Data error delays annual school report card release

The 1.5 million school report cards scheduled for delivery to South Carolina parents today and next week instead will be stored in the schools for a few more months.

The state Department of Education announced Thursday that it would delay until January the release of 2008 school report cards because of errors in test data files that affect middle and high school ratings.

Local district officials said the announcement came as a surprise -- principals were prepared Thursday afternoon to send the report cards home with every student today.

The Education Accountability Act of 1998 requires an annual report card to evaluate the performance of state schools. Ratings are based primarily on students' performance on standardized tests.

Beaufort County School District superintendent Valerie Truesdale said she was proud of the scores and even ordered a cake so she could celebrate the district's achievement with school board members at their retreat this weekend.

"I'm stunned," Truesdale said. "I'm just sitting here processing this in my head."

The ratings originally were scheduled for release at 12:01 a.m. today. By state law, school and district report cards must be distributed to parents by Nov. 15. The state Department of Education, however, faces no penalties if it doesn't meet

the deadline.

State superintendent Jim Rex said the contractor hired by the state to score and print test data is responsible for the errors, which affected end-of-course exam scores.

Both high school and middle school students take end-of-course exams in four subjects: Physical science, English 1, algebra 1 and U.S. history. The exams are administered to students at the end of each semester.

"We certainly do have a dilemma -- not one that we anticipated -- and it has to do with something our vendor did differently this year, something that we had no idea of knowing the impact of until very recently," Rex said.

Scores on each exam contri-bute both to individual students' grades and the school district's report card ratings.

After the exams are graded each semester, the schools receive a report of students' scores. They also receive a master file at the end of the year that compiles scores from each exam administration period.

That's where the educational measurement group, Pearson, the state's contractor, made a mistake this year.

School districts reported to the state Department of Education on Wednesday evening that the scores listed in the master file didn't match the scores listed in the files for each individual test.

By 10 a.m. Thursday, the Department of Education confirmed the data it used to compile the report cards was inaccurate. The master file listed incorrect scores for about 10,000 students who took the physical science exam and 200 students who took the algebra exam.

Jim Foster, spokesman for the Department of Education, said Pearson re-scored exams from one test administration period to create the master file and used the wrong answer key. The difference in the answer keys is slight but could cause scores to fluctuate by a few points, he said.

But because individual tests were scored correctly before they were put into a master file, the error will not affect individual student scores.

"There is some silver lining in this unfortunate incident," Rex said.