Two-thirds of Central District students opt out of state exams

A little under 50 percent of Bellmore-Merrick Central High School District seventh-graders passed the New York State English Language Arts exam and just over 56 percent passed the math test, according to the State Education Department.

Roughly 55 percent of eighth-graders passed the ELA exam, and just under 26 percent, the math exam.

These results, however, are in many ways meaningless, according to David Seinfeld, the Central District’s assistant superintendent for instruction. That’s because 60 to 70 percent of district students opted out of the exams, he said.
And, Seinfeld noted, he doesn’t think the number of opt-outs will diminish in the near future. “I suspect it will continue,” he said.

Without a representative sampling of students taking the state tests, it’s impossible to tell precisely how well the seventh- and eighth-grade classes would have performed as a whole this past spring, according to Seinfeld.

The number of students tested ranged from a low of 129 for the eighth-grade math test to a high of 328 for the seventh-grade ELA test. The number of students taking the eighth-grade math test was particularly low because eighth-graders in accelerated Algebra I, who had to take a Regents exam, were exempt from the eighth-grade math assessment.

State officials have suggested that school districts could lose federal funding if 95 percent of students within their borders do not sit for the state exams. Seinfeld noted, however, that the federal government would have to penalize nearly every district on Long Island and hundreds more across the state.

The “opt-out movement” began as a small, grassroots social-media campaign in North Bellmore and rapidly ballooned into a statewide movement demanding that the state scale back the number of state exams as well as their difficulty level. Many parents contend that the exams, based around the new Common Core State Standards, are one to two grade levels above their children’s abilities.
Statewide, more than 200,000 students –– or 20 percent of the total –– opted out of the grades three-to-eight state exams. On Long Island, the opt-out rate reached 40 percent.