Tuesday marked the first day of the controversial state-mandated testing at public schools across New York and the percentage of students who refused to sit for the exams in the Riverhead school district slightly decreased compared to last year’s total opt-out numbers.
Tag: state assessments
Assessment results for students at the Riverhead Charter School show proficiency rates of 34 percent on English Language Arts tests taken in April 2016 — a 12 percent improvement — and a slight increase to 33 percent proficiency in math, according to the state Department of Education.
Imagine you’re at home, it’s a little more than two weeks before school starts and you get a letter in the mail that begins as follows: “In accordance with the Elementary and Secondary Education Act’s flexibility waiver, the State Education Department issued a new institutional accountability system that monitors student proficiency and growth based on subgroup analysis.”
While this year’s student proficiency scores showed overall improvement statewide, local superintendents say that recent changes in testing design and implementation mean those results don’t reflect student performance accurately.
For the past few years, parents and educators have rallied against the state’s latest system of so-called high-stakes testing, which ties teacher evaluations to the controversial Common Core standards. Their principal strategy has been the opt-out movement, under which students refuse to take mandated assessment tests.
In response to the large numbers of students who have opted out of state-mandated testing in previous years, New York State education officials recently compromised by agreeing to hold off until 2020 on tying test results to teacher ratings.
The number of students opting out of state-mandated math assessments this year increased across the board on the North Fork, mirroring a trend seen last week with the required English Language Arts tests.
A large percentage of students in Riverhead and Shoreham-Wading River refused to take the state-mandated English Language Arts assessment Tuesday, according to numbers provided by school officials.