State to Increase Standardized Student Testing in 2014-15

State officials announced last week that beginning in the 2014-15 school year, students in New Jersey schools will spend roughly three more hours per year undergoing annual tests than current testing requires, according to a published report.

The new online tests, officials said, will help teachers better understand students’ needs, a Wednesday NorthJersey.com report said.

"The adoption of the common core standards is a very positive step in the right direction and I am supportive of the more rigorous standards and expectations that comes with the adoption of the common core," Interin Superintendent of West Orange Schools James O'Neill said.

However not all educators and parents are convinced of the effectiveness of the test, saying the new tests will drain more instructional time and increase pressure to “teach to the test,” especially at a time when teachers’ evaluations will be linked in part to their students’ progress on tests, the report said.

O'Neill agreed and said, "we test students too often currently and the plan is to test them more; we create too much stress surrounding tests and we are going to create more; I don’t believe we should test students in this manner in 3^rd and 4^th grade.  The logistics of testing hundreds of students multiple days is challenging and disruptive especially when we take into account all of the special arrangements we need to make for classified students who require testing accommodations."

A 22-state, federally funded consortium known as the Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) is developing the new tests for math and language arts. The tests are supposed to reflect what students must learn by each grade according to a new set of voluntary national standards called the Common Core. These standards, put in place this year, aim to be more coherent, clear and rigorous than many states had before.

Some district officials have questioned whether the tests would dominate their schools’ computers during test days. The state is now surveying districts to see if they expect to have enough computers and bandwidth. The consortium recommends that a school with 100 students in its largest grade have at least 50 devices: half the students could take the test in the morning, half in the afternoon.

"For this positive step in creating a more contemporary 21 century education to be diminished by high stakes testing for young students and to have that followed by teacher evaluations that satisfy our desire to measure everything is a complete distortion and misuse of the way tests should be used," O'Neill added. "Having said that I will concede that the recognition that a growth model is far superior to what the state has used in the past is movement in a positive direction."

Another issue plaguing districts is the cost of the new tests. Currently, a federal grant is paying for the test development, but paying for future costs of the test in New Jersey are unclear.