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The Record - N.J. students in low-income districts struggle on SATs … “In the high-performing, affluent district of Ridgewood, 93 percent of last year’s seniors took the SAT, and 81 percent hit the college-ready benchmark. “That 81 percent is one data point,” said Superintendent Daniel Fishbein. “What about a child who isn’t a good test-taker but performs well in class and works hard? It’s always nice to be acknowledged for our high test scores but what is really important is what happens in our classrooms every day…”
NJ Spotlight - Raucous Newark Crowd Drives Superintendent from School Board Meeting…Cami Anderson walks out after comments from heckling, chanting audience members get personal
The Record - N.J. students in low-income districts struggle on SATs … “In the high-performing, affluent district of Ridgewood, 93 percent of last year’s seniors took the SAT, and 81 percent hit the college-ready benchmark. “That 81 percent is one data point,” said Superintendent Daniel Fishbein. “What about a child who isn’t a good test-taker but performs well in class and works hard? It’s always nice to be acknowledged for our high test scores but what is really important is what happens in our classrooms every day…”
Tuesday, January 28, 2014 Last updated: Tuesday January 28, 2014, 11:46 PM
BY LESLIE BRODY STAFF WRITER E-mail
Click here to see your school’s 2013 performance report.
No seniors at Paterson’s Eastside High School campus last year did well enough on the SATs to meet the College Board’s threshold for being “college ready.”
In Bergen County, 13 percent of Garfield High School seniors who took the SAT hit that benchmark, along with 18 percent of their counterparts at Lyndhurst High School, according to the new School Performance Reports released Tuesday.
At a time when helping students become “college ready” is a mantra for New Jersey education officials, a startling share in many poor and moderate-income districts failed to meet the score deemed by the College Board to predict probable success in college — 1,550 points out of a possible 2,400.
That benchmark has been in the spotlight since Camden Schools Superintendent Paymon Rouhanifard used it last month to say it hit him like a “kick in the stomach” to learn that only three students in his city tested as college-ready. Governor Christie jumped on the figure in his recent State of the State speech to argue for his education agenda, including merit pay for teachers and a longer academic day.
The College Board, which administers the SAT, says that students who hit the benchmark have a 65 percent or greater chance of earning at least a B-minus average in their freshman year of college, and are likely to get a degree. Studies show SAT scores are highly correlated with parents’ income and education level.
The SAT is much harder than the state’s graduation exam. Indeed, in 46 of the 71 public high schools in Bergen and Passaic counties, most of the seniors who took the SAT did not hit 1,550. The Bergen County Academies, a selective magnet, fared the best, with 98 percent of its students hitting that target or better.
Education Commissioner Chris Cerf said low SAT scores in many districts — among other indicators – showed the urgent need to raise the bar for learning.
“We’re trying to move the focus away from graduation alone to graduation with a level of rigor commensurate with the needs of a 21st-century economy,” he said. Cerf has announced plans to phase out the current graduation exam in favor of new end-of-course tests but has not outlined the specifics, saying the new criteria will not take effect before the Class of 2019, and perhaps later.
The SAT scores were among a raft of measures in the 2013 School Performance Reports issued for every public school statewide. This marks the second year of a new format with categories for student growth, absenteeism, success in advanced courses and other data that Cerf said would give educators and parents more useful information than the report cards of the past, and help them improve their schools. Last year’s debut of the new format caused an outcry among superintendents who said they contained errors, but this year the grumbling was much more muted.
Critics of standardized testing say the SAT is culturally biased, unfairly vulnerable to test prep and fails to measure many skills that foster long-term success, such as creativity, perseverance and leadership. Robert Schaeffer, spokesman for the anti-testing advocacy group FairTest.org, said the 1,550 benchmark was a “marketing tool” constructed recently to compete with the college-readiness target long promoted by the SAT’s rival, the ACT. “Independent research shows a more powerful predictor of graduating college is high school performance, rather than a one-day test,” Schaeffer said.
More than 800 colleges don’t require standardized tests for admission, and many accept applicants with low SAT scores. Despite the paucity of college-ready SAT scores in Lyndhurst, for example, 81 percent of the district’s new graduates were enrolled in college 16 months later, according to its performance report.
Lyndhurst Superintendent Tracey Marinelli said she plans to launch an SAT “boot camp” next year and have guidance counselors help students discern whether they should take the ACT instead. She expressed pride in the district’s progress overall, citing better state test results and a broader menu of Advanced Placement courses. “We need to focus on our children and not just numbers on the page,” she added.
