Students to spend less time on testing
Skandera announces latest changes after ‘listening tour’
Most New Mexico public school students will spend less time taking standardized tests next year and will have two additional weeks of instruction to prepare for them under changes announced Tuesday by state Public Education Secretary Hanna Skandera.
Students next school year will test for somewhere between seven hours and nine hours — down from as many as 11 hours two years ago. A third-grader, for example, will test for seven hours in the upcoming school year, a drop of two hours from the spring of 2015, when the state first implemented standardized exams developed by the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC.
The modifications are the latest in a series of tweaks Skandera has made in recent months to the testing regime, one of her signature reform efforts, and come amid growing concern among educators and parents over the emphasis on standardized tests over traditional classroom instruction.
Skandera said Tuesday the latest changes are a response to feedback from educators, parents and community members during a recent “listening tour” of the state.
In addition to reduced testing time, Skandera said, school districts will receive test results for the state’s PARCC exams a month earlier than in previous years.
“Less testing time, more instructional time and getting results back earlier,” the secretary said.
The changes come just two months after Skandera made concessions on the state’s teacher-evaluation program by reducing the weight for student test scores.
Skandera said the state had to see how its educational reform programs
played out before making such changes.
The state reduced the time it took to conduct PARCC exams by about 90 minutes after the first year of the test. With the additional reductions next school year, Skandera said, it will take most students 15 percent to 20 percent less time to take the tests than it did in 2015.
However, the testing time for fourth- and fifth-graders will not be decreased this coming school year because those exams have a section in the English language arts reading section that cannot be removed without impacting the overall effectiveness of the test, Skandera said.
Betty Patterson, president of the National Education Association of New Mexico, said the union “applauds these changes and we are glad they are listening to the concerns of some stakeholders.”
Santa Fe Public Schools Superintendent Veronica García echoed that thought, saying, “Students will be less fatigued and probably be more focused. Generally speaking, I think it’s a good thing.”
The PARCC tests are based on Common Core education standards the state adopted in 2010 that spell out what math and English skills students should master at each grade level. Students in grades 3-11 began taking the exams for the first time in the spring of 2015, prompting student walkouts and protests in Santa Fe and other districts.
But there was far less opposition or disruption in the PARCC testing cycles of 2016 and 2017, and the Public Education Department reported that 97 percent of the state’s students took part in the exam last year.
Previously, districts had leeway with a six-week testing window to administer the PARCC exams, starting in early April and finishing in mid-May. But some district leaders and educators argued that by conducting the tests earlier in the spring semester, they lost valuable instructional time to prepare students for the test. And, some said, once the testing was completed, many students lost the motivation to continue to learn.
Next year, that testing window will be pushed back by two weeks, Skandera said.
García sees that as another positive. “After taking the PARCC exam, some kids may not have the same focus for the rest of the semester, so having them later in the school year is better than earlier,” she said.
Critics also complained that because the state released PARCC tests results in mid- to late August, districts had little time to address learning problems among students or to discuss holding them back if they were failing before the start of the next school year. In 2018, Skandera said, the Public Education Department will give districts preliminary results by mid-July.
New Mexico is one of six states and the District of Columbia that administer the annual PARCC exams. The PARCC consortium, as the group is known, initially included 26 states and the District of Columbia. Skandera currently serves as the PARCC consortium’s chairwoman.
She said Tuesday that all PARCC consortium states are reducing testing time next school year.
This is not the only concession Skandera has made to teachers and students this year. In April, she and Gov. Susana Martinez announced they would implement changes in the state’s teacher-evaluation system, doubling the number of sick days a teacher can take — to six from three — before they are penalized in their evaluations. The state also decreased the weight of student test scores in those evaluations to 35 percent from 50 percent.
Patterson said the union still has concerns about using test score data in a teacher-evaluation plan.
Charles Bowyer, the NEA-New Mexico’s executive director, said in an email, “The continued use of student test scores to label teachers through a misguided teacher evaluation system is a misuse of the assessment system, no matter how much we improve the impact on instructional time.”
Based on last year’s PARCC test results, 27.7 percent of New Mexico’s students were proficient or better in reading and writing, and under 20 percent displayed proficiency in math.