NJ Education Report

The Jersey papers are chock-full of stories and editorials today about the SRA scam in which kids who fail the High School Proficiency Assessment (HSPA) graduate anyway through the SRA. The HSPA itself is nothing to write home about: it assesses eighth grade skills and the passing grade is 50. If kids flunk it three times, they take the Special Review Assessment in which a teacher instructs the child on a small part of the material and then gives an assessment immediately with no time limits. James Ahearn of The Record reports today,

If a student fails a mini-quiz, the teacher does not accept defeat. Instead, she coaches him on the mini-content of the lesson and gives him a makeup quiz on it. The procedure can be repeated until finally (hooray!), he regurgitates the material satisfactorily.

Then it is on to the next bite-size lesson. Practically everybody who takes the SRA passes. Last year, more than 11,000 students did, 12 percent of all New Jersey seniors

Ahearn also reviews the D.O.E.’s assessment of its assessment, which yielded some surprising results: the kids who fail the HSPA and go on to take the SRA are not low-achievers. In fact,

Most [of the coursework taken by SRA-takers] were nominally college-prep courses. Ninety percent of the SRA students had taken, and passed, Algebra I. Eighty-six percent took and passed geometry. Ninety-one percent passed biology. Nearly three-quarters passed Algebra II, a course that, properly taught, is quite difficult. Bear in mind that all these students had flunked the middle-school-level HSPA.

In other words, it’s not the test that’s the problem; it’s the curriculum and instruction that is the problem.

Next, The Record Editorial Board worries that changing the SRA will lead to higher drop-out rates, but concludes that “it’s not working as it was meant to” since “almost no student ends up failing”:

State education officials say they are changing the alternative test so that it will be given over a matter of weeks, not months, and graded outside of the district, not by local teachers.

It remains to be seen whether these changes will end the two-tiered graduation system that exists in New Jersey. And without closing the achievement gap, far too many high school seniors will graduate deprived of the education they are entitled to.

Moving right along, the New Jersey Herald interviews D.O.E. spokesman Richard Vespucci, who says that over the years “we found increasing numbers of students taking the tests and schools were straying from their original purpose,” adding that the SRA “was not meant to be a back door to getting a diploma.” Good for him — we like plainspeak from the D.O.E. Local superintendents, however, are in a panic about because changes to the SRA will mean inevitably lower graduation rates.Superintent Joseph DiPasquale of Wallkill Valley Regional High School, for example, says the SRA really is worthwhile:

I think they (the state Board of Education) are going to run into several problems if they try to modify the assessment, especially in city schools. What people don’t realize is that so many of those students are transients and it’s difficult to keep them on task.

“Keep them on task?” Is that a euphemism for educating urban kids?

Vernon Township superintendent Anthony Macerino complains,

I do not know who comes up with these mass assumptions that the test is too easy. As is usually the case in New Jersey, we tend to correct inequities or wrongs with a broad brush.

Finally, the Daily Journal has an editorial today by Francis Reilly entitled “N.J. Exaggerating Educational Achievement,” which completes today’s Bartlett’s:

Derrell Bradford, executive director of Excellent Education for Everyone (E3), a New Jersey think tank, has called the SRA route to graduation “a conspiracy to disguise failure as success while propping up the state’s inflated graduation rate.”

Newark School Superintendent Clifford Janey says the SRA “has morphed into a culture of low expectations.”

Do we have a consensus, folks? With the exception of a few superintendents who live in dread that eliminating the SRA will tar their New Jersey Report Card numbers (the DOE measurement of individual districts which includes the number of kids who graduate) and their NCLB numbers (which also require a prescribed graduation rate), the educational illuminati of N.J. are in agreement: the SRA allows N.J. to conceal the fact that many of our kids leave high school without the means to proceed academically.

Can we look at that fact squarely? Can we concede that the SRA is a scam, a cosmetic injection of botox for New Jersey’s education rates? If we can’t look at our blemishes honestly, then the joke is on the kids.