By JOSEPH KELLARD
In Oceanside, 93 percent of fourth-grade math students met or exceeded state standards, up a percentage point from last year. Fifty-six percent of eighth-graders met the reading/Language Arts standards, down from 69 percent. Fifty-three percent of eighth-grade math students hit the mark, which was down from 58 percent.
In Island Park, 95 percent of fourth-grade math students met the standards, up from 88 percent last year; 47 percent of eighth-graders met standards for reading/Language Arts, down from 61; and eighth-grade math students meeting the standards dropped from 62 to 48 percent.
Superintendent of Island Park Schools Edward Price wasn't happy with the results, but said comparing the scores to those of the previous year's students wasn't a fair assessment.
"Overall, the kids didn't do well, and we're not happy about it and we have to look at why this is happening," Price said. "But making comparisons from one year to the next is like comparing apples and oranges, since you are dealing with different students."
Enid D'Arrigo, Assistant Superintendent of Oceanside Schools, echoed Price's feelings.
"It's a different group of kids, so it's hard to make a meaningful comparison," D'Arrigo said. "[But] we're not happy with the drop, either."
The state curriculum and tests are in their third year, and next year's eighth grade students will be the first group to have taken the tests in both fourth and eighth grades.
"The scores from the eighth-grade tests for next year should yield more information and be a better predictor of student development," D'Arrigo believes. "Because if you have the same cohort of students, while taking some mobility into account, we would be able to take an individual child and see his or her progress, consistency and achievement based on these assessments from grades four to eight. That might be much more telling than the data that we have now."
Both Price and D'Arrigo expressed skepticism over the state tests as a comprehensive measure in assessing a child's development.
"The state should be able to tell us specifically in what areas is an individual child having difficulty," Price said, "so that we can begin with our academic intervention services program and have work that's really focusing on those areas of need. And the state tests don't give us that information. We need to know these things in order to address the instruction. The other tests which we give do provide that information, but the state test does not. Without that information, these things standing alone are still not adequate."
On this issue, D'Arrigo again echoed Price. "There's been a confluence of factors that have been both positive and negative. But the state doesn't give us a lot of the information we need to assess where the weakness are in the instructional program. They say they're program evaluation tests, but when a lot of the data isn't open to us so that our supervisors or directors are able to give an in depth analysis to the teachers, it's hard to use it to improve instruction."
Price said that to judge a student on the basis of one test, given on one or two days
