Colorado Commissioner of Education Dwight Jones has been on the job less than two months, and he's been welcomed, as it were, with a set of disappointing scores on the Colorado Student Assessment Program.

Disappointing, because the CSAP is 11 years old, and significant numbers of students still cannot read, write or do math as well as they should. A third of all students score partially proficient or substandard in reading, and nearly half had lower-than-proficient scores in math.

And with the exception of a few bright spots, scores overall were basically flat.

Even those bright spots could be anomalies. For instance, 42 percent of eighth-graders scored proficient or advanced in science - a whopping 5 percentage point gain from 2006. An increase of more than a couple of points is unusual statewide, so we'll have to see if that positive trend continues.

Every bit of favorable news has the inevitable "but" attached. Math scores have increased consistently at every grade level since 2003. And yet 70 percent of 10th-graders score below proficient.

On the plus side, Coloradans can expect the "assessment" component of the CSAP process to improve over time. State officials will have more tools at their disposal to track students as they move through school. This information will give educators and the public a much better sense of whether students are advancing, treading water, or slipping behind. They can also be separated district-by-district, so that the methods of successful superintendents and teachers can be emulated elsewhere.

As an example, the Department of Education reported how well third-graders who took the reading test in 2005 scored on their fifth-grade tests this year. It turns out that 66.4 percent of third-graders with unsatisfactory scores did not advance to partially proficient or a higher level in fifth grade.

A similar pattern, though not always as pronounced, held for students who scored partially proficient and proficient in 2005. In none of the statistical breakdowns did more than half the students move to a higher level.

In a meeting with the Rocky last week, a clearly dissatisfied Jones said, "It looks like wherever we meet you, that's where you stay two years later." These initial reports suggest that students tend to stagnate, regardless of their race, gender, income and even school district size.

More diligent and detailed student tracking should help researchers, educators and the public discover which programs are succeeding and which ones should be discarded.

And that's one of the beauties of the CSAP. Had it not been for the insistence that the state require uniform testing of all students in the mid-1990s, the educational status of Colorado's kids might amount to little more than a host of anecdotes.

Thanks to the diligence of education reformers then, we have better ways of learning where students stand, so that struggling students get a fighting chance to learn.