BOE Asks State to Send Test Results By End of School Year

Cranford school officials formally asked the New Jersey Department of Education to release standardized test scores before the end of the school year, and to reinstate its policy of providing three test scorers to look over the exams.

State Commissioner of Education Lucille Davy addressed Cranford Board of Education concerns regarding the New Jersey Assessment of Skills and Knowledge (NJ ASK) standardized test at a meeting on Monday night.

NJ ASK is a statewide-standardized test for students in grades three through eight. The exam is the state's way of complying with federal education mandates. It tests a student's proficiency in language arts, mathematics and science on an annual basis.

Board members asked Davy to reinstate the NJ ASK schedule and policies from before the 2008-2009 school year. During that time, the exams were conducted in March and released in June. Two scorers looked over the exams, while a third was available in case of disagreement.

Test results were not delivered to Cranford school officials until August in the 2008-2009 school year, making it difficult know which students to enroll in summer and early fall remedial programs, and which teachers to hire for those programs.

"It's going to come to you late in the game, " Davy said. "Even if you get it by the third week in June, that's still pretty late. Your teachers are doing assessments of your students throughout the school year, my sense is that you're making those decisions along the way."

Davy asked the Cranford school district to use the exams as a tool in gauging a student's progress in learning, but not the only tool.

"It's as a factor, it may tip the scales, it just doesn't have enough on it to be something that I would let be the deciding factor," she said. "To me it's more useful to you on a class level rather than for individual students."

Cranford school officials spoke of their concerns regarding the clean-cut nature of the results. They worried that a student's learning ability cannot be clearly noted by state-mandated definitions.

"The challenge for us is the political nature of those three categories: advanced proficient, proficient and partially proficient," said Superintendent Gayle Carrick. "We do look to see how planted each student is in the proficient categories, but the state test has always been such a 'teach to the test' concern that people have."

"The bar at 200 is 50 percent, that's not enough in my mind," Davy said. "In a criterion reference test that shows what students learned that year… that bar, in my mind should be higher."