NYC Comptroller John C, Liu: High School Progress Reports Don't Measure Progress

Audit Finds that Department of Education’s Revisions to its High School

Grading System Leave Educators, Students Chasing a Moving Target

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New York City Comptroller John C. Liu announced that an audit of the Department of Education’s (DOE) High School Progress reports raised questions about the usefulness of the reports in comparing the yearly progress of schools.

“It’s troubling that a system that is used to decide school closings leaves teachers and students confused about what they need to do to improve,” Comptroller Liu said. “The Department of Education should not leave parents, educators or students in the dark when it’s deciding their fates.”

High School Progress Reports are a DOE accountability tool that assigns schools an annual grade of A through F. The Report grades play a significant role in the DOE’s decisions to reward high performing schools, perhaps with added funds, and restructure or close low-performing schools.

According to the audit, the DOE has revised the complex formula behind the grades every year. The frequent changes the agency has made to its grading and other formulas — without determining the impact of those changes — makes it difficult, if not impossible, to get a true picture of a school’s progress by comparing its grade from one year to the next. As a result, the High School Progress Reports paint an unreliable and confusing picture of a school’s progress or failure over time. Auditors recorded complaints from schools that the DOE’s lack of consistency made it difficult to set goals for students.

The audit focused on 10 high schools representing the five boroughs. It included three schools (Jamaica, Metropolitan Corporate Academy, and Norman Thomas high schools) that the DOE selected in January 2010 for closing.

CHIEF AMONG THE FINDINGS:

1. Inaccurate Picture of Year-to-Year Progress

The DOE’s changes to the formula behind the Progress Report grades make it difficult for parents and educators to measure a school’s performance from one year to the next.

The DOE says the Progress Report grades are meant as “a one-year snapshot” comparing one school against another in a given year, and not as a measure an individual school’s progress over time. Yet, the agency itself uses the formula to track achievement from one year to the next. For example, a school that receives a “C” three years in a row may be targeted for corrective action.

Example:

One school, Metropolitan Corporate Academy High School, which is set to close in 2014, improved its score every year from 2006 to 2010, but because of the DOE’s changing formula Metropolitan never rose above a “C.” In fact, the school fell to a “D” in the 2008-2009 school year even though its numeric score would have earned it a “B” under the 2006-2007 grading formula. It is impossible to tell to what extent Metropolitan’s scores reflect changes in its own performance or DOE’s changes to the grading formula. (See Table)

“The Comptroller’s audit of the High School Progress Reports demonstrates the difficulty of comparing a school’s letter grade over time when a school’s peer group composition and the cut scores for the grades change from one year to the next,” said Professor Aaron Pallas of Teachers College, Columbia University. “The recommendation that the DOE report high school progress report grades using both the old and new criteria would enable stakeholders both inside and outside of the schools to understand trends in school performance more completely.”

Action:

Since the audit, the DOE has posted an advisory on its website regarding year-to-year comparisons of High School Progress Report grades.

2. Lack of Communication

The audit determined that, while DOE met with school principals and others about changes, auditors found no evidence that it actually integrated feedback from them into the Progress Report. In fact, some educators told auditors that they felt as if they were chasing a moving target as they attempted to understand the changes that the DOE made to the grading formula each school year and to prepare students. The audit also found that the DOE did not do enough to inform schools what effect the changes to the grading system were expected to have on Progress Report grades.

“Taken alone, Progress Reports are an unreliable index for determining school closures or related high-stakes decisions,” said Professor David C. Bloomfield, chairman of the education department at the College of Staten Island. “Greater feedback by stakeholders, as recommended by the audit, might help to improve Progress Reports’ utility in this process.”

Action:

The DOE has since published materials summarizing and responding to feedback from educators and others involved in the 2010-2011 review process.

3. Data Reliability

The audit found that the data — student grades, Regents exam scores, and other information — that the DOE used to calculate each year’s Progress Report grades was representative of student data recorded in the DOE’s computer systems and verifiable. However, while the data in a given year was accurately recorded, it was not useful as a measure of an individual school’s progress over time.

RECOMMENDATIONS:

The DOE generally agreed with nine of the audit’s 10 recommendations and has begun to implement a number of them. However, the audit notes that “DOE inappropriately misinterpreted and even exaggerated, many of the audits ‘positive’ conclusions as an endorsement for the progress reports,” while simultaneously discounting its weaknesses.

SCOPE:

The audit was launched in March 2010 using data from the high schools’ 2008-2009 progress reports, the most recent data available at that time. The audit was expanded to include progress reports for the 2006-2007, 2007-2008, and 2009-2010 school years. In addition, auditors interviewed staff at the high schools in April and May 2010.

