State ELA, Math test results released

Last week, the state Department of Education released the results of this spring’s English Language Arts and math exams, and Bellmore-Merrick — a community that has been at the forefront of the statewide “opt out” movement — saw few changes from 2016.

According to Superintendent John DeTommaso, the Central High School District had the second-highest percentage of non-participating students, with roughly 73 percent of seventh- and eighth-grade students sitting out the exams.

With participation at that low a level, DeTommaso, said on Monday that the district has no reason to focus on the number of participating students found “proficient” — which stayed the same in ELA, and declined slightly in math.

“The data in Bellmore-Merrick is very skewed, because 70 percent of the kids don’t take it,” DeTommaso said. “So what do we do? We have 70 percent who opt out for the exam and that … really says it all.”

DeTommaso said that in Bellmore-Merrick, teachers and administrators are more focused on the dozens of quizzes, tests, projects and unit exams teachers give throughout the school year’s four marking periods and 40 weeks than the results of the standardized tests.

“A singular exam is never a true measure of a student’s performance,” he said.

The DOE found that statewide, the number of students taking the test who were found proficient in grades 3-8 went up by 1.9 percent, while math proficiency increased to 40.2 percent.

In Nassau County, of the roughly 50,000 students who took both tests (more students opted out of the math exam than ELA), 53 percent were found proficient in ELA, and 56 percent were found proficient in math.

According to the DOE, this year the percentage of students opting out of the exams actually declined from 21 to 19 percent.

In most Bellmore-Merrick schools, however, the number of students opting out either increased or stayed roughly the same.

And with such high numbers of students opting out, DeTomasso said in the spring, “Do you test in Bellmore-Merrick when 27 or 28 percent of the kids take the exam? If the opt-outs are such a significant number of kids, is there a validity to the test? I would probably lean toward no.”

The State Board of Regents approved a four-year moratorium in 2015 on using the annual state tests for students in grades three to eight for teacher evaluations or student promotion, which was among the 21 recommendations that a 15-member, governor-appointed task force came up with for re-evaluating the Common Core standards. The ban will last until the 2019-2020 school year.