The math and English language arts tests for children in third through eighth grades will be starkly different from tests given in years past. They are designed for a new set of standards that many districts are just beginning to introduce in their classrooms.

“Will the scores drop?” said Ken Slentz, deputy commissioner of P-12 education for the state Education Department. “It would be naive to think otherwise.”

The state’s largest teachers union has blasted what it says is a rush to the new exams, saying neither teachers nor students are ready.

“You’re basically putting the assessments before the curriculum, and every good teacher knows that’s the wrong thing to do,” said Richard Iannuzzi, president of New York State United Teachers.

The tests are aligned with new “Common Core” standards that 46 states have adopted. The standards are intended to raise the bar for student achievement to the same level in schools across the country.

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan made the adoption of the Common Core a requirement of his Race to the Top grant competition. New York adopted the standards early – part of the reason it won a $700 million grant.

In English language arts, there is a focus on understanding and writing about complex, non-fiction texts. In math, the emphasis is on deeper understanding of concepts and their practical application. The new tests will include more difficult reading passages, more complicated math problems and more open-ended questions that require students to go into depth in their answers.

New York is one of only a few states to base this year’s tests on the new standards. When Kentucky administered new exams last year, scores plummeted. The percentage of elementary pupils meeting the state standard in reading dropped from 76 to 48. In math, the drop was from 73 percent to 40 percent.

Scores on Common Core-aligned tests also dove in Georgia and Florida.

NYSUT supports the new standards, but says it is unfair to teachers and students to impose the high-stakes tests now.

The union surveyed more than 1,600 teachers in November and reported that only a third said they had access to textbooks aligned with the new standards. That includes about half of elementary English teachers and 26 percent of math teachers.

“You’re basically putting the assessments before the curriculum, and every good teacher knows that’s the wrong thing to do,” Iannuzzi said.

Jeff Craig, assistant superintendent at Onondaga-Cayuga-Madison BOCES, said it is true that many districts still are working to change over to the new standards.

“Everything’s relative,” he said. “But to say that districts are all set and ready to go and that all the curricular changes have occurred is not true.”

Craig said the state is sending a strong message to districts by introducing the new exams this year.

“The fact of the matter is that it’s the assessments that really can drive change thoroughly and quickly,” he said. “I would imagine that the thinking is that it’s going to increase the pace at which everyone is going to have to make changes at their schools.”

Slentz says the state has been pushing the Common Core standards since 2010, and has offered curriculum materials and other help to districts.

But Iannuzzi says teachers and students are at the mercy of their districts, and some have had more time and money than others to buy materials and train teachers. That’s not fair, he says, particularly since test results now play a part in teacher evaluations.

Both and Slentz and Craig said poorer student scores will not necessarily affect teacher evaluations because the evaluations compare teachers to their peers across the state.

“It’s about how they change compared to each other,” Craig said. “So as long as everyone’s in the same boat it won’t matter.”

The Syracuse school district is introducing a Common Core curriculum in all of its schools this year. Laura Kelley, the district’s chief academic officer, said she believes the district is as well-positioned as it can be for the new tests.

“The tests will be more difficult,” she said, “but we need to assess to see how the kids are doing according to those standards.”

In an eighth-grade social studies class at Syracuse’s Expeditionary Learning Middle School on a recent day, teacher Rich Richardson was immersed in teaching to the new expectations.

His students sat in a semicircle around him and pored over documents about the Japanese internment camps in the United States during World War II. Richardson didn’t lecture them – he prodded them to examine the documents and discuss what they discovered.

“All right, time to research,” he said. “I’m not going to tell you; we’re going to find it in the text.”

Time and again, as students read aloud from the texts and answered questions about the material, he would ask them: “Where’s the relevant evidence?” and send them back to the text to find it.

Richardson does not have a social studies textbook that corresponds to the Common Core approach, so he has had to find his own documents and incorporate them into his lessons.

“It’s a lot of work,” he said.

In their English class, Richardson’s students are studying a related work -- “Night,” Elie Weisel’s literary classic about the Nazi concentration camps. Under the new, more rigorous standards, the book was moved from the ninth-grade curriculum to the eighth grade.

Richardson, a 7-year teaching veteran, said the state tests will be a challenge for his students, but says they will force districts and teachers to change.

“If we wait a couple years it’s going to take another couple of years for our kids to meet the standards,” he said.

Iannuzzi of NYSUT disagrees, and is already foreseeing the fallout when the test results come in.

“The commissioner will blame the school districts,” he said. “The school districts will blame the state ed department. But the only ones who will feel the consequences will be students and teachers.”

Contact Paul Riede at priede@syracuse.com or 470-3260. Follow him on Twitter at @PaulRiede.