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Newark families should be able to view their children’s scores from last spring’s state tests around Oct. 7, Superintendent Roger León said at Thursday night’s school board meeting.
The state sent districts the results on Sept. 18, after Newark students had already returned to class on Sept. 8. The district’s data team is currently reviewing the scores, León said. He expects paper copies of individual student reports to reach schools around Oct. 9, but did not say when schools would distribute them to families.
The results will give families a better sense of where their children stand in reading and math. They will also give Newark educators key information they lacked at the start of the school year as the district works to improve student achievement. Last year, 34% of Newark students in grades 3-9 met the state’s standards in English language arts, compared with 53% statewide. Just over 21% of Newark students met the standards in math.
New Jersey introduced the NJSLA-Adaptive this past spring. The new online assessment adjusts the difficulty of questions based on a student’s answers, León said. State officials alerted the public that scores would arrive later than usual because they needed to set new scoring benchmarks and obtain approval from the New Jersey Board of Education.
The wait meant school leaders began the year without a measure they use to identify students who need additional support and to plan teacher training.
“When we have this data ahead of the school year, there are influences to our professional development,” León said. With that not being the case, he added, the results will instead be a focus of the district’s next training for teachers and school leaders.
The results will also show whether Newark students continued the reading and math gains they made last year, when pass rates improved but remained below 2019 levels. Newark received $400,000 from the state this year to expand tutoring for students struggling in both subjects, adding to the district’s existing efforts to address pandemic learning loss.
