Local public schools upgrade themselves

  • 2014-07-29
The ACT and Michigan Merit Exam (MME) scores for 2015's graduating class were released this month by the Michigan Department of Education, and Farmington Public Schools' performance improved significantly, making gains in science, reading, mathematics, and social studies.

The biggest improvement of all was in social studies, where students’ marks were higher by 7.5 percentage points. Farmington High School improved in every subject, and its performance, along with that of North Farmington High School, put them both in the state's top 10%.

The MME is given every spring to juniors in high school. Components of the test are a college entrance examination known as ‘ACT Plus Writing®; WorkKeys’, which assesses students’ job skills in areas of math, reading and information locating. Tests developed by the state of Michigan assess students’ competence in social studies, science and math.

The MME includes the ACT, which is given free of charge to all juniors, and is a standard exam for college entrance. The Michigan-wide score for ACT was 19.8, but Farmington Public School returned an average score of 21.2. There were 831 public schools included in the tally.

Farmington Hills officials will no doubt want to draw attention to their schools’ achievements, and could work with a catalog printing company to create items that describe the schools' courses and facilities. They could also mention the test scores.