Of the several swaths of data the Mineola School District uses to evaluate students’ academic progress, New York’s state tests carry the least weight, school officials said Thursday.
This year’s changes to the tests for third- through eighth-graders, combined with the continued strength of the opt-out movement against tests aligned with the controversial Common Core curriculum, render the scores almost meaningless when it comes to measuring growth, Superintendent Michael Nagler said.
“Even though we’re showing growth on the state tests, I think it’s disingenuous to actually promote that as a good thing,” Nagler said after Thursday’s Mineola school board meeting.
Some 45 percent of Mineola students passed the state math test this spring, up from 36 percent last year, state data shows.
The district’s English language arts passing rate remained flat at 52 percent.
This year’s state exams had fewer questions, no time limit and a lower minimum passing score, leading test results to appear inflated this year, Nagler said.
State education officials say the test was improved with input from teachers and is so different that it’s impossible to compare the results to last year’s.
Proof of the tests’ unreliability lies in the fact that 88 percent of eighth-graders taking this year’s Common Core algebra exam passed, while only 43.2 percent passed the seventh-grade math test last year, Nagler said.
The Northwest Evaluation Association’s Measures of Academic Progress exam is a more reliable indicator of student progress toward the district’s goal of graduating students with advanced diplomas, Nagler said.
The online test measures where students stand when they take it at the beginning of the year, sets academic goals and measures progress when students take it again in the spring, he said.
Students outperformed their English benchmarks this year in all grades except fourth, and all grades except third surpassed their math benchmarks, Nagler said.
“A state test definitely has a place, but I’m not sure how much emphasis I would want to put on that state test,” said the school board president, Christine Napolitano. “I would rather look at a whole bunch of other indicators.”
While the state Regents exams for high-schoolers do not have the same confounding factors, Mineola’s high school data is complicated by a high rate of students entering and leaving at some point during their career, about 9 percent on average, Nagler said.
Many of those students speak little or no English, making it harder for them to graduate in four years, he said.
But the district still tries to help them earn advanced diplomas, as it does for every student, he said.
The class of 2016 was an anomaly with about 61 percent of students graduating with advanced Regents diplomas, less than the usual rate around 70 percent, Nagler said.
Twenty-four of the 37 graduates who formerly took English as a second language got advanced diplomas, he said.
“It never should be any belief that our kids that don’t speak English can’t do what everybody else does. They just don’t know the language,” Nagler said. “As soon as they learn the language, look at the performance they do.”
The district expects advanced graduation rates to recover, as 66 percent of rising seniors have already qualified for advanced diplomas, Nagler said. That’s been helped in part by a push for more students to enroll in chemistry and trigonometry, he said.
