District Position on High Stakes Testing
The state assessment system has garnered much attention in the last few years and while we do not like expending excessive classroom time administering assessments, we believe the current assessments hold a place in the overall monitoring of a child’s achievement. The District continually collects information about a child’s progress gauged against a set of standards, both state and locally developed. It is essential to us that we are able to monitor in an ongoing fashion, whether or not a child is achieving those standards at a rate that will provide him/her with the knowledge and skills to be successful once he/she graduates from Brighton. State assessments are one such measure and provide an additional metric of an individual student’s capabilities. Because we don’t use these scores as the sole measure of achievement, we believe they better enable us to triangulate a child’s achievement against our other local measures. In addition, the state assessments allow us to benchmark our instructional programs against other districts from across New York State. Without these data, we lack a context to ensure that we are providing our students with the best possible education.
We believe that ongoing monitoring and targeted instruction are what help a child to be successful. Our goal is not to incite anxiety in him/her by the state assessments, but rather, instill an overall disposition of perseverance and confidence to tackle tasks that may be challenging. These we believe, are the lifelong lessons that can be learned from the New York State assessments.
New to test administration this year will be the use of computer based testing for our ELA tests at French Road and Twelve Corners. While each grade level assessment is still two days in length, because of the need for enough devices for an entire grade, we will be spreading the testing over six days. Parents received information about this assessment in March. Math assessments will remain paper based for this year's test administration.
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