High School	Borough	2006-2007 Score/Grade	2007-2008 Score/Grade	2008-2009	2009-2010
ACORN Community HS	Brooklyn	63.3/B	64.4/A	65.4/B	71.7/A
Baruch College Campus HS	Manhattan	81.2/A	82.6/A	83.6/A	74.5/A
Curtis HS	Staten I.	64.2/B	59.4/B	68.8/B	69.8/B
DeWitt Clinton HS	Bronx	47.7/C	42.7/C	49.7/C	48.1/C
Flushing International HS	Queens	n/a	73.0/A	70.9/A	64.5/B
Jamaica HS	Queens	44/C	37.3/C	41.7/D	45/D
Metropolitan Corporate Academy HS	Brooklyn	35.9/C	39.1/C	43/1/D	48/C
New World HS	Bronx	n/a	97/A	92.1/A	85.6/A
Norman Thomas HS	Manhattan	33.4/D	29.7/D	36/D	36/F
Ralph R. McKee Career and Technical Education HS	Staten I.	63.8/B	67.6/A	79.5/A	76/A

BACKGROUND:

High School Progress Reports are a DOE accountability tool that assigns schools an annual grade (A through F) based on a variety of factors, including student performance, student progress, school environment, and comparisons between schools with similar populations. The letter grades were introduced in the 2006-2007 school year.

Comptroller Liu credited Deputy Comptroller for Audit H. Tina Kim and the Audit Bureau for presenting the findings. The full report is available at http://comptroller.nyc.gov/audits.

Michelle Rhee’s Potential DC Cheating Scandal by: Ann Bibby - Care2

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Michelle Rhee rose to prominence in the education reform ranks thanks in large part to methods that helped raise test scores in the perennially low-scoring Washington D.C. school district she oversaw as chancellor.

Her tough stance on low-performing schools and teachers, which included firing those whose students didn't measure up on standardized tests, endeared her to reformers like Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan.

A Shining Star

Using a merit pay inspired bonus system to spur performance in both teachers and students, Rhee's reforms seemed to work. Schools like Crosby S. Noyes Education Campus made spectacular gains on the standardized test used by the No Child Left Behind Law to measure student academic growth. In 2006, Noyes ranked in the 10% and was labeled a school "in need of improvement" but two years later ranked 58% and was one of Rhee's "shining stars," proof that her reform efforts worked.

Teachers at Noyes were rewarded with $8,000 bonuses and the principal received $10,000 on two different occasions within a three-year period. Parents, however, complained that the test scores made no sense. Their children still couldn't perform basic math, but they were ignored. Test scores, after all, don't lie.

But sometimes, teachers do.

Altering Test Answers

A recent examination of the tests given in Rhee's former district has revealed that perhaps her incentives worked too well and not in a good way. Noyes students' tests, for example, revealed a high number of erasure marks on the test sheets. A frequency higher than would be expected normally and always from an incorrect answer to a correct answer. In one Noyes seventh grade classroom, the average wrong to right erasure marks averaged 12.7 compared to a district wide average of less than 1. The odds of winning the Powerball, in fact, are greater than such an occurrence being merely chance.

At least half of the schools under Rhee's tenure appear to suffer from the same higher than should be expected erasure problem. Taking into account what was at stake for teachers and principals, it evokes questions. Had some schools engaged in widespread answer changing to secure bonuses or jobs?

What Do You Think?

Rhee's methods have been touted by no less than the White House. But what if the miraculous turnaround of schools under her charge was the result of cheating?

The current Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, came into his White House appointment under similar circumstances. His tenure as the superintendent of the Chicago Public schools system supposedly resulted in widespread improvement based on test scores that turned out to be questionable.

If the "reformers" aren't really reforming, why has no one put the brakes on the dismantling of public education? Even NCLB has fallen far short of it's promise without anyone questioning the wisdom of allowing it to be the law of the land.

What do you think? Are we doing our children good, or harm, by jumping on every bandwagon and following every reformer without first testing their theories on a smaller scale to see if they have merit? What should we be doing?

Kids are Big Losers in Mayor Bloomberg, Joel Klein's School Test Scores Game by Juan Gonzalez - NY Daily News

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Mayor Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein touted big jumps in math and reading scores. Appleton for News

So 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."

To promote his reforms nationwide, Klein even founded a nonprofit group last year with the Rev. Al Sharpton. They called it the Education Equality Project.

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.

Even worse, the new scores show the racial "achievement gap" has increased.

Back in 2003, 73.3% of white fourth-grade students met state standards, compared with only 46.3% of black pupils. The gap between the two groups was 26.9 points. This year, the gap between black and white fourth-graders increased to 31.7 points.

