A little more than a month ago, I wrote about the School Report Card results for Roslyn's schools and some of the misleading ways in which educational statistics are often reported in the media. With the release last week of the results of New York state's new fourth grade reading test, I would like to again provide some information that will give our parents and other residents a broader context for understanding and analyzing these test results.

The new test is called the English Language Arts examination for grade 4, or ELA 4. The test is intended to be a more rigorous test than the one it replaced, the Pupil Evaluation Program test in reading for grade 3. The Commissioner of Education, in an effort to improve student performance, is establishing higher standards across the curriculum and at all levels. The ELA 4 is just one of many new assessments designed not only to measure how well New York's children are doing in school, but to challenge them to do better.

Every public school student in New York took the ELA 4 for the first time last January. Roslyn's fourth graders performed exceptionally well on this test in comparison with other students throughout the state and in our area. In fact, students at the Harbor Hill School had the highest average score of any elementary school in Nassau County. With the East Hills School's fourth graders also doing vey well on the test, Roslyn ranked second overall in the county.

Once again, our faculty is to be commended for their outstanding efforts to enhance the elementary reading program during the last two years and to prepare students for this new standardized reading test. To ensure that fourth grade students were well prepared for an exam whose format differed entirely from tests the students had taken in prior years, our teachers followed state recommendations and guidelines for appropriate testing preparation.

In Roslyn, our philosophy has always been that we do not "teach to the test." Skills are more important than scores. In fact, the old third-grade reading test was originally designed as a diagnostic tool, intended primarily to identify those students who may need extra help in reading. Therefore, our program has always focused on valuable reading and language arts skills that benefit stuednts in the long run. Indeed, that is the commissioner's goal for this particular test: not to have elementary students merely pass the test, but to make them better readers, writers and listeners.

As pleased as we are about our results on the ELA 4, I would like to offer the same word of caution that I always do about statistics. The difference between the very best performing school and one a little further down the list is minuscule, especially when we compare Long Island school districts to one another. On last year's third-grade reading test, East Hills School ranked among the very top schools in the state, with Harbor Hill, with results that were also outstanding, a little further down the rankings. This year, the situation is reversed, with Harbor Hill coming out first in the county and East Hills a bit further down the list.

Now consider this fact: it is the same class of students at each school who took last year's third grade test and this year's fourth grade test. More than a month ago, weeks before these results were known, I wrote in this space that "the differences in achievement between students at the East Hills and Harbor Hill schools are insignificant. In one year, students in one school will perform slightly better; in the next, this may be reversed." I could not have imagined a better validation of this point, and a better example of the parity that exists between East Hills and Harbor Hill in their outstanding staffs and programs, than the results that came out last week.

There are many educators throughout the state who have taken issue with many aspects of the ELA 4, and we should not be surprised if it is revised in future years. This should neither diminish our pride in our students and their teachers, nor make us complacent about those students who need our help to do even better. In Roslyn, we don't wait for test results to be reported in the media before we provide programs to help our youngsters. Helping every student achieve is the way we work every day.