Each year, the Office for Catholic Schools in the Archdiocese of Chicago releases standardized test scores for all the Catholic elementary schools in Cook and Lake counties, and each year, officials point out that once again, the scores are above the national average. But the scores on CTB McGraw-Hill’s Terra Nova tests offer Catholic schools much more than bragging rights, said Mary Kearney, associate superintendent of Catholic schools. They give teachers and schools a snapshot of how their students are doing, through a lens that was generated by outside educators. “We want to use a respected external resource to audit our student progress,” she said. “Our students may be doing well on our own assessments, but how do you corroborate that?” That helps teachers understand where individual students might need more instruction and schools plan adjustments to their curricula, as well as evaluate any changes they may have made to their curricula, Kearney said. For example, several schools have used grants from the Rowland Reading Foundation to introduce Pleasant Rowlands’s SuperKids reading curriculum at the primary grades. Both the schools themselves and the Office of Catholic Schools can look at the Terra Nova scores to find out whether teachers are succeeding with it. “The program is an excellent one, but the teachers need to use it with fidelity,” Kearney said. “If our scores aren’t where we think they should be, we can ask the assistant superintendent for that area to talk to the school and find out what’s going on.” The Terra Nova works well because it assesses in all major curriculum areas – reading, language, math, science and social studies — and the material covered matches up with archdiocesan curriculum standards, Kearney said. It also includes both multiple choice sections and sections where students must write out answers. The archdiocese requires that all 215 Catholic elementary schools administer the tests to third-, fifth- and seventh-graders each year, although many schools use them in other grades as well. Schools now are required to give eighth-graders the Explore test, which is the first in a cycle of tests published by ACT, culminating in the ACT college entrance test. “That will corroborate the claim that our kids are high-school ready and on the path to college readiness,” Kearney said. Indeed, all of the Catholic high schools in the archdiocese are classified as college preparatory, and 95 percent of their graduates go on to college. According to the 2011 Terra Nova scores, Catholic schools in the city of Chicago surpassed the national average in all three grade levels in five subject areas. While Chicago public schools cannot make that claim, they are also using a different, state-mandated test. The state has not made its test, called the ISAT, available to non-public schools. The standards are high even in the lower grades. Catholic school superintendent Dominican Sister M. Paul McCaughey has a long-term goal of every school having an average score at above the 90th percentile in reading by third grade, and an average score of above the 90th percentile in math by seventh grade. Generally, Kearney said, Catholic schools show better scores in the higher grades, which indicates that students are doing better over time. But she cautioned that using school-level scores doesn’t prove that, since students move in and out of schools between testing years, and the presence of only one or two high- or low-achieving students can change the average score for a class, especially if the class is small to begin with. Even so, she pointed to success stories like St. Thomas of Canterbury School in Uptown, where many of the children come from families who have just arrived in the United States, some as refugees. Often, their scores in the primary grades reflect their academic challenges. “But by the time they get to the fifth and seventh grades, they are smokin’,” she said, showing that the school is working for those students. The Office for Catholic Schools does not release test scores for individual schools because they don’t want people to look only at the scores when determining the quality of a school, especially when Catholic schools serve communities that run the socio-economic gamut from Lake Forest on the North Shore to the West Side of Chicago. However, schools are welcome to release their own test scores, and parents who are interested in a particular school’s scores are encouraged to ask the school directly.