ALBANY — Local and state education officials are saying poor performance on state Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests in social studies can be blamed on a combination of an overly broad curriculum and a too narrow assessment.

State School Superintendent Kathy Cox said in an e-mail to school system superintendents Wednesday that the state was invalidating the sixth- and seventh-grade social studies CRCT scores because “we have come to the conclusion that these scores are not trustworthy measures of student achievement in social studies.”

Georgia’s pass rates for sixth- and seventh-grade social studies are about 20-30 percent while its eighth-grade math pass rates are around 62 percent, Department of Education spokesman Dana Tofig said.

Dougherty County’s pass rates are projected to reflect those rates closely, DCSS Test Coordinator Renee Bridges said Thursday.

The system is projected to have about a 25 percent pass rate on its sixth- and seventh-grade social studies CRCT, while its eighth-grade math CRCT pass rate should be closer to the state’s average.

Bridges said that school systems throughout Georgia had been implementing new math and social studies curriculums this past year for grades six-eight. Pass rates traditionally dip during the implementation of a new curriculum, she said.

Still, “you expect a dip, not a baptism,” she said. The poor results were attributed to broad curriculum and narrow assessments, she said.

“It’s kind of like teaching A and assessing B,” she said.

Bridges said she did not anticipate declines in the reading CRCT pass rates.

The school system’s summer school classes will focus largely on students who failed their required CRCTs. Eighth- and fifth-graders must pass reading and math CRCTs to be promoted, she said.

LEE COUNTY

Lee County teachers, parents and students were surprised and in some cases, relieved, to learn the DOE had invalidated the social studies scores for grades six and seven, Lee Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum and Instruction Adrienne Hamlin said.

“Our principals can tell you — our teachers have been teaching the standards that they have been taught to do,” Hamlin said. “They know how hard those teachers work. We have some children that cried and some teachers that took it personally because they worked so hard.”

The message relayed by Cox Wednesday was that, statewide, “the teaching standards themselves were too broad and the test was too specific,” Hamlin said.

Without the systemwide data that will be provided by DOE, Lee schools have only general pass rates crunched from test scores by school officials.

Overall, approximately 61 percent of Lee students in grades three through eight passed the social studies CRCT, Hamlin said.

Lee students in grades three, five and eight who did not pass the reading or math CRCTs that Georgia requires for them to pass in order to be promoted are preparing now for retests June 5-6.

“We are actually doing an intense remediation right now in grades three, five and eight for students who may have failed the reading and/or math portions of the CRCT,” Hamlin said.

The remediation will continue through the system’s post-planning days after school lets out May 28 and the first week of June.

The reading CRCT retests will be given June 5, and the math retests will be given June 6.

The remediation period is the only opportunity Lee is offering its students to prepare for the tests, she said.

Systemwide, 96 percent of Lee students passed the reading CRCT and 80 percent passed the standardized math test.

DOUGHERTY RETESTS

Dougherty County schools will be retesting its students in math on June 4 and on June 5 in reading, Bridges said. Its remediation period begins Tuesday, she said.

The state will have about $1.4 million to help systems offset the cost of summer school for students who did not pass the CRCTs, Tofig said.

Parents of middle school students do not have to pay for their children to attend summer school, Bridges said.

While the social studies pass rates for sixth- and seventh-grades would not have any kind of direct affect upon school systems, the eighth-grade math pass rates may, Tofig said.

The state’s schools were mandated to get their pass rates up to 67 percent this year in math, he said. Because of students’ poor performance on the tests, the state will ask federal officials if they can have a three-year window to get its pass rates up to 67 percent, he said.

If schools cannot make the mandated passing rate on the CRCTs for two consecutive years, they face tougher regulations, he said.