Parents at some Montgomery County elementary schools are relieved about the announcement last week that an achievement test for second-graders no longer will be given, starting next school year.

The news from Superintendent Joshua P. Starr that the TerraNova 2 test in math and language arts will be eliminated has pleased parents who have seen their schools taking several days to prepare students for the test, said Ted Willard, co-chairman of the curriculum committee with the Montgomery County Council of Parent-Teacher Associations.

“Is that really serving a longterm educational purpose?” Willard said.

However, eliminating the test means that parents no longer will have results from a nationally-benchmarked test to assess their children’s progress, especially for those with high-achieving students, said Michelle Gluck, chairwoman of the county PTA’s Gifted Child subcommittee.

“I don’t think MCPS overtests its students,” Gluck said. “I think MCPS overprepares its students for tests.”

The TerraNova test, which has been given to Montgomery students since 2007, assesses second-graders’ abilities in reading, language, mathematics, language mechanics, and mathematics computation. Students’ scores can be compared to other students’ results nationwide.

In his announcement that the test no longer will be given, Starr said that school already had “existing tools” to evaluate student in second grade.

“Testing certainly has its place, but we must carefully consider every assessment we are giving our students and determine if the benefits outweigh the cost and the interruption to instruction,” Starr said in a statement.

Scores have been steady on the TerraNova test the past two years. In 2011, 72.6 percent of all students scored at or above the test’s equivalent of the 50th percentile, compared to 72.5 percent of students in 2010.

In its annual report last year, the school system stated that students who score at or above the 70th percentile of TerraNova scores in reading are “considered on a pathway to college and career readiness.”

Less than 30 percent of blacks and Hispanics hit this benchmark, while 61 percent of white students and 53.5 percent of Asians did so.

In its testing calendar for elementary schools this year, the school system’s Office of Curriculum and Instructional Programs lists the testing dates for TerraNova for April 16 through April 20. Less than three weeks after that, from May 7 to June 1, K-2 students are scheduled to take the school system’s Primary Reading assessment. That test follows separate Primary Reading assessments earlier in the year.

“The pendulum has swung so far in favor of standardized tests that there’s an awful lot of pressures and our teachers and our administrators,” said Board of Education member Patricia B. O’Neill (Dist. 3) of Bethesda. “Even if it’s just one small step to relieving some of that, I’m pleased.”

However, Gluck said that unlike other tests where statistical cut-offs for achievement levels are artificially low, TerraNova has provided data points that have been useful to parents investigating whether their students are high-level learners.

At Rockville’s Brookhaven Elementary School, second-grade teacher Barbara Woodworth said teachers used to devote more time preparing students for TerraNova. But they have not gotten the desired results from that preparation and have scaled back in recent years.

Unlike the school system’s Primary Reading assessment, results from TerraNova do not reach teachers until nearly the end of a school year, Woodworth noted. This makes the test not particularly helpful for teachers looking to adjust their classroom strategies.

“For specific children, it’s really never helped us,” she said.

Starr’s decision does not require approval from the school board.

In his statement, Starr said the school system wanted to use the money spent on administering TerraNova to other areas in the school system, but did not specify where. Eliminating the TerraNova test will save the school system $230,000, spokesman Dana Tofig said.

TerraNova is produced by CTB/McGraw-Hill, an education publishing company. The school system has a contract with Pearson Education, another education publishing company, to help develop a new elementary school curriculum. Tofig said the decision to stop giving TerraNova is not linked to the system’s curriculum deal with Pearson.

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