[BHS Etree] FROM THE PRINCIPAL - Why STAR Testing Matters

[BHS etree]

Dear BHS Families:

 

Tomorrow we begin administering the STAR tests for our 9th through 11th
grade students. While I know that many of you have heard from
Superintendent Huyett and BHS Vice Principal Vernon Walton regarding STAR
Testing, I wanted to add my thoughts toward our collective request that
your students participate in earnest in this week's exams. 

 

The STAR tests, like several other types of performance measures, are not
without flaws, yet often in the area of education we allow the absence of
a completely perfect measurement tool to justify not attempting to measure
student progress at all. We are all cognizant of the fact that the results
of the STAR exams are not the only indicators or determiners of whether
our school is a good school or not, but I personally feel that there are
valuable pieces of data to be found and utilized in the results of these
assessments. These results, coupled with increased progress in creating
site-based formative and summative assessments, as well as common
curriculum, will move us toward a place that is slightly less anecdotal
and more quantitative in terms of monitoring and assessing our collective
progress with kids. 

 

Earning a valid Academic Performance Index, a rating given based on STAR
results and participation rates, will be critical to our securing of a
long-term accreditation when the visiting team from the Western
Association of Schools and Colleges assesses our school this coming fall.
It is unlikely that a six-year accreditation would be granted to a school
without a firm API and thus the staff would be subject to committing to or
sustaining current levels of professional development time to the
accreditation process; time that could be tendered to more immediate site
needs such as more specific course outlines, pacing guides, and in-house
common assessments; tools that can provide real-time feedback for use in
revising and adjusting curriculum and lesson design in ways that are
immediately beneficial for kids. 

 

Standardized testing invokes a huge variety of responses and opinions
though the existence of such assessments remains a significant part of the
secondary and higher education experience on things like the SAT, ACT,
GRE, GMAT, LSAT, etc. STAR affords us, at the very least, a practicum for
those upcoming experiences and environments, and also yields information
that allows us to compare our students' progress against the progress of
students state-wide on a standards-based assessment. 

 

Student performance in grades 9-11 on STAR can be a strong predictor of
performance or a needs assessment of sorts where the aforementioned exams
are concerned. In addition, it allows us to continue to monitor
disparities in grade-level performance between groups of kids on our
campus when disaggregated by socioeconomic status, gender, disabilities,
or race. While STAR may not reflect the full scale and scope of student
learning and experience at Berkeley High School it is nonetheless a
consistent cross-school measure. Again, while it may not be the lone piece
of information that defines our school, STAR results do, in my opinion
have value and relevance. 

 

I ask you to partner with us this week to have students complete these
exams. As medical practitioners use multiple indicators to assess their
patients' levels of wellness, I similarly believe that STAR testing is a
single, but critical measure that educators should employ when determining
whether their student's levels of mastery and comprehension warrant a
clean bill of health or a more specific diagnosis. 

 

Respectfully,

 

Pasquale Scuderi

Principal

Berkeley High School

(510) 644-6120

 

________________

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