At the Hicksville Board of Education meeting on July 23, the newly reorganized trustees expressed great concern about our high school students' performance on some of the New York State Regents exams given in June. Since the new standards took hold in New York State and since the national push has been to improve student academic performance, test scores have become increasingly influential as a determining factor of student progress. While the new board should evaluate how our students fare against the local and state results, it should not judge our district and our teachers solely on these unreliable test results.

As the state has been implementing its new tests, it has also been arbitrarily adjusting the rubrics to score these tests. As a high school English teacher with over 18 years in the classroom, I have marshaled hundreds of my 11th grade students through the grueling new six hour English Regents exam. Anyone who has not taken a New York State Regents exam in the past few years cannot understand the magnitude of the annual format and scoring changes involved in these tests.

I know firsthand the shortcomings of the ever-changing Regents testing process. We need our board members to proverbially get in the trenches with the teachers and the students to see what is really going on before they recommend changes or criticize test results. Therefore, I recommend that before any trustee evaluates our district's performance on these exams, he or she do the following:

1. Read the June exams in each subject in which he/she questions the results;

2. Compare the June exams and their scoring rubrics with the last several exams and their rubrics;

3. Discuss the contents of the exam with the teachers who taught the courses;

4. Ask the teachers about issues concerning the curriculum that they think affect the student performance on the exam;

5. Discuss with the teachers their concerns about the preparedness of the students who took the exams;

6. Ask the teachers what difficulties and successes they had with this exam compared to the past exams;

7. Compare the numbers of special education and non-English speaking students who took this year's exam with the numbers from last year;

8. Look specifically for the areas of progress that defy statistics such as non-English speaking or special education students who passed the exams despite the odds against them;

9. Examine portfolios, projects, and other valid performance assessments throughout the academic year that demonstrate student progress; and

10. Applaud the efforts of the teachers who continue to teach the curriculum creatively despite the demands of these fickle exams.

Hicksville, like every other public school district in the nation, is faced with the challenge to educate a diverse population to meet ever-increasing standards and to prepare our students for the demands of the future job market. Of course we want our teachers to be informed and prepared to teach the curriculum demanded by the state standards. However, to judge our teachers, our students, and our entire district by such narrow standards is a disservice to all.

To judge academic progress or failure by percentages on our Regents exams is to grossly oversimplify the complexity of what determines a successful learning environment. If our board focuses solely on test scores, the teachers will feel pressure to teach strictly to the tests. I do not want the students of Hicksville become victims of the deadly "drill and kill" teaching methodology.

Instead of relying on the state to determine how well our children are progressing, we need to establish our own broad-based assessment that incorporates a wide range of factors that affect student learning. As a community, we need to decide what we think is valid progress for our children, and we must trust our dedicated teachers, not the state, to be the experts on determining the academic needs of our students. Our children's education should not be manipulated by a newspaper's published school report card.

Each child deserves the opportunity to be judged by his or her individual progress, not by an arbitrary rubric that the state is experimenting with. Our teachers should not be forced into becoming robotic test administrators stripped of their creativity to teach beyond curriculum required by the state. Our children deserve a more enriching learning environment.

I have confidence that our new board has the commitment to our children and to our teachers to judge our academic progress fairly and knowledgeably. In order to measure both our academic accomplishments and challenges, our board of education needs to evaluate our students' academic performance holistically on a variety of data - not just on the basis of the black and white statistics of the unreliable state exams.

With the professional expertise of our teachers and administrators, the board of education should research and analyze a wide variety of data on academic performance. Only then should the board make recommendations to adjust curriculum, staffing, class sizes, professional training, or academic intervention. Since academic excellence is dependent on so many factors, careful evaluation is needed before changes should be implemented. In spite of the ever-changing standards, let us not forget that so many of our current students and staff have achieved high levels of academic success. Let us build on our accomplishments.

Lorene Bossong