WESTEST week

West Virginia public school students in grades 3 through 11 are taking WESTEST 2 this week. That's the new, supposedly tougher standardized test to see if they are learning what they are taught.

Later this year, the state Department of Education will release results. We will learn the average score in each school or grade, and there will be some other statistical data released, all of which seem to tell us something but really not.

The average score tells us little. I would like to know the arithmetic mean, median and mode for each school and grade. And the standard deviation, which tells you whether most scores are clustered around the average.

I would like to know if there is a correlation -- linear or nonlinear -- between WESTEST 2 scores and grades. I say that because of the experience of a kid I know. He lives on the same road I do. When he was in middle school, his parents pulled him out of school and taught him at home because he was close to failing his subjects. When he took the WESTEST, he scored well above average. When he returned to public school that fall, administrators wanted to fail him. When his parents said his WESTEST scores showed that he was above average, the administration passed him to the next grade.

And I would like to know how the kids who take the test year after year advance. Do they do better or worse?

How do the scores of kids who drop out of school compare with those who stay in? Did kids who dropped out and got their GEDs within a few years do okay on WESTEST and WESTEST 2?

In other words, I would like to see a really good analysis of exactly what WESTEST 2 can tell us about our schools and our education system.

Not that any of us will ever see it.