BY LAYLI WHYTE
Staff Writer
RED BANK — The borough district schools are seeing a sustained and significant improvement in students’ scores on mandated tests, a school administrator said last week.
According to Dr. Elizabeth Keshish, assistant superintendent of the Red Bank Public School District, scores for the ASK 3 (Assessment of Skills and Knowledge Grade 3), the ASK 4, and the GEPA (Grade Eight Proficiency Assessment) exams have all risen since last year.
“We are pleased to announce,” said Keshish in a presentation at the Board of Education meeting last week, “a continuing trend of strong improvement on our ASK and GEPA scores.
“The overall improvement is the result of consistent, targeted curriculum, focused instruction by professional teachers and administrators, and the performance of diligent, engaged students,” Keshish said.
The GEPA scores showed a 10.7 percent increase in proficient and advanced proficient scores in mathematics, which is a 40 percent increase over the past two years, according to Keshish.
Also, according to Keshish, 84.9 percent of eighth-graders were proficient or advanced proficient in the science portion of the GEPA exam, and two of the district’s special education students received advanced proficient scores.
Also, in 2004 district students had 14 advanced proficient GEPA test scores, and in 2005, there were 23 advanced proficient scores.
The GEPA exam, according to Keshish, is a good indicator of how well a student will do when taking the High School Proficiency Assessment (HSPA) exam in grade 11.
“Students who test proficient or advanced proficient will not have to have a remediation in high school,” Keshish said. “Partially proficient students will be required to take remedial classes. The impact of that is that it greatly limits the electives that a student can take in high school.”
The threshold for proficient in the GEPA and ASK tests is a score of 200 or above, and advanced proficient is a score of 250 or above.
According to Keshish, the ASK 4 shows an increase of 15.8 percent proficient and advanced proficient in mathematics to total 71.4 percent of students in that range.
The English as a Second Language (ESL) students have shown improvement in their own right, said Keshish, by improving dramatically in all areas.
On the 2004 ASK 4 exams, the school had six ESL students taking the exams and none were proficient in language arts literacy. Only one ESL student was proficient in mathematics.
Now, according to the 2005 ASK 4
results presented by Keshish, of the 11 ESL students taking the exam, four were proficient in language arts literacy, eight were proficient in mathematics and two were advanced proficient in mathematics.
Last year, ASK 3 was added to the third-grade curriculum as a field test, and this year, it was administered as an operational test.
According to Keshish, test results for ASK 3 showed that 92.9 percent of third-grade students tested as proficient or advanced proficient in mathematics.
Starting next spring, there will be additional state mandated tests added to grades five, six and seven, but the content of those tests is still unknown to the
district.
“We don’t know the content,” Keshish said. “We don’t know the format. We know it will be here in spring of 2006.”
Keshish said that the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act requires that there be standardized tests every year from grades three through eight, beginning in 2006.
The goal of NCLB is that by 2014, 100 percent of students will be 100 percent proficient, including sub-groups, such as students with limited English proficiency and special education students.
“I think there is such a thing as over testing students,” Keshish said. “I don’t think one test a year is over testing, but we also have our own testing in our schools. We try to keep our tests for meaningful use, to drive instruction.”
Keshish said she thinks that although the HSPA exam, which determines whether or not a student can receive a diploma, is the test with the highest stakes, the other standardized tests can put added pressure on students.
“There is a lot of federal funding for NCLB,” said Keshish, “but not as much as needed to accomplish the task.”
Keshish said she does not believe that the federal government can fully appreciate what happens at the local level of running a school district.
“We have to work with the constraints of the state as well,” Keshish said.
Almost exactly one year ago, former Gov. James McGreevey signed into law S-1701, which places several caps on school spending, including limiting the amount of surplus a district can keep in its budget and cutting down on how much a budget can increase from year to year.
“I think they [the state and federal governments] are working at cross purposes,” Keshish said.
She said that she is not sure how the budget problems will affect the test scores, because the tests are mandated by the state and federal governments, but she does believe that the budget problems will take away what she calls “enrichment programs,” like the arts and technology.