Educators
face the 'achievement gap'
HSPA failure rate in Jersey
varies by ethnicity
Wednesday, August 17, 2005 • BY GEOFF MULVIHILL
• Associated Press
A national study finds white and
Asian-American students do better on New Jersey's high
school proficiency tests than black and Hispanic students
do.
The findings released yesterday by the
Washington-based Center on Education Policy were no surprise
to educators in New Jersey, who have long been trying to
narrow those gaps, including the gap for students who are
not native English speakers.
Assistant Education Commissioner Richard
Ten Eyck said that in New Jersey, the more affluent a school
district, the better students do on standardized tests. And,
Ten Eyck said, black and Hispanic children are concentrated
in impoverished areas.
According to the analysis of 2004 test
scores from the High School Proficiency Assessment, which
most New Jersey students are required to pass in order to
graduate from high school, about seven in 10 students pass
the math section and more than eight in 10 pass the language
arts section.
But there's a wide variation for
subgroups.
For instance, nearly 90 percent of white
and Asian students passed the reading section in 2004,
compared with about two in three black and Hispanic
students, four in 10 students with disabilities, and less
than one-fourth of English-language learners.
In math, the gap is even larger. Less
than half of Hispanic students and less than 40 percent of
black students passed the test in 2004. More than 80 percent
of white and Asian students passed.
New Jersey -- like other states -- has
programs aimed at closing what educators call the
"achievement gap."
Closing the gap is at the heart of the
federal No Child Left Behind act, a 2002 law that seeks to
have all students in each state meet the same
standards.
The issue is also at the crux of the
state Supreme Court's Abbott vs. Burke court decisions,
which have forced the state to give extra help to 31 poor
school districts.
One of the biggest initiatives to grow
out of the Abbott cases was state-funded, all-day preschool
for 3- and 4-year-olds in the poor cities. That program has
been credited with raising test scores, especially in
language arts, for third-graders in poor cities.
But the program is still so new, close to
a decade may be needed to know whether early-childhood
education affects the number of students who pass the high
school exit exam.
Students who do not pass the HSPA can
still get their diplomas through something called the
Special Review Assessment, but the state is planning to
phase out that option, starting with students now entering
eighth grade.
Ten Eyck said students in Massachusetts
started doing better when that state got rid of its
alternate route to graduation.
"We're all confident" the same will
happen in New Jersey, Ten Eyck said. "When the easy way out
was eliminated, a surprising number of kids started to turn
up the jets enough to do better."
New Jersey's Education Department is also
working on standards that would require schools to offer --
and prepare students for -- algebra in eighth grade. Many
experts say that learning algebra before high school is a
key to math success.
© 2005 The Star-Ledger. Used by NJ.com with
permission.
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