Martinsville Bulletin, Inc.
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Martinsville, Virginia 24115
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| For third-graders in state schools |
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Sunday, June 21, 2009
By KIM BARTO - Bulletin Staff Writer
Third-graders will have to take a history Standards of Learning (SOL) exam next year after all.
Superintendent Patricia Wright had proposed discontinuing the test in response to requests from division superintendents across the state “to ease the testing burden,” said Charles Pyle, communications director for the Virginia Department of Education.
But Friday, Wright issued a statement that she was withdrawing the proposal in response to “the concerns of educators, legislators and others who disagreed.”
The matter was to have come before the state Board of Education for a vote this week.
Wright “still believes it was a thoughtful approach to meeting the needs that we have but recognizes there are concerns in the field about accountability for this content,” Pyle said.
“She felt this could be done without sacrificing history instruction,” Pyle said, but “she recognizes there were lots of folks who disagreed and worried that if you don’t test it, it won’t be taught.”
Local school superintendents said Wright’s original proposal to discontinue the third-grade history exam seemed reasonable and that teachers would have continued to teach the material if the test was dropped.
Keeping the exam in place “leaves us where we’ve always been, so it’s essentially no change. Certainly we can live with that,” said Henry County Schools Superintendent Sharon Dodson.
However, eliminating the third-grade history exam “seemed to be a reasonable plan” and would “not lessen the importance of learning social studies,” she said.
“We do spend a considerable amount of time and resources on testing,” Dodson said, adding the division has “a finite amount” of both.
“We have professional educators that teach more than what’s on the test. We don’t have an SOL test in a lot of subjects that we teach,” Dodson said.
Martinsville Schools Superintendent Scott Kizner said he “would not have been upset if they had removed that requirement” for the third-grade history exam.
“I would agree we probably need to review the number of assessments we’re giving children, especially younger children,” Kizner said. “Math and reading are a very important part of their daily instruction, and I’m not sure we have to hold 8-year-old children accountable for social studies at the level that we’re doing it.”
While classroom instruction “does emphasize things that are being tested,” Kizner said he believes “teachers would incorporate social studies and science even if they’re not tested” by the state.
Kizner said he also supports Wright’s recommendation to add reading passages dealing with history and social science to the third-grade reading exams.
Pyle said the exam would “remain a reading test, but instead of students reading a passage that has been generated for that test that doesn’t have any connection with anything they’ve learned during the school year, the idea is to have a reading test that reflects the broader curriculum.”
This approach has been advocated by education experts, Pyle said.
Third-graders in both school divisions have done well on the history exam in the past, the local superintendents said.
Passing rates were not a factor in Wright’s proposal to eliminate the test, Pyle said. Passing rates on the history SOL have been “very high, around 93 percent” statewide, he said.
“At the same time, our third-grade (statewide) reading pass rate in 2007-08 was 84 percent, and we would like to see that much higher,” he said.
The history assessment was proposed for elimination rather than other subject areas for a number of reasons, Pyle said.
“This is a cumulative test that holds 8-year-old children accountable on a single test for three years’ worth of content,” which is “something we no longer do with middle school students,” Pyle said.
A couple of years ago, he said, the cumulative eighth-grade social studies test was broken into separate grade-level assessments.
Wright also made the point that eliminating the history test “would free up resources for some other things we need to do,” Pyle said, such as developing a test for special education students as well as a new test in secondary math.
The state board reviews and, if necessary, revises standards in the different academic areas every seven years, Pyle said. Depending on the changes made, a new assessment may need to be created, and “this takes money,” he said.
Part of the reason Wright proposed eliminating the history test was because of a change in the standards last year that would lead to “the expense of creating a new test,” Pyle said.
“The anticipated savings from eliminating the third grade history test would’ve been about $380,000 a year,” he said.
The process takes about three years to come up with test questions, have them reviewed by committees and classroom teachers and conduct field testing on students. New questions are debuted in existing SOL exams but not counted against the students to find out if the questions are “fair and a valid instrument for student achievement,” Pyle said.
Wright has proposed to the board to start the process of creating the new history test and to continue using the existing exam until that process is completed. |
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