Enlightenment

San Diego's Catholic schools do their standardized testing at the beginning of the year, before the kids have a chance to learn anything at their grade level. They also choose to use the Iowa Test of Basic Skills (a norm-referenced test) instead of the California Standards Tests the public schools use. By doing this, they have ensured that there is no possible way to measure how much students have specifically learned in a year. Which is fine. As an inner-city English teacher, I'm not a fan of judging teachers by their test scores. ;)

We just got Nikki's test scores for this year. Her composite score indicates she scored better than 96 percent of sixth graders. Her language scores indicate she is in the 99th percentile. It also gave her a lexile score, which indicates the level at which she reads. Nikki's indicates she reads at grades 11.4-12.4. They also indicate a website, www.lexile.com, where you can go to see a list of books your child can read at his/her level. Nikki's list consists of many non-fiction books about a variety of things from continents to gender and sexuality issues among doctors and patients, along with literature like The Bell Jar, An American Tragedy, and Beowulf. And I only read through the beginning of the Bs.

That's great. My child is eleven. What a helpful resource this has proven to be!

I think we'll continue to rely on the librarian and the nice lady at The Yellow Book Road to recommend titles for Nik.