THE STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT / THE UNIVERSITY OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK / ALBANY, NY 12234 Office of Elementary, Middle, Secondary & Continuing Education Information and Reporting Services Tel. (518) 474-7965 Fax (518) 474-4351

You were notified earlier that on September 14 you can use nySTART to obtain the New York State Testing Program (NYSTP) grades 3-8 English language arts (ELA) scores for your district and component schools and on September 28 you can obtain the grades 3-8 mathematics scores. On behalf of Commissioner Mills and Interim Deputy Commissioner Stevens, I want to thank each of you for the hard work that was necessary to administer, score and report exam data to the repository system. Your hard work has made the first year’s test administration a success.

State Education Department Press Conference

I want to inform you about how these test results will be used in the coming months. As has been his practice with the 1999-2005 ELA and mathematics results, the Department will hold press conferences to publicly release summary data for the State, districts, and schools. The ELA press conference will be held on September 21; the math press conference on October 5. For each grade level, the Department will publish the percentage of students who scored at each performance level. All 2006 NYSTP ELA and math test scores will be embargoed until these dates. The ELA data to be published will be taken from the Level 2 Student Information Repository on September 7. If you are aware of missing or erroneous enrollment, demographic or program data for students in your district, you should arrange with your Level 1 Repository operator to correct these data on Level 1 and have the operator move the data to Level 2 by September 7. Your Level 1 Repository operator will specify the date by which it must receive corrections to meet this deadline. Making these corrections will ensure that your district and component schools will have the most accurate possible data for release at the press conferences. Note that you can never change assessment scores assigned by CTB: McGraw Hill.

nySTART Print-Ready Reports

On September 21, using nySTART, you can obtain print-ready individual student reports for ELA for distribution to parents and teachers and print-ready school and district summary reports to distribute publicly, if desired. The data for the print-ready ELA reports were taken from the Level 2 Repository on August 28. Please note that if your district makes changes to enrollment, demographic, and programmatic data for students in grades 3-8 between August 28 and September 7, the nySTART print-ready reports may not match the ELA summary data to be released at the press conference. Changes made to the Level 2 data, however, will be reflected in the ELA nySTART Interactive Reports.

On October 5, the print-ready reports for mathematics will be available through nySTART. To help districts ensure the accuracy of these reports, on August 31, using nySTART, you can obtain verification reports showing the demographic, enrollment, and program data for students in your district and component schools who were enrolled in grades 3-8 or, if ungraded, were in the appropriate age ranges to take the mathematics assessments. To ensure that these data are accurate for the nySTART print-ready math reports and the press release on mathematics results, you should make corrections and certify data to be sent to Level 2 by September 15. Your Level 1 Repository operator will specify the date by which it must receive corrections to meet this deadline. The verification report, however, will continue to be available for review until September 30.

Report Cards

If you find that the ELA and mathematics data released at the time of the press conferences are not accurate, you will still have the opportunity to make corrections before the report card is released publicly and accountability decisions are made. On October 26, using nySTART, you can preview your school and district report cards, including accountability status. On the same date, again using nySTART, you can access verification reports showing individual student results for elementary- and middle-level data reported in the report card. You must make any necessary corrections to these data and submit them to your Level 1 Repository operator by November 2. On November 15, you will be able to access your final report card and accountability status using nySTART. The final list of schools and districts in improvement status will be made public on that day. The report cards will be made public on November 22. The Department is required by the United States Department of Education to release the list of schools in need of improvement for the 2006-07 school year no later than November 15. Please be aware that the Department will move all data in the Level 2 Repository to the Level 3 Repository on November 4 for use in the school report cards, regardless of whether the data have been certified as accurate.

New York State Student Identification System (NYSSIS)

Over 99 percent of New York State students have been assigned unique student identifiers by NYSSIS. This is a significant achievement of which we can all be proud. There are a few remaining students who were enrolled in the 2005-06 school year who have not yet been assigned unique identifiers. I would like to remind districts enrolling those students that it is essential that Level 2 repository records for these students include unique identifiers before November 2; students must have a unique identifier for their records to be moved to Level 3. If your district has students in the NYSSIS near-match queue for whom you have not made a decision, I urge you to make the best decision possible with the information that is available. If the district does not have sufficient information to be certain of its decision, it should identify the student as matching a student already assigned an identifier. The Department will implement a unique identifier auditing system during the 2006-07 school year. This system will notify a district when a unique identifier that it reports is reported for a student simultaneously enrolled in another district. Therefore, false matches will likely be detected and can then be corrected. If a district erroneously decides that the student for whom it is requesting a unique identifier does not match a student already in the system, it is unlikely that the error will be detected.

The same URL used to access this memo provides additional information about nySTART: http://emsc32.nysed.gov/irts/nystart/.  Again I wish to convey my sincere appreciation for the hard work done to administer the new tests, assign unique identifiers, and provide student data to the repository system.

cc:  David Abrams
      Big 5 Coordinators
      RIC Directors