Posted on 02/08/2002 4:12:56 PM PST by summer
February 8, 2002
New Jersey Schools Commissioner Suggests Eliminating Some Tests
By RONALD SMOTHERS
Responding to concerns among parents and teachers, New Jersey's new education commissioner has proposed eliminating several of the state's assessment tests for grades 4, 8 and 11.
Under the plan, unveiled just a month before the next round of testing, Commissioner William L. Librera would also modify the fourth-grade exam to become more of a diagnostic tool for individual needs rather than a measure of how one school or district is doing compared with another.
Dr. Librera's proposals come as a growing number of schools across the country protest the use of standardized testing, saying it limits creativity in the classroom and forces schools to focus narrowly on the material in the tests. Similar complaints have arisen in New Jersey since it began the testing four years ago, but defenders of the tests say they are important tools for making schools accountable.
Mr. Librera said yesterday that his plan was the fulfillment of a campaign pledge by the new governor, James E. McGreevey, to rein in standardized testing, which the governor and others say is stifling teaching and curriculum innovation, and subjecting elementary students to unnecessarily long and stressful exam sessions.
Central to the changes is the proposed elimination of state tests in subject areas like social studies and science, which often turned the tests into four- or five-day affairs for all three grades. Under Dr. Librera's plan, testing would be limited to language arts and mathematics for all of the 1.2 million elementary and secondary school students in the state's 566 school districts.
The tests for fourth graders would cease to be graded at the state level and scores reported for comparison when published six months later. Starting with next month's tests, local districts would do the grading themselves, so the results would be immediately available for each student, to help fine- tune curriculums and highlight individual strengths and weaknesses.
The commissioner announced his proposals on Wednesday in a surprise presentation during a State Board of Education meeting.
Some board members are said to be wary of the changes, so the commissioner has scheduled a Feb. 20 meeting to air opinions from board members and the public. But Dr. Librera said that he believed the law allowed him to make the changes without board approval, and that he had asked the state attorney general for a legal opinion.
While some said Dr. Librera's plans favored diagnostic tests over accountability measures, he said in an interview that that was too simplistic.
"The answer is that these tests are for both diagnostic and for accountability purposes," he said. "But at this point there were reasons to do this differently, and in so doing there were opportunities diagnostically that didn't exist before."
Dr. Librera said the changes were necessary now because the state's new goal of achieving literacy by the third grade was incompatible with current tests that did not begin until the fourth grade. He also noted that the state's exams were incompatible with new federal requirements that testing be done in language arts and mathematics in every grade from third to eighth as a condition for receiving some federal money.
Kathy Christie, vice president of the Education Commission for the States, said that the New Jersey proposal to pare down the test subjects was in line with national trends.
Around New Jersey, the reaction to Dr. Librera's plan was mixed.
Frederick Stokley, superintendent of the affluent Ridgewood School District in Bergen County, called it "a giant step in the right direction." He said that educators have long felt that the comparisons of test scores — especially for fourth graders — measured only the relative socioeconomics of the districts or schools.
"We used to like to point out that the test scores say more about the value of houses in an area than about the effectiveness of the schools," said Dr. Stokley, whose district generally ranks very high.
Joanne Kenny, the assistant superintendent of Jersey City schools, praised the proposed elimination of the long testing periods that the district's fourth graders suffered through each year. But she was a bit wistful about the potential loss of the comparisons among districts and schools that, she said, give the poor urban districts "a goal to shoot for."
Mary O'Malley, executive director of New Jersey United for Higher School Standards, a two-year-old coalition of business and education groups, said she was concerned that accountability might suffer.
For the Princeton Regional School System, said Jeffrey Graber, assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction, the changes would mean less bureaucracy, and more instructional time for teachers. The problem, he said, was finding the money to train personnel to grade the tests and extract data from them.
Two words: Dumbing Down
Says it all!
What I've noticed about most of my students is they don't have good reading, math, or thinking skills, and they are lacking a certain core of knowledge.
They do have good self-esteem, however.
In 6th grade social studies/history I ended up teaching the basic paragraph as only about 20 % of the kids could write effectively. So, I hear you.
Why don't we scrap tests altogether, get rid of the 3 R's and replace it with courses in self esteem and the plight of every professional victim group imaginable, give all the little shithead darlings A's in everything, pay teachers on average 150% of what people who do real jobs make with complete job security and no accountability and...wait...
...we already do all these things.
Nevermind.
WHY NOT?
New Jersey Commissioner Suggests Eliminating CHILD LABOR LAWS [for grades 4, 8 and 11]
/sarcasm
Always follow the money, right? :)
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