In Paterson, only 26 of the 598 seniors in district schools last year who took the SAT met the college-ready benchmark, district data show. Superintendent Donnie Evans said the district has been successful in recent years in raising state test scores and graduation rates, and now must do more to help students handle national tests, such as the SAT and ACT. He said he was “frustrated” by the disappointing SAT scores, but optimistic that they will improve with the current shift to the Common Core – a set of more rigorous standards for what students should learn in each grade.
On average, higher SAT scores correlate with higher income. For example, among seniors in New Jersey families making $20,000 to $40,000 last year, the average score was 1,375. In households making more than $200,000, seniors had an average score 358 points higher than that.
Researchers attribute achievement gaps to a broad range of factors, including parents’ expectations, access to books and tutoring. Many high-need schools lack rigorous courses, and teachers say it’s hard for students dealing with hunger, unstable housing, violent neighborhoods and fractured families to concentrate.
In the high-performing, affluent district of Ridgewood, 93 percent of last year’s seniors took the SAT, and 81 percent hit the college-ready benchmark. “That 81 percent is one data point,” said Superintendent Daniel Fishbein. “What about a child who isn’t a good test-taker but performs well in class and works hard? It’s always nice to be acknowledged for our high test scores but what is really important is what happens in our classrooms every day.”
The state Department of Education has posted the data online at http://education.state.nj.us/pr/
Staff Writer Dave Sheingold contributed to this article. Email: brody@northjersey.com. Twitter: @lesliebrody
Raucous Newark Crowd Drives Superintendent from School Board Meeting…Cami Anderson walks out after comments from heckling, chanting audience members get personal
John Mooney | January 29, 2014
More than 500 people packed Newark's First Avenue School auditorium last night -- with scores more squeezed into the cafeteria or standing outdoors -- to protest Superintendent Cami Anderson's plans for the state's largest district.
The state-appointed superintendent's One Newark initiative calls for universal enrollment, expanded charters, and the closure or consolidation of more than a dozen schools.
And while these board meeting have been famously contentious under Anderson, this may have been the most raucous yet. There was virtually no support for the superintendent, who's in the third year of her tenure, and near constant heckling and chanting.
Anderson stoically sat through more than a dozen speakers denouncing her, many calling for her ouster and more than a few openly insulting her.
The tipping point came about two hours in, when one speaker asked Anderson about her own biracial child.
“Do you not want for our brown babies what you want for your brown baby?” said Natasha Allen, a community activist.
Anderson’s face reddened. She gathered her papers and walked off the stage to the derision of the crowd. Her senior staff in the front row got up and followed her out.
The board may have skipped half a beat, but after a few minutes its chairman said the meeting would proceed, almost in defiance of the state operation of the district that it has long challenged.
“This is our opportunity to show we are ready to conduct the business of this board,” said president Antoinette Baskerville-Richardson. “We don’t need the superintendent to do that.”
Reached afterward, Anderson would not comment.
Even before the incident, the meeting was noticeable for its rancor, with opponents of Anderson’s One Newark plan growing in confidence and number.
Parent-teacher organizations from some of the schools came out for the meeting, joined by all of the district’s teacher, staff, and supervisor unions, as well as the increasingly combative student union.
And they got some star-power last night, with the appearance of national American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten, who returned to Newark for the second time this winter to directly confront Anderson.
“The nation is watching Newark,” said Weingarten, arguably the nation’s preeminent union leader. “The emotion is palpable here, and the AFT will be here with you to fight for the community until community gets its schools back.”
It has not been a good couple of weeks in general for Anderson, with a new round of public criticism coming earlier this month when she suspended five principals for speaking or acting against her plans.
Each of them was reinstated, although two were reassigned, but that did little to quell the uproar, with the some last night calling them the “Newark Five.” They have since filed a federal complaint that their freedom of speech was violated.
Meanwhile, a bill is gaining momentum in the Statehouse that would set strict requirements on any closure or consolidation of a public school, including in state-controlled districts like Newark.
Much of the tension in Newark centers on the expansion of charter schools, which already serve a fifth of all students and are only expected to grow dramatically under One Newark.
But even plans to open up existing schools to a district-wide system have also brought opposition from those who say they want to stay in their neighborhood schools instead of crossing the city to attend another.
