Bibb Eighth-Graders Hurt By Test Upgrade
By Julie Hubbard, The Macon Telegraph, Ga.
Jun. 2–For whatever reason, many Bibb County eighth-graders weren’t ready to tackle a new, more stringent math curriculum this school year.
And it showed when they took the math portion of the state-mandated Criterion-Referenced Competency Test in April. All told, 1,073 Bibb eighth-graders did not pass it.
School officials statewide were blindsided just before the school year ended after receiving preliminary CRCT scores showing that 40 percent of eighth-graders across Georgia failed the newly revised math exam. In Bibb County, 58 percent of eighth-graders did not pass the test.
So, beginning Monday, many Bibb County students will head to summer school to prepare to retake the math exam June 25-26.
Even though state law requires students in the third, fifth and eighth grades to pass the standardized tests to advance to the next grade, there is flexibility in the law. It allows parents the right to appeal test results to their child’s principal and meet to examine other records for consideration for promotion. In Bibb County, hundreds of eighth-graders have been promoted to high school in recent years, even though they did not pass one of the CRCT exams.
The high number of failures on this year’s math exam has Bibb County scrambling to find more summer school math teachers to instruct the anticipated surge of students. They’ll need at least 52 math teachers this summer — or 28 more than last year. As of Friday, 700 students had registered for classes, and more are still coming in.
Some education officials blame the state for setting too high an expectation while, at the same time, not giving teachers and students enough time to make the transition to the harder curriculum.
Despite school officials’ pleas for more flexibility, the state is not budging.
“I can’t say any one person dropped the ball or any one thing. There were a combination of things that led to this,” said Dolores Gordon, an eighth-grade math teacher at Ballard-Hudson Middle School who is teaching summer school. “We upped the standards, and this group of kids we’re teaching are our guinea pigs. They are the first ones that these things are being tested on.”
Previously, only a fraction of students took algebra or other advanced math in middle school. Now, under the new curriculum, called the Georgia Performance Standards, all students are being exposed to it, as well as statistics, by the time they finish eighth grade.
“It’s not that they’re less prepared. They came to me with plenty of skills,” said Mary Legare, an eighth-grade math teacher at Miller Middle School. “It’s just that the bar was higher.”
Instead of students getting two sets of numbers and being told what to do with them to solve a problem, for example, the curriculum now asks students to read a word problem and figure out what math skills and multiple steps they’ll need to solve it. It’s comparable to what students learn internationally, she said.
Despite facing a harder curriculum, eighth-graders weren’t allowed to use calculators on the CRCT math exam, teachers said.
The state’s online practice testing system didn’t have enough good sample questions for students to prepare, according to Gordon. Unlike prior exams, this one called for students to use math skills they’ve accumulated from prior grades, not just from the previous year.
Sharon Patterson, the Bibb County school system’s superintendent, doesn’t deny that students need more math training. Historically, the system falls below state averages on many exams in the area of math.
Last year, 15 of 40 Bibb County schools didn’t meet No Child Left Behind standards, and 10 of them missed the mark because they had low math scores on state exams.
Students who were eighth-graders during the 2007-08 school year had a 58 percent failure rate on the math CRCT exam. As seventh-graders, 44 percent of them failed the math portion of the CRCT. As sixth-graders, 55 percent of them failed that math exam.
PUNISHED UNDULY?
But Macon’s eighth-graders weren’t out of line this year with school systems of similar demographics.
Richmond County (Augusta) schools, for example, reported that 55 percent of its eighth-graders failed the CRCT math exam this year, according to news reports.
“There is no question that we need stronger math students, but the concern I’ve had is the eighth-grade students are paying a price for not having a grace period in the implementation,” Patterson said. “I know we’ve got to increase the standards. This eighth-grade group of students hasn’t been given enough notice or time.”
One state education group agrees with that assessment.
“They are getting punished unduly right now,” said Tim Callahan, a spokesman for the Professional Association of Georgia Educators. “Teachers may say we didn’t get a good education and training on this to do the best of our ability, but those really impacted are those (students) who have to go to summer school.”
He says the state, local school systems and the Georgia General Assembly should share the blame.
The Georgia Legislature, he said, should not have slashed education funding, which has reduced some professional learning programs, he said.
Only a sampling of teachers from each district received training from the state on the new curriculum, and those teachers went back to their systems and trained the remaining teachers. Callahan questions how well that training worked.
“This has been a major bump in the road,” he said. “My sense of it is we have not run the business of education like a business. We didn’t invest in training the work force.”
There also were issues this year with a new social studies CRCT exam, but State School Superintendent Kathy Cox tossed out those scores for sixth- and seventh-graders earlier this month when nearly 70 percent of students in those grades statewide failed the test.
She admitted some test questions were never covered in the classroom, and she said in a statement that the scores weren’t “trustworthy.”
Meanwhile, the 40 percent of eighth-graders statewide who failed the math CRCT exam won’t get that same chance.
“There are no plans to change the current course we’re on with mathematics. The reason the social studies (exams) were invalidated is because there was concern that what was on the test was not well-aligned in the curriculum,” said Dana Tofig, a spokesman for the Georgia Department of Education. “That was not the case in math.”
“It is a change and a more rigorous curriculum, and we realize it comes with some impact.”
Operating bigger summer school programs is now one of them. The increase in CRCT failure rates is making it harder to recruit math teachers.
“For summer school, we are still looking,” Bibb’s deputy superintendent, Diana Rodgers, said last week.
Many middle school math teachers already had summer plans or needed a break, Rodgers said.
She has asked the state to allow elementary grade math teachers to fill in to teach middle school math this summer.
The system also may use math computer labs, where students will take turns working math on a computer program for about an hour of the school day.
“It might allow the math teacher to provide instruction to one group while another group is in the lab with a facilitator,” she said.
Ron Collier, Bibb’s chief financial officer, said Bibb County schools had budgeted to spend $1.1 million on summer school.
“We anticipate it’s more,” he said, while still preparing the budget. “One issue is they are still trying to hire teachers, and not all students are registered yet.”
Tofig said the state will shell out $1.4 million to help school systems with their increased summer school budgets, and state school leaders may ask lawmakers for additional funding to help cushion the impact.
While test results lagged this year, teachers say the curriculum upgrade is needed to prepare students for the global market they’ll soon face. “I don’t think there was another way to do it,” Legare said. “You just have to put the standards in place, and we work as hard as we can to achieve it.
“I would ask people to hold judgment at least until after summer to see where we stand, or next year when we really transition into this.”
To contact writer Julie
Hubbard, call 744-4331.
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