Friday, October 17, 2003 • BY JOHN MOONEY  • Star-Ledger Staff

If schools in New Jersey weren't already having a tough enough time meeting new No Child Left Behind standards, a computer glitch has roiled the process even more.

State officials said this week that errors in the data collection and analysis of student test scores have forced them to delay until mid-November the release of the list of elementary schools potentially falling short of the new federal law's requirements.

And while officials said all will be fixed, and it has not affected students' individual scores, the problems highlight the vulnerability of the NCLB process. So far hundreds of New Jersey middle and high schools are being labeled as underperforming, sometimes due to just a handful of kids.

ETS, the New Jersey company that makes the SAT, was given a four-year, $35 million contract last winter to develop and score the new third- and fourth-grade tests, known as NJASK.

The administration and scoring went relatively well, officials said, but problems first surfaced when ETS sent back to districts a rough run of students and their scores, where a slew of errors were in demographic and other background data linked to students.

State officials put the number now at 2,300 students with information still to be corrected, out of the 105,000 children taking the tests last spring. That's not a high percentage, but they said it's enough to potentially affect the standing of dozens if not hundreds of schools mandated under the federal law to show student progress across the board.

The state already has identified three-quarters of its high schools and nearly half of the middle schools as failing to meet at least one of the 40 criteria listed in the law. If the schools miss the mark two consecutive years, they can face sanctions that include requirements they offer students a chance to transfer or get outside tutoring.

"The reason why this is so critical is that so many schools have already been identified, sometimes due to only a couple of kids," said Richard Ten Eyck, the state assistant education commissioner who oversees the assessments. "Nobody wants to get in a situation where we are not as accurate as we can possibly be."

Added Thomas Ewing, a spokesman for ETS: "Given what's at stake, it is absolutely critical we get it absolutely right."

This fall, only the fourth-grade scores and how they compare with results on the previous test taken the year before will be used to determine a school's status under NCLB. The third-grade scores will start to count next year.

Several issues arose in ETS's first administration of the new NJASK, which was developed specifically with an eye on the new federal law that ultimately will require annual testing from grades 3-8, officials said.

Initially, coding problems led to as many as 2,000 students' scores being sent to the wrong schools, a problem quickly resolved, officials said.

But then errors were discovered in some of the individual student information provided on the test, where, for instance, a student's race or other background was not tabulated correctly. Answer sheets for the language arts and math sections were not always linked to the same child, either, leading to duplicated counts.

In addition, about 1,300 students who took tests in separate private schools -- the vast majority of them schools for the disabled -- were not properly reported back to their home districts, officials said.

Ten Eyck and Ewing said the coding problems are pretty typical in any first year of a new test with a new vendor. And they were confident the problems have all been uncovered, given the number of people who review the results, from state officials to the local teachers and administrators to the testing coordinators at ETS.

"It is in everyone's best interest to take the process seriously," he said. "Everyone wants accurate information out there, and we think the combination of ETS and districts looking at it will get this down to a very small number."

Westfield schools are among those affected, said local officials, after some confusion over the coding of the answer sheets. "We ended up with some kids who were marked down as having taken only half of the test," said Janie Edmunds, the assistant superintendent.

Edmunds, who serves on an advisory committee on statewide testing, said she was confident the errors would be resolved.

"Of course, it's worrisome, but a certain amount of this is inevitable," she said. "But it also points up the need for there to be checks and balances before the results go out."