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.
Imagine that. Forcing the schools to focus on material like reading, writing, history, math, and science. That will never do.
Did you see Jay Leno the other night doing his Jay Walk at a college? None knew that the moon controls the tides, they did not know what FBI meant, none knew the phrase "if you can't stand the heat, get out of the ________" and they did not know who said it. It's getting bad in America. Read "None Dare Call it Education" by John Stormer.
NJ takes out the old, white men George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, etc. out of the Curriculum.In addition they want the word "war" replaced with "conflict" and the words Pilgrim and Puritan taken out for it's religious connotation
But it's OK to have a Ramadan table in the school cafeteria.
This would, unfortunately, render the tests meaningless. In the past when they are employed this way, they have simply buried in the files of the individual student.
Where to begin? While the Abbott decision may not OFFICIALLY have been settled, NJ has acted like it accepts it. The 30 Abbott districts already receive a huge subsidy, so their students are getting well over the average of suburban districts. I'll bet you didn't get that impression from the NYT article, did you?
You can see it for yourself online at the page of comparative statistics." . Here is a list of Abbott districts.
With all the waste and mismanagement in some of those districts, no wonder their children end up short-changed.
:-)
You gotta love Governor McGreevey. He made a promise to cave in to the teacher's unions on everything -- and by golly, he's going to keep it!
New Jersey has crossed the Rubicon and taken the concept of "Dumbing Down" in a whole new direction. Many of the college level interns we use here at work are products of the local South Jersey upscale suburban high schools... they can barely string two sentences together in writing without losing track of the tense, voice, or even the idea they wanted to convey. These kids are studying engineering. It appears that, even in upscale districts with strong science and math programs, schools are letting kids get away with being AWOL in the subjects that don't interest them.
NJ isn't just "dumbing down," it's "stupiding up."
And, of course, they will dumb down the educational system so much we will soon have a workforce that is brainwashed as well as dumb.
Gordon MacInnes is an ultra-liberal J.K. Galbraith look-alike. He got elected on a fluke and was kicked out after one term. Darned right his implementation of Abbott will be "expensive"! Count on MacInnes to waste money ultra-liberally.
a high-quality preschool program for poor districts
This provision of Abbott mandates universal "pre-school" in so-called poor districts -- all, of course, at the expense of state taxpayers. The NJ Supreme Court has forced NJ taxpayers to fund Hillary's "village."
Why are you keeping such a close eye on this stuff? Wouldn't happen to be your job, would it?
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