing the gap. The difference in passing rates between white and black fifth-graders in mathematics dropped from 50 percentage points in 2004 to 22 percentage points in 2006, and in English, the gap decreased from 36 percentage points in 2004 to 16 in 2006.

Board member Peggy Van Yahres asked that the division track results from students in the gifted programs to make sure that the success of higher-achieving students has not diminished.

Miles also presented Charlottesville High School students’ results from the Scholastic Assessment Test. The CHS Class of 2006 had a combined score of 1633, besting the Virginia average of 1525 and the national average of 1518.

Not all CHS students took the SAT, Miles noted.

The average SAT scores of white and black CHS students revealed an achievement gap significantly higher than that of the state and country. The difference at CHS was 552 points, while the gap in Virginia was 290 and in the U.S., 291.

Because the SAT results show a larger achievement gap than the SOLs, board member Julie Gronlund said that barometers other than the SOLs might be used to get a fuller picture of student achievement.

The result with the most overarching meaning for the division, however, was that it failed to make Adequate Yearly Pro-gress, a benchmark used by the federal government to assess schools. Virginia uses the SOL tests to determine the AYP status of schools and divisions.

“When you add up all of [the results] as a school division, we have a problem,” Miles said.

He voiced particular concern about the failure of Johnson Elementary to make AYP. Johnson is a Title I school, meaning it receives federal aid as well as monitoring. If it fails to make AYP next school year, Johnson parents would have the choice to transfer their children to another school in the division." (Matt Deegan, The Daily Progress, October 6, 2006)