New School Standards, Tests in the Pipeline

The Manasquan School District is bracing for sweeping changes to its curriculum and standardized tests as part of a national initiative to streamline U.S. students' core standards. 

New common core state standards (CCSS), with a more rigorous curriculum in language arts and math, must be implemented by the end of this year, while a new standardized assessment test to be taken entirely online — Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) — will hit classrooms for the 2014-15 school year. 

Last week, Schools Superintendent Geraldine Margin outlined the district's plan to prepare its students for the new standards, which she says will move the state's K-12 schools toward a more national curriculum. 

By the end of this school year, the district also must put into place a teacher evaluation system with multiple rankings and data for the state to review. 

"We're on the threshold of a very dynamic time in education," Margin said. 

The changes come at a time when international testing trends show that American students are becoming less and less competitive with their peers across the globe, Margin said.

"We're in a state of emergency," Margin said. 

The new math and language arts standards will be more specific, and students will be expected to learn more in less time, Margin said. 

Reading levels among American students have been on the decline since 1963, and the CCSS will expose them to more complex texts and encourage more independent reading, Margin said. 

The district will be forced to move toward more informational texts and away from narratives, as at least 70 percent of what each student reads must be deemed "informational," Margin said. 

In math, students will be tasked with ramping up their understanding and application of concepts, formulas and theories, Margin said. 

For instance, under the old standards, students could get away with being able to understand and apply the Pythagorean Theorem. 

But under next year's standards, they will have to explain the theorem as well as its converse, and then apply it in real-world problems in two and three dimensions, Margin said. 

The shifts in language arts and literacy will encompass regular practice with complex texts and academic vocabulary, building knowledge through content-rich nonfiction and informational text, and reading and writing grounded in evidence from texts, according to Margin's report. 

The changes in math standards will include an emphasis on the core standards, links between major topics across all grade levels, and a rigor that requires fluency and application with a deep understanding, the report says. 

The new curriculum standards will also be assessed with a new test that will replace all current assessments throughout both the Elementary and High Schools, Margin said. 

The PARCC, set to be implemented for the 2014-15 school year, will test students twice per year beginning in the third grade up through the eleventh grade, Margin said.

The test will determine whether students are college- and career-ready or "on track" to being so, Margin said. 

And since the tests will be taken online, the results and other data will be returned immediately to the teachers so they can use it to help students where they need it, Margin said. 

The district's current third-graders will be first ones to really experience the full force of the testing assessments by their high school graduation, Margin said.