Middlesex County misses the bar on standards

Four Middlesex County high schools including New Brunswick failed to meet standards set forth Rosetta Stone Store by the No Child Left Behind Act, according to the Adequate Yearly Progress report. Mandated by the NCLB Act, the report results are calculated through schools' scores in the High School Proficiency Assessment and the New Jersey Assessment of Skills and Knowledge tests, grade levels three through eight. "We won't be satisfied until all of our schools meet state and national standards," New Brunswick Superintendent Richard Kaplan said in a Home New Tribune article.Kenneth Heim, a learning disability teacher and consultant in the Allentown school district, said every school in 2013 is expected to pass language arts and mathematics in the 85th percentile, regardless of the students' individual learning abilities. He said if a school fails the state standards, the school's administration must come up with a plan within the next year, and the government has the right to come in and make changes.In addition to New Brunswick, Old Bridge, Perth Amboy and Rahway high schools, 68 other schools statewide are required to execute school-restructuring plans, according to the State Department of Education's list of schools in need of improvement.New Jersey Department of Education spokesperson Beth Auerswald said New Jersey's NCLB Act takes a gradual approach to reach complete proficiency, with proficiency benchmarks increased each year. Schools are required to meet those benchmarks in each of the 41 indicators, which break down Rosetta Stone Cheap students by race, socioeconomics, special education and language. "Looking at the raw categories, New Brunswick made none whatsoever, but did improve the number of students who didn't make proficiency," Auerswald said. "With No Child Left Behind, it was required to place students in various categories and break it down in order to cover every situation and social grouping."Almost 71 percent of the 2,210 New Jersey schools in which tests were administered this spring met the AYP standards, according to a New Jersey Department of Education press release from Dec. 19, 2008. Auerswald said state proficiency tests are given near the end of spring, and schools that failed have two more chances to pass in October and March. "Depending on how many years they fail to pass state standards, like two to three years verses seven to eight years in a row, the schools' financial consequences vary," Auerswald said. After meeting the requirements for the first time since the act was put in place in 2002, McGinnis Middle School in Perth Amboy was placed in a "hold" status, according to an article in the Home News Tribune. Perth Amboy Superintendent John Rodecker said McGinnis Middle School's improvement was due largely Rosetta Stone Greek V3 to a strategy in which groups of students remain together throughout the day and take classes with the same teachers. The article discusses the strategy known as "teaming," which allows teachers to collaborate with each other more easily because they're dealing with the same group of students.Heim said all student results are lumped into a school's single assessment used to determine the progress of the entire district. One factor affecting the New Brunswick school district is the way students are classified in special education, Heim said. Schools are not allowed to classify students as disabled in a way that is disproportionate to the district's racial makeup, he said. If the racial makeup of a district is 30 percent African-American, 25 percent Hispanic, 25 percent White and 20 percent Asian, then within the students who are disabled, no more than 25 percent of them can be Hispanic, Heim said.The racial classification system embedded in the NCLB Act affects a district such as New Brunswick, which Rosetta Stone Languages is very racially diverse. These classifications also affect the benchmark results, all of which New Brunswick failed, he said.The reason why schools fail to meet the standards may be attributed to raising the bar on schools' proficiency requirements, State Education Commissioner Lucille E. Davy said in a New Jersey Department of Education press release. "It is also important to remember that AYP is only one measure of a school's progress," Davy said in the press release. "DOE staff have been working with teachers and administrators to improve the learning environments in schools that have struggled in the past."