Test Results Good, Improvement Needed

Bridgewater-Raritan students are performing better on the state’s annual standardized tests in language arts and math—but there is still room for improvement.

That was the message Cheryl Dyer, assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction, delivered in an hour-long presentation at Tuesday’s board of education meeting.

“It’s not the programs,” she said. “It’s what happens in the hands of the teachers.”

“The difference is the people, not the programs,” she added.

Overall, Dyer said, district students are performing much better than the state average in language arts and math, and also better than students in school districts with similar demographics. The tests are given in grades three through eight and 11.

The high school and all of the district’s primary schools achieved the standards of adequate yearly progress [AYP] as required by the nation's No Child Left Behind Act. But there are some areas, Dyer said, in which students are not reaching the state’s AYP benchmarks at the , and .

At the middle school, Dyer said, benchmarks were not met in language arts by students with disabilities and students in the Hispanic and “economically disadvantaged” sub-groups.

Sixth-grade students at Eisenhower and Hillside did not reach the language arts benchmarks, achieving 37 of the test’s 40 indicators.

“Yes, we have some problems, but so do other districts,” Dyer said, adding that most of Bridgewater-Raritan’s scores continue to rise.

Dyer said that the seventh-grade language art scores cause the “most concern.”

“They have gone down every year,” she said.

But the scores rebound in the eighth grade, she said.

“Everybody does better in eighth grade than in seventh grade,” she said.

Specific plans are being developed to address the language arts scores at the middle and intermediate schools. For example, Dyer said, the seventh-grade language arts curriculum will be revised.

As for the high school, Dyer said, students’ language art scores continue to improve.

“We will continue what we have been doing there because it’s working,” she said.

Only in a few sub-groups at the middle school and Hillside’s grade six did students not meet the state’s benchmarks in math, Dyer said.

On the math tests at all grade levels, “we’ve leveled off at a really high plane,’’ she said.     

Board vice president Patrick Breslin said the academic performance at the primary schools is “quite impressive.”

“We’re doing a great job,” board member Jill Gladstone said.