Over sixty percent opt out of ELA test in RVC

The Rockville Centre School District saw a slight increase in the number and percentage of third- through eighth-grade students who opted out of the New York State English Language Arts assessments last week, and the latter figure — 61.9 percent — was among the highest in Nassau County.

According to school officials, 1,011 students did not sit for the tests, which were administered March 28-30, 15 more than last year. Last year, 60.1 percent of eligible students opted out of the ELA exams.

Just over half of all Long Island students elected not to take the tests, though only 44 percent of those who sat out were in Nassau County.

Rockville Centre Schools Superintendent Dr. William Johnson cited the state’s inability to reduce the number of testing days from three to two as the main reason why the opt-out numbers remained high. “It’s more of the same,” he said. “The state didn’t make the changes we thought they might make, and so the parents are not going to change their response.”

The exams consisted of multiple-choice questions, and essay questions based on reading passages. Last year, teachers gave their input on the format of the tests, and students, for the first time, were given extra time to complete them.

The parents of just over half of the 280 third-graders in the district’s five elementary schools, the youngest students who take the test, held their children out. Last year’s third-grade opt-out rate was just under 47 percent. The highest percentage of opt-outs last week was in the eighth grade — 75.8 — and the sixth grade saw a jump of about 8 percentage points, to 64.3 percent.

Rockville Centre resident Barbara Barker again kept her daughter, Alisa, now an eighth-grader, from taking the exam. Alisa sat for the test when she was a third-grader at Covert Elementary School, but her mother decided against it in the following years, she said, because of the stress it put on Alisa and her son, Chris, who is now a student at the high school.

“I feel like it’s an injustice to the children that have to suffer through it,” Barker said.

Leslie Rose has daughters in the sixth and seventh grade at South Side Middle School, and neither has taken the ELA or math exam since 2013, when her oldest girl was a third-grader at Covert.

“This isn’t just about New York state tests, but about protecting public education as we know it,” Rose said. “The current tests are still based on Common Core state standards, and there’s no sign of those standards going away any time soon.”

Her children will resume taking the exams, she said, “when the tests are based on appropriate standards and readability levels, and when the tests are actually used to enhance … instruction. They will take them when there is no 50 percent teacher evaluation piece tied to a state law, moratorium or not.”

In December 2015, the New York Board of Regents passed a moratorium that suspended the use of student test scores in teacher performance reviews for four years.

Johnson has been a outspoken critic of Common Core testing, noting that state exams do not adequately measure students’ achievement or progress, and that the district has several other measures by which it gauges learning. The district uses tests developed by the Northwest Evaluation Association, which Johnson has said are superior measures of student progress.

NWEA tests take 45 minutes, instead of three days, to complete, and teachers and parents receive the results within a week, not months later, as is the case with the state assessments. Teachers can immediately identify subject areas in which students are struggling, and tailor lessons to help them.

The state math test will be administered in May.