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Njspotlight.com - 1)New School Choices Give Students More Room to Roam...State names 56 additional inter-district options, with openings for some 3,000 student... and, 2)State Signs on to Help Develop Tomorrow's Tests... New Jersey joins governing board of next-generation assessment effort
Education Week - Assessment Consortia: New Shifts in Membership
Njspotlight.com - New School Choices Give Students More Room to Roam State names 56 additional inter-district options, with openings for some 3,000 students.
By John Mooney, April 15 in Education
New Jersey's modest start in opening up public school boundaries a decade ago is about to see a major expansion, with the state yesterday adding 56 more districts that can accept students outside their borders.
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New Jersey Inter-District School Choice SiteNew Choice Districts and ApplicationsThe inter-district choice program that began mostly to ease enrollment declines in South Jersey will be making big inroads – and some innovative turns -- into the north, in suburban enclaves in Morris, Somerset and especially Hunterdon Counties.
Overall, next year will see 71 participating districts able to accept nearly 3,000 students not their own.
The Inter-District Difference
Different from charter schools or private vouchers, the program beginning under former Gov. Christine Whitman blurred school boundaries and let students travel outside their districts for public education.
With pretty tight limits set by the state and the legislature, a dozen districts signed up to accept outside students, most in South Jersey, and a few hundred students took the leap.
The expansion comes after the legislature last year significantly loosened the limits from a previous cap of one choice district per county, and then Gov. Chris Christie more than doubled the pot of state aid for such districts by adding another $12 million for next year.
But they are changing in purpose, too, not just filling empty seats but also bolstering specialized programs that help local districts compete with the likes of the charter schools and the county magnets.
In Morris County, according to state officials, Morris Knolls High School will offer seats to its rigorous International Baccalaureate program, and its sister Morris Hills will use the program to help fill out a new math and science academy.
In Springfield’s Dayton High School, it will help fill out Advanced Placement offerings in the school. At Glassboro High School, it’s a performing arts academy, and in Northern Burlington Regional, the agricultural program.
"People wanted to use it for areas of specialization, with charters and county schools growing more and more specialized," said Valarie Smith, director of the state’s inter-district choice office. "A light went on of more competition, where they saw they could now build their own."
Picking Up the Tab
It also didn’t hurt in these economic times that there is money attached, with the state paying typically about $10,000 per student, plus plans to include additional state aid in the future.
For some districts, it’s new state money for outside students –- oftentimes the children of teachers -- already attending their schools but forced to pay a tuition. Now, the state will pay.
Morris Schools are opening up their schools for students to attend the Normandy Park School. The school board’s president told Morristown Patch that it was as much an economic decision, with many students already paying.
"When every penny counts, you have to figure out ways to increase revenue,” said Lisa Pollack, the board president said.
Deal schools was another such case, state officials said, with 76 outside students already paying tuition, but now with the state program picking up the cost, it will mean even more money to the district.
Of course, all of this will depend on how many students end up choosing to attend these districts. After a tepid start in some districts in the late 1990s, the enrollments have grown in many of the existing programs.
Single-School District
Among the most notable is Folsom’s one-school district in Atlantic County, where the choice program practically saved the school from extinction, and its 157 outside students are now almost half the enrollment. Another 30 seats are available for next year.
(In the first such arrangement, Folsom’s receiving high school in Hammonton was among those approved yesterday, now providing a full K-12 path for these students.)
Elsewhere, Englewood City has used the program to address a decades-old desegregation order and created a specialized magnet at Dwight Morrow High School, enrolling more than 200 outside students and helping diversify a school that had been predominantly minority students.
For the next school year, the application process for students to attend any of these schools has been expedited, and they will have two weeks to apply. Details of how to do so are on the local and state websites.
Still, a prime sponsor of the new legislation that helped open up the program statewide said yesterday that the interest and all the different uses being envisioned are more than she would have dreamed when she started pressing for the new law two years ago.
"This is really the intent of the program all along," said state Assemblywoman Mila Jasey (D-Essex). "It creates an efficiency and allows for this kind of creativity. I’m very excited about this.
Njspotlight.com - State Signs on to Help Develop Tomorrow's Tests
New Jersey joins governing board of next-generation assessment effort
By John Mooney, April 19 in Education |Post a Comment
As testing drives state education policy more and more, New Jersey has formally signed on with a national group developing the next generation of standardized tests, ones that take place over the course of the school year and could have computers asking the questions.
