By:Chris Munzing
The scores come from standardized tests given in fourth and eighth grade last spring, and the results were released last week. Among Long Beach Middle School eighth-graders, 78.3 percent met or exceeded the state standards on the test, compared with 78.5 percent last year.
Helen Cheliotes, assistant superintendent for curriculum, instruction and adult learning services, said that she was happy with how Long Beach students performed. "I think that we did fairly well," Cheliotes said, adding that the average for Nassau County was 77 percent. "You always want to get to 100 percent. And we're always working for 100 percent."
The fourth-grade numbers saw a more significant drop, from 94.1 of students meeting or exceeding state standards last year to 91.3 this year.
Cheliotes said that for some students, the structure of the test doesn't test their math skills as much as it does their reading comprehension. "It's very often not a math test," she said. "It's a reading test. There are a lot of word problems, and students who have trouble reading may not grasp the mathematics of the problem."
Lido Elementary led Long Beach schools, with 99.1 percent of fourth-graders meeting or exceeding state standards. Lindell School followed, with 98.8 percent, ahead of East School, with 84.8 percent, and West School, with 83.1 percent.
Superintendent of Schools Dr. Robert Greenberg said that each question on the tests would be analyzed to see how students scored on it and what the schools need to focus on. "What we don't want to do is teach the test," Greenberg said. "I think we need to do a better job of exposing our kids to problem-solving and ways to work out word problems. This test is less about doing computations than it is reading."
He added that the elementary schools included all of the special-education students in the test, which may have contributed to the slight drop in scores. "We include all of our students, which a lot of other schools don't," he said. "We don't leave anybody out."
