North Shore school district officials said students who recently opted out of the state assessment in English Language Arts reflect the concerns of parents and school administrators with a teacher evaluation system that relies heavily on student test scores and a fumbled rollout of the Common Core standards.
About 15.7 percent of students eligible to take the exam in the East Williston, Herricks, Manhasset, Mineola, New Hyde Park-Garden City Park and Roslyn school districts refused to take the exam, according to figures obtained by Blank Slate Media, joining more than 65,000 students on Long Island and more than 100,000 throughout New York, according to various published reports.
“What we need to see are substantive changes in the assessment and teacher evaluation system that allow for local districts to play a more prominent role in what needs to be done in those areas. Right now, we’re working with a very top-down approach,” said Manhasset school Superintendent Charles Cardillo, whose district had 56 of 1,554 eligible students (3.6 percent) opt out of the exam.
Of the North Shore districts that reported students opting out of the English-Language Arts assessment, Roslyn had the highest percentage — 32.5 percent — with 480 of the eligible 1,475 students choosing not to sit for the exam.
Less than 20 percent of eligible Herricks students (228 of 1,771 eligible, 12.9 percent) and Mineola students (229 of 1,254 eligible, 18.3 percent) opted out of the exam, while 21.1 percent of the 810 East Williston students refused to take the assessment.
“The New York State tests tell us very little we don’t already know in a lot of other ways — and that’s not necessarily true of all districts in the state,” said Herricks Superintendent of Schools John Bierwirth. “But for the state to suggest as some have that tests are the only way parents and teachers can know how students are doing is wrong and I find it offensive.”
Neither the Great Neck nor Port Washington school districts released the percentage of eligible students that did not take the state assessment, but Great Neck officials said the district would consider releasing the numbers after the state math exam.
Great Neck Superintendent of Schools Tom Dolan said the district would not take a formal position on whether students should opt out of the assessments, saying it is a family decision, but noted that some Great Neck students did opt out of the exam.
He said the statewide trend of students opting out “indicates that students and parents find the tests poorly constructed and used inappropriately to measure teacher effectiveness.”
“These tests are not designed to measure teacher effectiveness, and yet New York State persists in advocating that career decisions for teachers should be based on student performance on these privately constructed instruments,” he added.
New Hyde Park-Garden City Park Superintendent Ralph Katulak echoed Dolan’s assertion that opting out of a state exam is a decision that should be left up to parents, but said “I personally have no issues with the [Common Core] standards.”
“In a global, competitive society you have to keep raising the bar to make sure we’re keeping pace with everybody else, but it has to be developmentally appropriate,” Katulak said.
About 23.8 percent of the 977 New Hyde Park-Garden City Park students eligible to take the exam opted out, district officials said.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo proposed changes to the teacher evaluation system in his 2015 budget plans that placed 50 percent of an educator’s rating on student test performance and 50 percent on the observations of outside school administrators and education professionals. Previously, student exam performance accounted for 40 of a possible 100 points on a teacher’s evaluation.
When the budget was approved, the new evaluations were included but without specific percentages attached, resulting in widespread disgust among school officials who said the evaluations did not place enough control in the hands of individual districts.
“It does nothing to help students and will do nothing to foster the professional dialogue and collaboration that is essential to helping New York’s already strong teaching force become stronger,” the New York State Union of Teachers, among the system’s largest opponent, said in a statement following the announcement in March that a budget agreement had been reached. “Ironically, this will only make it harder for school districts in impoverished communities to attract and retain the excellent teachers that students need and deserve.”
In its statement, the union also suggested the new teacher evaluations contributed to parents pulling their students from the state assessments, given each year in English-Language Arts and Mathematics to students between 3rd and 8th grades and in Science for 4th and 8th grade students.
“This has been an issue for the last three, four years, though it’s only really taken hold the beginning of last year,” Cardillo said. “What we have seen with the exit of [former state Education] Commissioner [John B.] King is recognition that change is long overdue on these issues than what has been imposed at the state level.”
King, who resigned from his post in January after accepting a position with the Obama administration, was instrumental in securing the $700 million federal Race to the Top education grant, which led to the implementation of the Common Core standards and, with it, a controversial rollout and increased testing that has been maligned by educators, administrators and parents.
Bierwirth and Cardillo said they support a state teacher evaluation process, and that student exam performance is a valuable factor in determining an educator’s value.
But Bierwirth said alternative testing methods, such as online adaptive exams that adjust automatically to the level of the student taking it, could be shorter in length while being more accurate metrics of teacher performance and student achievement. He added that the Common Core’s shift in focus to problem solving and conceptual learning is a step in the right direction, but by no means perfect.
“We want kids to know times tables, but we also want them to know whether the problem being posed to them is a multiplication or division problem and how to use the math to solve the problem,” Bierwirth said. “Conceptually, it’s the right direction. The rollout, however, has been bungled, and the details of the standards could use some tweaking by the professionals.”
James Galloway and Adam Lidgett contributed reporting.
