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NJ SPOTLIGHT - THE LIST: NJ SCHOOLS WITH THE MOST STUDENTS NOT TAKING THE ONLINE PARCC EXAMS…Highest percentages of students who didn’t take exams were mostly from more affluent districts ‘The PARCC exams will be soon be administered once again – but the state’s first experience with the controversial tests in 2015 continues to resonate, not just for the many students who took the tests but for the many students who didn’t. The Christie administration hasn’t provided data on exactly how many sat out the test in protest, maintaining that PARCC provided no way to count each student based on their motivation. There were alternative tests available to students, and other reasons for missing the testing, state officials said. But beyond dispute is the fact that more students missed the PARCC tests than for any previous testing, led by those at the high-school level…’
JOHN MOONEY | FEBRUARY 22, 2016
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Education Week - Which Test Has the Toughest College-Ready Standards?
By Debra Viadero on February 22, 2016 5:20 AM
‘UPDATED The PARCC assessments are generally tougher than the Smarter Balanced tests, ACT Aspire, and the other tests states are using, according to an analysis released Monday.
For his study, author Gary Phillips, a vice president and fellow at the American Institutes for Research, examined the achievement levels, or cut scores, that are intended to show that students are on track in 4th and 8th grade to be college-ready by the time they graduate from high school.
He set out to gauge the difficulty of those cut scores by mapping them to the cut scores used on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP. The NAEP offers a common metric for making comparisons because it's taken on a regular basis by nationally representative groups of students in grades 4, 8, and 12, and it intentionally sets a high bar for student achievement.
By guest blogger Catherine Gewertz
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NJ SPOTLIGHT - ADDITIONAL STATE AID FOR MOST DISTRICTS WON’T EVEN COVER ONE TEACHER’S SALARY…Median amount is around $30,000 ‘With few surprises -- but one big outlier -- the Christie administration on Friday released its state-aid figures for New Jersey’s nearly 600 school districts for fiscal 2017. Hardly surprising was how small actual aid would go up for a vast majority of districts, after Gov. Chris Christie presented a budget plan last week with an overall increase in school aid of just 1 percent. The median increase was around $30,000, less than the cost of a single teacher…’
Find your district here.
The big outlier was Newark, which is receiving an additional $26.8 million in state aid – far exceeding any other district in terms of dollars. The next-highest aid amount was an additional $2.6 million to Elizabeth and Plainfield each.
The administration said the aid distribution is based on the state’s school-funding formula, albeit at a fraction of full funding.
Yet the bulk of the additional aid to Newark is from a newly-created fund for districts with big numbers of students in charter schools
JOHN MOONEY | FEBRUARY 22, 2016
