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Good afternoon Senator Cryan, Assemblywoman Jasey, and members of the Committee. I am Betsy Ginsburg, Executive Director of the Garden State Coalition of Schools. Thank you for the opportunity to share the thoughts of our members on the very important topic of student assessments. The consensus among my members is that for a standardized assessment to be useful to educators, and, above all, of benefit to students, it has to be well-designed, with a defined purpose or rationale, and thoroughly field tested...'
Hearing on Student Assessments
Joint Committee on the Public Schools
December 6, 2022
Good afternoon Senator Cryan, Assemblywoman Jasey, and members of the Committee. I am Betsy Ginsburg, Executive Director of the Garden State Coalition of Schools. Thank you for the opportunity to share the thoughts of our members on the very important topic of student assessments.
The consensus among my members is that for a standardized assessment to be useful to educators, and, above all, of benefit to students, it has to be well-designed, with a defined purpose or rationale, and thoroughly field tested. Results should be delivered promptly in a format that is as simple and accessible as possible. Recent New Jersey standardized assessments have not always met those criteria.
Our members have asked me to highlight three specific areas today. The first concerns the impending release of the New Jersey Student Assessment results for the spring of 2022. We are concerned that the “analysis” of this data will involve extensive comparisons to the 2019 results, to the detriment of students and educators. Test results have long been used by some individuals and factions inside and outside the education policy-making apparatus as a way of demonizing educators and the public education system. Doing so in the wake of COVID would be unconscionable as well as unproductive.
When the results are publicized tomorrow, we urge legislators and policy makers not to rush to judgment and make unwarranted assumptions based on one set of data. Reactive solutions are rarely the most effective in the long run.
Remember that New Jersey educators have been assessing students and aligning instructional strategies to those students’ needs in various ways ever since schools reopened post-COVID. As Rachel Goldberg, superintendent in Springfield put it, “Our strategies are not based on a single assessment taken at a single point in time, but rather continuous points of analysis about a student's level of understanding and processing of critical skill sets.”
While the delayed release of the NJSLA results will not start the process of learning remediation and acceleration, though educators will certainly take what is most useful and practical from those results. To quote Readington superintendent Jonathan Hart, “There are learning gaps that need remediation - yes. Educators have always identified learning gaps and provided instruction to close those gaps - this situation is no different. The gaps may be wider and perhaps more unique than we have seen before, but nothing is lost. “
The second issue that concerns us is the NJ Start Strong assessment. The vast majority of my members believe that the test is unnecessary now that the state is once again administering the NJSLA. Teachers and administrators are nearly unanimous in saying that the administration of Start Strong this past September upended schedules, disrupted students’ acclimation to school routines and procedures, and took away valuable instructional time.
In effect, the 2022 Start Strong test was an attempt to quantify delayed learning by delaying learning.
We suggest that if Start Strong is not abolished all together, it be made optional for districts in the fall of 2023. In the words of a Kelly Wentz, a 17-year veteran high school teacher in Union City, “We continually squander limited resources attempting to prove learning loss. The existing data is definitely sufficient. It would be a far more prudent allocation of resources to discuss tangible and practical ways to support growth before the [available] resources are depleted completely.”
We also take issue with the rollout of the New Jersey Graduation Proficiency Assessment (GPA), which was done in a way that was detrimental to our students. The Legislature intervened to make the GPA a field test, but that did not change the fact that we subjected our students to an assessment that had never been thoroughly field tested before it was administered for the first time. The reporting of results has been equally botched, forcing superintendents to explain to parents that a test report that states that a student is not “graduation ready” has no meaning for that student. There was absolutely no benefit to students, educators or families in the 2022 GPA. If we must use a standardized assessment as a graduation requirement, that assessment should at least have some validity.
No student was ever healed, comforted, inspired or instructed by a standardized assessment. No matter what we hear tomorrow when the NJSLA results are revealed, let us keep our focus on creating humane and creative solutions for our students and school communities.
