“Despite what these results may imply, the reality in our schools is that high-quality learning and teaching is occurring every day, and standardized tests like PARCC set our schools up for failure”, said Stephanie Ly, president of American Federation of Teachers New Mexico.
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While the majority of county high school students fared worse on their exams than the state average, there were a couple of exceptions. If they don’t do well on the test, there are alternative tests for them to take.
The PARCC test is a test that many opposed, while a few students outright refused to take it. The previous standardized test the state used gave students a general assessment based on what grade they were in.
In geometry, none of the tested students achieved Level 5 – “exceeded expectations”. “Under the Standards Based Assessments, or SBA, 56.5 percent were proficient in English in 2014”.
Superintendent Joel Boyd said students in Santa Fe public schools performed about as expected on New Mexico’s new, tougher proficiency tests for math, reading and writing aimed at establishing whether students meet college and career readiness benchmarks.
Level 2: Student partially met expectations.
Statewide, juniors who took the English exam did the best on the assessment.
Level 3: Student approached expectations. For Algebra II, 42 percent achieved a three, four or five in 2015. According to PARCC’s results, just 6 percent of students tested attained the second highest level in geometry and 5.5 percent in Algebra 1. About 44.6 percent of juniors scored a 4 or 5, meaning they met or exceeded expectations.
Hand said that the percentages of students who scored four or higher reveal a correlation to what researchers already know about college and career readiness.
PED says 24.3 percent of 11th-grade students will have to retest in English and 51.4 percent will have to retest in mathematics.
Skandera says although these scores may appear low, schools here are on the right track.
PED Secretary Skandera pointed to a more hard test as a reason for the lower scores. “It’s really a new proficiency baseline”, Skandera said.
“We had been expecting that”, he said. “What we’ve seen in our state when we’ve raised our expectations in the past is in the first year, we did drop in our scores”.
“It is very important that our students and our staff know that this is not the end; it’s the beginning”, said Skandera. “There are multiple other ways to show that you are ready and competent to graduate high school in New Mexico”.
“What I told all of our principals is I’m not concerned where we start; I’m concerned that we grow after we get started”, Balch said. “School grades, teacher evaluations and the future of students’ lives should not depend on something that is actually measuring change and not what students know and are able to do”. Aggregate PARCC scores for grades 3-8 will be released on October. 30.
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The state education department plans to release individual students scores to school districts on November 2.
