Amidst all the shouts of accountability coming from the Bloomberg and Klein administration in NYC, we find they have not been accountable to the public. The parents are confused, and the students are suffering from the way in which testing standards were manipulated through the years.
Suddenly students who thought they were succeeding, are not. The huge gains in test scores claimed by Bloomberg and his buddy Joel Klein....were not there after all.
The ones caught in the middle of all the educational politics, the ones paying the price for the changing standards and reliance on one test are the students.
The
Incongressional blog quotes the New York Times on the topic.
New York State education officials, admitting that the state’s annual tests were not properly measuring student proficiency, released results Wednesday showing that more than half of New York City students were failing to meet state standards in reading, at a time when Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg boasted that more that more than two-thirds of city’s students were reading at grade level.
After researchers concluded that the state exams had steadily become easier to pass, state officials said last week that they would recalibrate the way the tests were graded, warning educators to brace themselves for a harsh wake-up call.
New York City officials said that if the passing rates since 2006 were adjusted to match the new scoring standards, the city had shown substantial progress over all. But that explanation is likely to offer little consolation to teachers and parents who must now face the reality that just more than half of city students in the third through eighth grades are proficient in math, not four out of every five, as they were led to believe last year.
Fred Klonsky's blog about teacher training in faculty meetings really hit a chord with me. He is writing about the "Accountability" and the irony of the president's speech to the Urban League coming just a day after the test score fiasco hit the news.
AccountabilityAs I read President Obama’s speech to the Urban League yesterday I just kept thinking: Huh?
It reminded me of staff development meetings at work. Every couple of years the administration brings in some consultant and inevitably we do the “which color are you?” thing. Or the “which direction are you?”
“Green” = individualist. “East” = Good at collaboration. A good 90 minutes of staff development time wasted. 90 minutes of your life you won’t get back. And when it’s done the obvious question is: What does this have to do with anything?
Oh, yeh, I remember the inservice trainings through the years. Some of ours were so ridiculous that I was embarrassed to be there. We had to wear signs of various steps in teaching, we had to move in order of presentation or be moved by a so-called monitor. We had to role-play parents, teachers, and students. I hated it. The presenter was always so gushy. We needed to be having serious training or else be allowed to work in our classrooms.
More from Klonsky's blog:
Other than blaming teachers for not being good with change, was this really a defense of Race to the Top, of competitive grants, of the wholesale closing of schools, of turnaround demands that end up firing good principals and good teachers? Did his speech address the issues raised by the report of the seven Civil Rights Organizations and the critique of Race to the Top that came out of the NEA RA?
Hell no.
This was also covered by Juan Gonzalez at the New York Daily News. The article pointed out that
kids were the big losers in the test scores gameSo all those glowing school test results were a fraud, after all.
For years, Mayor Bloomberg, Schools Chancellor Joel Klein and top education officials in Albany touted big jumps in math and reading scores statewide - and skyrocketing results among New York City's pupils.
The scores, they said, were proof that mayoral control and Klein's data-driven version of school reform had succeeded. Schools were winning the "civil rights battle of our time," the chancellor claimed, by closing the racial "achievement gap."
.."Now, state officials have revealed a startling nosedive in test scores. Admitting that results from previous years had been inflated, the state announced tougher standards this year - resulting in the lower scores. Thousands of parents who had been told their children were at grade level are suddenly learning they aren't.
So does that mean they are not at grade level? Or does it mean the test standards have been raised and lowered so much that no one really knows what is grade level anymore?
Al Sharpton has been very much on board with Bloomberg and Klein and the mayoral control idea. Now he has second thoughts.
The new scores are so bad Sharpton has begun to distance himself from Klein. "I'm very disturbed and concerned by these scores," Sharpton said.
"We were told students were improving, but it seems our kids were victims of dumbed-down tests to make the administration look good."
Scores are also way down at charter schools. Not just traditional public schools.
Charter schools show alarming drop in pass rate.Pass rates at city charter schools dropped even more dramatically than at public schools on the state reading exam - by 34 percentage points - a Daily News analysis shows.
As the state moved to raise the bar for achieving a "proficient" rating on the exams, charter schools fell as sharply as public schools on the math exams - by 28 percentage points.
I really think the NYC Public School Parents blog said it best of all.
It's not about the tests.Standardized test scores have become the scourge of the American education system. In New York, simply reconstructing the exams and raising the cut scores will do nothing more than address a symptom, one reflected in overly generous assessment of students' academic progress and readiness. While the change is needed, it will also conveniently eliminate a major structural criticism of the current education reform movement that those "reformers" will be happy to see removed; it's not for nothing that the New York Times, NY Daily News, and NY Post editorial boards jumped on the "revise the NYS standardized exam bandwagon" so quickly and enthusiastically. That alone should warn everyone of the underlying reality of this situation and their agenda. To wit: test, test, and test some more; measure, measure, and measure some more; incentivize and otherwise hold teachers, principals, and entire schools accountable based on those results.
The yardstick may end up being different, but schools will still be driven toward all the ills of score inflation. As long as people like Joel Klein insist that a single, annual exam (or any number or combination of exams) can determine everything from a child's readiness to a teacher's worthiness to a principal's evaluation to whether a school should be closed, the institutionalized response will inevitably lead to the same place we're at today: score inflation, teaching to the test, altering curricula and classroom time allotments to what is being measured and to the detriment of everything else, favoring repetition and drill over exploration and creativity, systemic cheating, manipulation of data, etc.
Read that second paragraph twice.
As long as one test determines a child's readiness, a teacher's worthiness, a principal's ability, whether or not a school should be closed....then there will be some sort of manipulation at some level. Whether charter or public or private...
Edit to add a link to the NYT article today called
When 81% Passing Suddenly Becomes 18%The world of NYC students and parents has been turned upside down.
It is happening around the country as well.
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