The board joined a statewide effort against a standardized state test for fourth-graders.
By: David Dankwa
MONTGOMERY— The township Board of Education has joined a statewide effort to garner legislative support against the Elementary Student Performance Assessment test (ESPA) for fourth-graders.
The ESPA, along with the Grade Eight Proficiency Assessment (GEPA), was administered to fourth- and eighth-graders, respectively, for the first time last spring.
But it was the ESPA that sent shock waves thoughout school districts across the state.
By a 6-0 vote Monday night, the board approved a resolution citing the test as “developmentally inappropriate” for fourth-graders.
The resolution said that the test “detracts from much needed instructional time in the core curriculum, creates a stressful situation for students at this level, has not been shown to be a validated or properly norm referenced assessment and has resulted in the generation of unnecessary and questionable individual improvement plans for almost forty percent of the state’s students.”
The resolution will support the state Association of School Administrators’ efforts to work closely with other state professional organizations and the state legislature to eliminate the test.
“If our educators don’t think it’s effective, then something has to be done,” said board President Linda Romano. Ms. Romano said the test poses undue stress on students, and either has to be improved or totally abolished.
“It’s incredibly hard,” she said. “It’s unnecessary.”
When the test results were released in October, Superintendent of Schools Dr. Jamie Savedoff described the tests as “very rigorous,” especially for the fourth-graders, and said the way it was conducted raises questions about it’s validity.
“Its too broad and too ambitious,” he said.
But in a letter to The Packet in December, David C. Hespe, the state’s commissioner of education, defended the test.
“They are diagnostic tools designed to detect areas of strength, or areas of weakness, so course corrections can be plotted,” he wrote.
“Predictably, a large number of students did not fare as well as their parents, teachers and school were used to,” Mr. Hespe wrote. “This is not unusual. Whenever standards are raised, test results drop at the outset, but progress comes quickly — and progress is what we expect to see in the coming years.”
Montgomery students did well in math and science, but faired poorly in language arts compared to the state average. Reported in three levels — “partially proficient,” “proficient” and “advanced proficient” — less than 3 percent of fourth-graders who took the tests scored in the “advanced proficient” category in the language arts section of the test.
In the mathematics section of the test, however, the results showed that 41.4 percent scored “advanced proficient,” 45.2 “proficient” and only 13.4 “partially proficient.”