Following news this past week that nearly half of Montgomery County’s public high schools did not meet targets on statewide tests, the school system plans to investigate the problem but officials say no changes are imminent.

Central office staff could work with administrators and teachers at some schools to help them meet future test targets, said Erick J. Lang, associate superintendent for curriculum and instruction. He added putting in additional staff and staff hours to those schools was a costly last resort.

“We really have to dive into the data,” he said.

In data released Friday by the state education department, 12 of the 25 county high schools did not make Adequate Yearly Progress on the high school assessments, which measure reading and math performance on standardized tests.

The following schools did not make AYP benchmarks: Albert Einstein, Bethesda-Chevy Chase, Clarksburg, Col. Zadok Magruder, Gaithersburg, John F. Kennedy, Montgomery Blair, Northwood, Sherwood, Springbrook, Wheaton and Richard Montgomery.

Under the HSAs, required by the federal No Child Left Behind education law, schools must meet annually increasing performance targets every year on the exams, where students can score advanced, proficient or basic.

Every student demographic — including subsets of students categorized by race, poverty level, special education status and English language proficiency — must meet the progress performance targets for proficiency for a school to meet AYP. Schools also must meet target graduation rates.

Six of the 12 high schools were identified as in “school improvement,” meaning they did not achieve testing or participation targets in reading or math for either two consecutive years or three out of the past four years. Schools must meet AYP for two consecutive years to exit “school improvement” status.

Schools in improvement that do not meet future testing targets could be subject to corrective action and restructuring, such as new school leadership and teaching staff or conversions into charter schools.

The schools in “improvement” are Clarksburg, Magruder, Gaithersburg, Kennedy, Northwood and Sherwood.

Last year, 10 of the 25 high schools failed to meet AYP. No high schools were in school improvement status. One high school, Watkins Mill, made adequate progress for the second straight year in 2010-11 and was moved out of school improvement.

Although the school system is concerned about HSA results, officials are more focused on a comprehensive picture of whether the students are ready for college and careers, said school system spokesman Dana Tofig.

“AYP has never been an end-all, be-all at MCPS,” he said.

Parents usually don’t notice the test results unless they cause major changes at schools, such as a principal leaving, said Kristin Trible, president of the Montgomery County Council of Parent-Teacher Associations.

But she worried resources at schools weren’t sufficient for certain students, and that a wide range of high schools did not make adequate progress.

“It’s not like it’s clustered, or that it’s falling under one community superintendent or anything like that,” Trible said.

Reading gave certain groups of high schoolers an especially hard time. At all but one of the schools — Wheaton — that did not make adequate progress had insufficient reading scores.

Seven of the 12 high schools’ special education students failed to meet AYP in reading, while six of the schools’ students with limited English proficiency failed to hit the test performance targets. Gaithersburg, Northwood and Wheaton high schools failed to hit targets for graduation rates.

Including the Maryland School Assessement scores for elementary and middle school students released earlier this year, 73 of Montgomery’s 200 public schools, or 36.5 percent, failed to make adequate yearly progress. Statewide, 44.8 percent of the 1,376 public schools failed to make adequate progress.

State education officials are deciding whether to apply for a waiver from the testing requirements under No Child Left Behind, which requires all students to reach 100 percent proficiency on the statewide tests by 2014.

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