Lawrence school board members will hear more details today about a local testing tool that goes beyond federal mandates.

“It eclipses No Child Left Behind in its ability to measure, diagnose and provide information about individual kids,” said Superintendent Randy Weseman. “If you’re interested in the performance of every child, then you’re interested in not only children who are performing at a lower level, but those who are at the top of the curve.”

Board members will hear a detailed report about the testing tool, called Measures of Academic Progress, or MAP, at their quarterly retreat today.

The retreat will be from 5:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. in the board meeting room at the district’s Educational Service and Distribution Center, 101 McDonald Drive.

The board also will review a system that will be used to rate programs and services for starting the 2007-08 budget process and hear enrollment projections for the 2007-08 school year.

In discussing the MAP program – which the district began to use last fall – Weseman said his philosophy has been to go along with the federal No Child Left Behind mandates.

“But I don’t need the federal government to come in and lay out a plan for what we need to do with kids,” Weseman said. “I knew that long before they thought this up.”

Because of drawbacks to state assessments, the district turned to the MAP testing system, giving the test last fall to about 7,500 students.

MAP is a computerized math and reading test that gives educators and parents immediate feedback about the grade-level performance of each student.

The test starts by asking students a few questions. The more questions that are answered correctly, the harder the questions become.

There are 52 questions for math and 48 for reading. Students then take another test in the spring to see how much they’ve progressed from the fall test.

“This is an instrument that tells you where a particular kid is at, it tells you where you would expect them to be and it measures over a period of time, intermittently, where they’re at,” Weseman said.

Based on the MAP data, teachers can decide what each student needs – even those who might be performing above grade level.

“It allows us to challenge every kid, regardless of where they might be on the continuum,” Weseman said.

“That’s why I really wanted to move to this as opposed to just looking at this aggregated data that we use for No Child Left Behind and for the state assessments.”