Last fall, Dorri Ramati’s eighth-grade twins sat for the state’s Start Strong standardized exam at school. But she said they were tested on material they hadn’t learned.
The test, used to measure whether students had fallen behind during the pandemic, left her children feeling that they might have missed a lot during virtual classes at Maplewood Middle School.
“It was not great timing for them,” Ramati said. “It didn’t do anything great for their confidence.”
Ramati’s children are among an untold number tested in October on material they had not learned, creating uncertainty about what they know and tainting statewide test results for nearly 1 million students who took the exam.
Chrissi Miles, the New Jersey Education Association’s director of professional development and instructional issues, said she heard at least a dozen reports — from union locals and parent networks — of children receiving the wrong tests in October.
It’s unfair, she said, to test students on material they haven’t learned yet. “You can’t say this was a great meal, just as you’re getting seated at a restaurant,” she said.
The state Department of Education, which oversees the exams, has not received complaints that students were assessed on material they had not covered, said spokesman Michael Yaple.
The Start Strong test measures English language arts skills in grades 4-10, science skills in grades 6, 9, and 12, and math skills in grades 4-8 plus Algebra 1 and 2 and geometry.
Miles said the student management systems in each district, not classroom teachers, assigned tests to students. She said teachers and paraprofessionals are not even allowed to look at the tests their students take. School staff received test results in January, but the information was not useful, as it did not indicate what specific skills an individual student did well or poorly.
Miles said the test results cannot be trusted without sorting out students who were tested on material they hadn’t been taught yet. In addition, some schools met in person for many more months than others, and different districts used different devices, some slower and clunkier than others, she said.
In fiscal year 2022, the cost of the contracts related to the administration of the Start Strong tests totaled $5,080,317, according to the Department of Education.
Miles said students experience anxiety about standardized assessments, as seen by instructions given to teachers about what to do when children throw up on their tests.
“It points to the extreme level of pressure on students for state standardized assessments,” she said, especially when the curriculum is geared toward the test rather than toward more authentic proof of progress. “They feel the weight of it, and when they get a score that says they’re not meeting the standard, that’s a big weight on their shoulders.”
Julie Borst is the executive director of Save Our Schools NJ Community Organizing, a nonprofit schools advocacy group. She said her group had heard five to seven reports from all over the state of tests given to the wrong students — those who had been taking a class for five weeks yet were tested on the whole year’s material.
Borst said that while it appeared that the majority of students were correctly receiving tests for material they had covered the previous year, the test’s overall results were useless.
“Just the fact that they were given to different cohorts completely ruins any validity,” she said.
The test was initially intended as a shorter version of the New Jersey Student Learning Assessments, replacing the similar Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers tests in 2019. Students are allotted 45 minutes to take each of the three subjects tested on the Start Strong exam, which schools first administered in the fall of 2020 to 90,000 students, and intended to give a snapshot of how students were doing as the pandemic progressed. A third of those tested needed “strong support,” the neediest category, the exam showed.
But when the exam was offered in October 2021, it was used to determine if at-risk schools required to improve under the federal Every Student Succeeds Act would still be considered low-performing or could exit that designation.
“The test wasn’t built for this,” Borst said. The results, released in January, showed about half of 4th through 6th graders needed strong support.
One mother from a public school district in Somerset County said her daughter, an 8th grader who usually gets A’s in accelerated math classes, scored poorly on the test, which was on material taught by the end of eighth grade. The teacher told students not to worry if they did not know the answers, as the test was not the correct one for them to take.
The mother, who works in education and did not want to give her name, heard from at least five other parents who were also surprised by low Start Strong test results.
Meanwhile, one school staff member told her not to worry about the tests as they were not used for future placement. The mom, wondering why the tests were given, did not tell her daughter how she had scored, as it would likely upset her.
Ramati, who later learned through her local school’s parent Facebook group that other children had also been given the wrong exam, said she explained the mistake to her children, who got over any stress they felt from the test.
Our journalism needs your support. Please subscribe today to NJ.com.
Tina Kelley may be reached at [email protected].