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PARCC WebsiteAlgebra Test Letter to DistrictsAt the same time, the state also has informed districts that this spring’s administration of a separate algebra test would be the last, at least for now, as the new exams are brought on board in the coming years. Other tests will remain in place for the time being.
Achieve Inc., a non-profit group out of Washington, D.C., is developing the new tests. It announced Friday that New Jersey has agreed to be a governing board member of the assessment effort, known as the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC).
While not a final commitment to adopt the tests, New Jersey is the 15th state to join the governing board, along with Massachusetts, New York and Florida, among others.
PAARC is one of two national assessment programs that had been funded by the federal government as part of its Race to the Top program. It is charged with developing models that states could follow as they adopt the new nationwide Common Core State Standards.
The other model, known as SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium, is being developed out of WestEd in California and was initially led by noted Stanford University professor Linda Darling-Hammond. WestEd describes itself as a "nonpartisan, nonprofit research, development, and service agency that works with education and other communities…"
New Jersey, like many states, had straddled the two efforts for months as each program's work was being completed. Achieve’s vice president said New Jersey only recently sent in a memorandum of agreement to be a PARCC board member, signed by Gov. Chris Christie and acting Education Commissioner Chris Cerf.
"They will now be helping make the decision to the design and content of the next test," said Sandra Boyd, Achieve’s vice president for communications. "They will be taking an active part."
With the tests at the center of Christie’s plans for teacher and school accountability, the difference between the two assessment efforts involves the arcane nature of testing and psychometrics.
The PARCC model is considered the more structured of the two in requiring a series of "through-course" assessments over the span of the year, given every two months to be closer to when the students learn the material. The results of those assessments would go into a single score at the end of the year.
But both are big departures from the kinds of state tests now administered, using computers and other technology to oversee the evaluations and relying heavily on performance-based assessments taken over two days that require students to complete broader tasks, rather than fill in multiple choices or short answers.
Still, much is to be determined in the coming months and even years, with the new tests not slated to be in place until 2014 and PARCC’s work starting in earnest this summer to develop what the tests will look like and include, Boyd said.
In the meantime, New Jersey is beginning to move away from its current tests, with the two-year-old Algebra I exam being given only once more. It probably won't be much missed. A vast majority of New Jersey students failed the exam last year and the state had to hold off on making it a requirement for graduation, as initially planned.
That test had also been the product of a consortium of states, again in partnership with Achieve under its American Diploma Project. That project was to focus on specific subject skills through end-of-course exams, instead of the state’s current one-time high school assessment in language arts and math.
But with the new assessment efforts under way and the Common Core standards increasingly adopted by other states, New Jersey joined those states in giving up the algebra test.
Cerf said in a letter to districts last week that the department remains committed to end-of-course exams and he hopes districts wouldn’t deemphasize the algebra test this year.
"Please do not interpret this to mean the state does not value the results of the upcoming Algebra assessment," he wrote. "The Algebra I assessment is aligned to the Common Core standards and the rigor expected of students to be college and career ready."
With the contract for the state’s existing High School Proficiency Assessment also slated to expire in 2012, Cerf asked districts for their input in developing the high school tests that will bridge the gap to the new PARCC exams.
Education Week, 4-18-11 - Assessment Consortia: New Shifts in Membership
Catherine Gewertz| No comments | No recommendations
The sands are shifting once again among the members of the two big state consortia that have $360 million in federal Race to the Top money to design tests for the common standards.
Last week, New Jersey and Oklahoma became "governing" members of the Partnership for the Assessment of College and Career Readiness (PARCC). Both states had been "participating" members, but decided to shift into roles that give them more input into the design of the testing system PARCC is creating.
But here's the kicker: The move also means that New Jersey and Oklahoma have to drop out of the other testing consortium, SMARTER Balanced. They had been among the dozen or so states that had maintained membership in both consortia to see how things developed, behavior that some consortium wonks likened to polygamy. When a state decides to be a governing member of one consortium, that means it has to belong exclusively to that group. So now New Jersey and Oklahoma have joined the ranks of the monogamous PARCCers.
Arkansas and Georgia had already shifted from participating to governing states within PARCC. For Georgia, that meant dropping out of SBAC, but not so for Arkansas, which had been monogamous even as a participating state. We saw some of this shifting back in December, when New Hampshire decided to stop dating both consortia and go steady with one, SMARTER Balanced, and Wyoming, who hadn't been dating anyone, decided to take up with SBAC as well.
For those of you who like to keep count, all this means that consortium membership now stands at 25 for PARCC and 29 for SBAC. (SBAC's membership list doesn't yet reflect New Jersey's move.)
