Rockville Centre schools superintendent: State math, ELA test results ‘hardly interpretable’

District uses other tests to measure student performance

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The state released the results of the state math and English Language Arts tests last week, but Rockville Centre Schools Superintendent Dr. William Johnson called the scores “hardly interpretable.”

A total of 66 percent of students in grades 3 through 8 who took the ELA exam were deemed proficient in the subject, meaning they scored a 3 or 4 on the test. On the math exams, 68 of Rockville Centre students were proficient. Both figures are nearly identical to last year’s results, and the proficiency levels are well above the state average of 45 percent on both tests.

But 53.2 percent and 59 percent of Rockville Centre students opted out of the state math and ELA exams, respectively.

“We can look at the individual scores for each child and then we can hopefully use them effectively to help us understand how each individual student who took the exam is performing,” Johnson said. “But in terms of taking a look at groups of students, since there are so many people missing from each one of those groups, it’s almost uninterpretable data.”

Johnson said the district supplements the state scores with data from the Northwest Evaluation Association’s adaptive electronic test, which serves as an alternative to the traditional state exams.

A known critic of Common Core, Johnson has been a proponent of the NWEA adaptive test in recent years and has publicly expressed hope that the state would adopt a similar style test for its purposes.

Students take online NWEA exams in September, January and June. It measures students’ math and ELA knowledge and is “adaptive,” Johnson explained. As students answer questions correctly, the test gets more challenging, he said, and if a student is struggling, questions then reflect a level of difficulty the student is more comfortable with.

Johnson noted of the NWEA exams, “It is what I consider to be the wave of the future.”