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Mostly Cloudy Five Towns ELA, math test scores improve slightly
In Hewlett-Woodmere and Lawrence school districts opinions differ on ways to address student achievement
Officials in the Lawrence and Hewlett-Woodmere school districts continue to grapple with the issues that affect student performance as the results of this year’s New York State English Language Arts and math assessments showed slight increases in scores.
Laura Seinfeld, Hewlett-Woodmere’s assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction, said the district had an overall improvement in performance of 1 percent in both the ELA and math exams. “The aggregate performance in ELA was 70 percent in 2011 and 71 percent in 2012,” she said. “Similarly, in math, from 80 percent to 81 percent.”
But Hewlett-Woodmere Central Council PTA Co-presidents Linda Kreisman and Mitchell Greebel said they are not particularly pleased with the results. “It demonstrates that we are not scoring like an elite school district at this moment in time,” they wrote in an email to the Herald. “These tests, like many we subject our students to, are unfortunately often not meaningful gauges of what our students are capable of or true measures of their knowledge and grasp of subject matters.”
Instead of just tests, Kreisman and Greebel want student achievement assessed through what is called the portfolio approach, a record of students’ overall work on exams and in the classroom. “When students contribute to their own assessments, they have the ability to reflect upon themselves as learners as well as what they have accomplished,” they wrote. “With close supervision from teachers as mentors and co-contributors to the portfolio assessments, there is more team work and an honest conclusion of where a student is as a learner and what progress has been made.”
The Central Council PTA has asked for moratoriums on homework on weekends and during vacation periods, believing that students are bombarded with too many tests and too much homework. “The amount of testing our students are faced with is simply obscene,” Kreisman and Greebel wrote. “Between the state mandated tests, the never ending tests and large amounts of daily homework assignments, one can easily argue that we are not serving their educational needs.”
Taking a longer view
