Count Northern Lehigh School District administrators among those who have expressed frustration with the new Pennsylvania System of School Assessment.

Assistant Superintendent Karen Nicholas told the school board on Monday that the Pennsylvania Department of Education has asked administrators to share with the district five points policymakers should know about the new PSSAs.The five points are as follows:• This past spring, a new PSSA was administered in classrooms throughout the state, grades three through eight, in English language arts and mathematics. The assessment was the first PSSA to be fully aligned to the more rigorous PA Core Standards, which PDE adopted in the fall of 2013. The PA Core Standards are intended to better prepare commonwealth students for college and career readiness when they graduate.• On July 9, at a public meeting in Harrisburg, the PDE approved "cut scores" to determine student performance levels on the 2015 PSSAs. The Secretary of Education recommended the cut scores, which a standards setting team of 58 PA educators developed.• The heightened difficulty and increased rigor of the PA Core, and the limited time between final adoption and implementation of the new PSSA has resulted in fewer students scoring proficient or advanced. Other states have experienced similar results when making the transition to more rigorous standards. Transitioning to the new standards requires time to develop new curriculum, train teachers and provide resources to support the new curriculum.• It is not useful to directly compare students' scores on the new assessments to student scores from previous years because the 2015 PSSA measures different content from the previous years' PSSAs.• The Pennsylvania Value Added Assessment System, which contributes to teacher specific data in educator effectiveness ratings and the School Performance Profile, will provide teachers and schools with reliable estimates of growth for the 2014-15 school year, and PDE does not anticipate a reduction in the number of teachers or schools receiving favorable PVAAS scores for the year.Nicholas said entirely too much time is being spent on testing."This has been a very, very difficult task with what continues to change year after year," Nicholas said. "It's a huge ball of wax that we're dealing with."Superintendent Michael Michaels added, "I don't agree with all this testing.""I don't want them to be great test-takers," Michaels said. "I want them to be great, productive adults."Contacted Thursday, Nicholas said the district has yet to do a breakdown of the scores."We have not analyzed the scores at this point in time," she said. "We will be sharing the scores with our teachers when they come back to school and be analyzing the information at that time and sharing it with the public after our teachers have had a chance to take a look at the scores."The PSSA is a standardized test administered to public schools in the state.Students in grades three through eight are assessed in reading skills and mathematics, while students in grades five and eight are assessed in writing skills.