All Times News area schools received School Performance Profile scores in 2016 after a one-year hiatus when only high schools were measured.

For the fourth consecutive year, Carbon Career & Technical Institute had the highest score in the area, jumping from 88.4 to 91.2.The scores are based heavily on state assessment scores, but also includes college readiness tests, industry standards-based assessments, graduation, promotion, and attendance rates, as well as evidence of offering rigorous courses as other factors in the calculation.Also making a large leap was Palmerton Area High School, jumping from 73.4 to 84.2.Other top scoring schools include Pleasant Valley Intermediate School at 86.0, Towamensing Elementary at 81.5, and Tamaqua High School at 82.1.Many administrators were critical again this year of the state's standardized testing process."Our school performance profile scores are directly tied to teacher evaluations," Lehighton Superintendent Jonathan Cleaver said. "The teachers take this information to heart. All year, our students and staff work hard getting ready for these tests and there is a lot of pressure. There have been kids that cry during these tests because it's a lot to deal with. Our eighth-graders who take the Keystone Exam are tested for 15 days out of, we say 180, but with all the activities it's really 165, days of the school year."Jim Thorpe Superintendent Brian Gasper also said it's difficult to use the SPP score as a measuring stick because it's "not comparing apples to apples."The growth calculations, he said, that are a fundamental part of SPPs can easily be misread if one does not consider the relative size of the gap that a district is trying to close in on."It really depends on when they started SPP and where we stood. We stood higher when we tested our students years ago, so therefore when we're trying to close this gap, we have a smaller gap to close. Closing a 5 percent gap when we're already doing pretty well is pretty difficult," Gasper said.The School Performance Profile is being overhauled by the state, a move that Gov. Tom Wolf said will make it less reliant on tests, and more reliant on holistic measures of school success.The Department of Education plans to increase the weight of value-added measures, measure English language acquisition among nonnative speakers, promote career awareness instruction beginning at the elementary level, increase the weight of rigorous course offerings such as AP, IB, and "dual enrollment," allow districts to include locally selected reading assessments and math as additional snapshots of student progress, and award extra credit to schools graduating students with at least one industry recognized credential.