New Mexico students score lower on new statewide tests

The results show more than 44 percent of juniors met or exceeded English and language arts expectations while less than 27 percent of freshman scored at the same level. Thus, a wide array of students from grades 8 through 11 took varying levels of math PARCC exams.

Mississippi used PARCC tests only past year, but will keep a five-level format going forward.

Level 5: Student exceeded expectations.

New Mexico Public Education Secretary Hanna Skandera released this year’s results from the controversial Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers exams, or PARCC on Friday.

APS also beat out Santa Fe School district in math, English and language arts.

Those high school students who scored at level 4 or 5 are considered by PARCC to be on track to graduate with the necessary skills. Levels 1 and 2 are deemed to be failing grades.

In algebra two, 21 percent of students are proficient.

An average of 40 percent of students passed the Algebra II exam, while 60 percent failed.

Hand said that the percentages of students who scored four or higher reveal a correlation to what researchers already know about college and career readiness. Examples of other ways would be the SAT, AP exams, etc.

Students are divided into three levels, from 1 to 5.

Despite the outrage, these scores aren’t the absolute in deciding if a student will graduate.

Rounds said that in 2014, 49.7 percent of juniors were proficient in math under the old SBA test. With PARCC, the tests are broken up by subject, depending on the math course each student is taking.

PED Secretary Skandera pointed to a more hard test as a reason for the lower scores. “We are doing what I would say is closing the honesty gap”, said Skandera.

“Our students didn’t all of a sudden get worse. But we worked with districts across the state and, this year and next year, a three will count for graduation”.

“Our goal as a state is to make sure that students are prepared for success in life”, Skandera said.

Either way, our advice: Don’t trust anyone pretending to draw conclusions from the results of an unproven test lacking any context for comparison. “Let’s get honest about where we are, and when we know where we are, we can do something about it”.

Albuquerque Public Schools stacked above the state average in all of the testing categories.

A district-by-district breakdown is expected to be posted on the PED website Friday, but had not yet been posted as of this story’s publication.

Those overall proficiency levels will certainly become a primary broad-brush talking point when results are released, and will greatly influence the perception of New Jersey student performance. Students and their parents will need to wait until at least November 2 to learn their individual scores.