Free Republic

Sixty fourth-grade students from Runyon Elementary school will be receiving zeros on the writing portion of the CSAP, according to the Colorado Department of Education. Littleton Public School officials said teachers discovered that a test question on the 2008 CSAP was identical to one used for practice testing. a fourth-grade teacher had committed the question, called a prompt, to memory several years ago. The teacher, who was not identified, used the prompt for student preparation, not realizing it would appear again on a test. Jo O'Brien, assistant commissioner of Standards and Learning for the Colorado Department of Education, said state...

Willie Angelo's grasp of math, never firm, took a sharp nose dive just before Christmas. "Towards the end of last semester, it was all building up," said Angelo... "It was too much for me to handle." So there he was at a recent early-morning tutoring session with his teacher, struggling to learn polynomials - mathematical expressions studded with digits, X's, exponents and parentheses. He's not alone. Students across Colorado are struggling with math, according to results of statewide achievement tests. And the test scores go down as the students get older. The vast majority of students - 68 percent -...