Our Say: Rising test scores reflect strong effort by county schools Tainted money | Maryland Gazette (HometownGlenBurnie.com)

And from that standpoint there was good news this week for the county schools in particular and state schools in general.

The latest scores on the Maryland State Assessment - which has measured reading and math skills in third through eighth grades since 2003 - showed strong improvements, in line with improvements seen elsewhere in the state.

This year, 90.8 percent of county elementary students passed the reading test (a 3.1 percent gain over the year before), while the math pass rate was 89.6 percent (0.9 percent above the year before). Middle school students gained more, although they still lag behind the elementary students: The reading pass rate was 80.9 percent (5 percent above the year before), while the math pass rate was 77.8 percent (4.6 percent above the prior year).

Additionally, the achievement gap between white and minority students - a long-standing problem that county and school officials have repeatedly pledged to remedy - continued to shrink.

These results reflect a lot of effort, reaching from schools Superintendent Kevin Maxwell to each classroom. Dr. Maxwell has emphasized having principals and teachers look at the testing data to pinpoint areas for improvement. A lot of such work must have been going on at certain county schools - such as Freetown Elementary, where scores in third-grade math increased 18.5 points, and Brooklyn Park Middle, where scores in seventh-grade math rose 14.6 points.

It certainly helps that current fifth-graders have had the statewide curriculum throughout their career in school; as they advance, this bodes well for the lagging scores in the middle schools - a stubborn problem.

Dr. Maxwell and administrators and teachers throughout the county system deserve a lot of credit for these results. They're going to have to push harder if the schools are ever going to reach 100 percent proficiency - the eventual federal goal. But they're going in the right direction.

GOOD FOR Marylanders United to Stop Slots and Stop Slots Maryland. The two anti-slot-machine groups, which are trying to organize opposition to the legalization referendum on Nov. 4, pledged this week not to take contributions from gambling interests.

Such out-of-state interests, of course, would presumably like to head off any competition from Maryland. And accepting such tainted help must be at least tempting to people who know that, as is customary for anyone who fights organized gambling, they are likely to be drastically outspent.

But the groups did the right thing, depriving slot machine advocates of a cynical diversionary argument. Perhaps this will help keep the debate focused on the subject: what legalized slots will mean for the future of Maryland.