Students in some county school
systems in West Virginia
The year-end dates were moved back
to allow for makeup days necessitated by winter weather cancellations. The
state Board of Education denied waiver requests made by 27 counties, mandating
the school systems complete the necessary 180 days of instruction.
State Department of Education Chief
Academic Officer Clayton Burch said some of those counties will now have
standardized testing later.
But some counties ending the school
year deep into June have decided to retain their original testing dates. For
some counties it could mean as many as six weeks of school after the testing is
over.
Burch said the extra time should be
used for instruction.
“The test does not mark the end of
something,” he said. “The test is a temperature of how we’re doing, how we can
improve the system. We still got to prepare a child that’s in fourth grade—they
are going to progress to fifth grade. We have to continue that instruction.
“We’re getting away from this idea that
we do standardized test and the year is done,” he said. “We hope that it is
becoming part of instruction and children are starting to see it as what they
are doing throughout the school year.”
West Virginia Education Association
President Dale Lee said the testing should be moved back. He said the testing
shouldn’t take place until 80 percent of the material has been covered. Lee also
said there are technical problems with the online testing, because schools
don’t have enough computers or adequate broadband service.
Some students don’t want to take the
test at all because of its connection to the controversial Common Core teaching
standards. Nearly 200 students at Spring Valley
High School in Wayne County
He warned that not taking the tests
could hurt the students down the road.
“What’s next? What happens when those
students go to take the ACT or the SAT to do entrance into higher education?
The ACT and SAT are aligned to those same standards,” Burch said. “We’re asked
continually to improve the education system. We test to gather data on how to
improve the system and without data that’s very difficult to do.”
The school systems are given a 36-day
window to conduct the tests for students in grades three through 11. Each
student has seven testing sessions using computers in the schools. The students
are this year being tested on English and math.
Students in the fourth, sixth and 10th
grades also are tested in science. The state school board waived social studies
testing this year.
