Math test leads to more Rockville Centre opt-outs

Rockville Centre’s refusal to participate in state testing continued with the Math exams last week, but the trend did not carry over to St. Agnes Cathedral School.

Once again, 60 percent of students — 811 in all — opted out of the Math assessment last week, which was given from April 13 through 15. The number of students opting out in each grade remained mostly the same, with the only noticeable change being seven more students in third grade refusing the test.

Opting out began a few years ago, when parents started to protest what they felt were overly difficult tests being administered to students as part of the Common Core Curriculum. Common Core is an attempt to create more rigorous national education standards to prepare students for college and careers out of high school.

Rockville Centre has been a hotbed of opt-out activity and has routinely had some of the highest opt-out numbers on Long Island. Many district officials, from the superintendent down, have spoken out against the tests.

But at St. Agnes Cathedral School, things are very different from the public schools. Because St. Agnes is private, it can choose whether it wants to administer the state exams. It only tests students in grades 4 and 6, instead of 3 through 8 like the public schools.

Only three St. Agnes students in both grades opted out of the ELA test in the first week of the month. And four opted out of the math test.

“The test is important, but the emphasis isn’t exactly the same,” said Helen Newman, St. Agnes co-principal. “Our teachers were never evaluated [in the same way].” In public schools, student performance on the exams is used as a measure of teacher performance.

St. Agnes also differs in what it does with students who opt out: they keep the students home.

“We don’t allow them to come to school,” Newman said. “They have to stay home until the test is completed. And since it was untimed this year, they came in at 11 a.m.”

In the public schools, because there are so many students opting out, those students are taken to different rooms from those that are taking the test and given educational activities to do, like reading and packets of work. However, they are not given any new lessons, because that would put them ahead of the students taking the tests. They’re also not given anything that’s too fun or interesting, because the district doesn’t want the students taking the tests to feel like they’re missing anything.