For Hispanic fourth-graders, there was a smaller rise, from 29.7 points in 2003 to 30.3 this year - but a rise nonetheless.

Comparisons aren't possible for all grades because the state only tested fourth- and eighth-graders until 2006.

More than 15% of the 400,000 students who took this year's reading test registered at Level 1 - the lowest possible level - while only 2.8% did last year.
An astonishing 85% of those lowest achievers were African-American and Hispanic.

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."

"We've been warning for years that passing levels had been lowered," said Victoria Bousquet, a member of the Coalition for Educational Justice.

The mother of two children at Medgar Evers Preparatory School in Brooklyn, Bousquet was stunned when she read the new test scores for their school.

"We went from 95% of the children meeting standards last year to 67% this year," she said.

Klein and Bloomberg dared to claim this week that the sky had not really fallen on their reforms. Test scores have continued to climb under their watch, they claimed. It's just that standards are getting tougher.

Well, ask any baseball fan about all those balls rocketing out of stadiums in the Mark McGwire-Sammy Sosa era. At first the numbers looked amazing, and everyone was happy. Then the investigations started, and McGwire is no longer anyone's hero.

The era of school scores on steroids is coming to an end. Let's see who survives this scandal.

10 Queens Pupils Got Second Chance at State Test by Trip Gabriel - NYTimes.com

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Multiple choice: New York State’s fifth-grade social studies test was given Nov. 16 and 17. After students completed the test, which of the following should NOT have occurred:

(A) Students waited patiently to learn the results.
(B) Students enjoyed the week without worrying how they had done.
(C) Students received their test booklets back the next week and were allowed to answer omitted questions.

The correct answer is C, but that is what happened at a Queens elementary school after the principal ordered that 10 students get a second chance at the test a week after handing it in, an apparent violation of state regulations.

The principal, Karen Zuvic, told members of her staff at Public School 86 that she was making “an executive decision” to allow students to complete unanswered questions, according to several teachers and administrators at the school.

“There was an uproar because of course it’s not fair, and the teachers were quite upset,” said a teacher who was present. Ms. Zuvic, several recalled, told the group, “Not a word of this is to leave the room.”

Investigators from the city’s Education Department interviewed Ms. Zuvic and members of her staff last year after receiving a complaint, but some teachers, having heard nothing since, wondered if the case was being ignored. The investigation “certainly will be concluded and is still under way,” said Shael Polakow-Suransky, the deputy schools chancellor for performance and accountability. “I don’t think it will be that long.”

Across the country, states and school districts have pursued cases against teachers and principals suspected of cheating to raise students’ scores on standardized tests. Critics of testing point to the pressure on educators to produce results that are used to determine their merit pay, tenure and career advancement.

But the fifth-grade social studies exam — unlike the New York State math and English tests — is a relatively low-stakes test that does not figure into city or state accountability measures. For that reason, one P.S. 86 staff member said, Ms. Zuvic’s motive was less to improve her own standing than to allow students to raise scores that would be entered in their records.

Ms. Zuvic, 58, who has been principal since 2005, said in an interview that she had allowed the students to return to the test because each had omitted an entire section. She blamed teachers who were proctoring the test for failing to point out unanswered questions, as the state testing manual requires.

“The students prepared for this test, and they shouldn’t walk away with a lower score because a teacher didn’t do their job proctoring,” Ms. Zuvic said.

Allowing a second chance at a test is against regulations, and educators can lose their licenses as the ultimate sanction, according to a spokesman for the New York State Education Department. Principals are required to report irregularities to Albany. The 10 students’ test results at P.S. 86, out of some 220 at the school, have been invalidated.

In 2007, in its most recent Quality Review evaluation of P.S. 86, the city called Ms. Zuvic “an effective leader who is well respected by the school community.”

But in interviews, a number of staff members described their principal as an authoritarian who inspired fear. “The attitude is, if you don’t like it, there’s the door,” said one teacher, who, like others, refused to be identified for fear of retaliation.

Reflecting its immigrant neighborhood, Jamaica, the school’s 944 students speak more than two dozen languages at home, and more than 75 percent are poor, according to Education Department records. Despite the obstacles, the students have performed well on state math tests, scoring close to the state median. Performance on the social studies test — which asks questions like what method of travel was improved by Robert Fulton and what the stripes of the American flag represent — has been below the median.

When the principal learned that some fifth graders did not complete the test last fall, attributing the omissions to teachers, “that just drove her bananas,” one staff member said, adding, “She blew. ‘How dare they?’ ”

But some teachers disputed that the test had been proctored incorrectly and that students had omitted entire sections. One teacher said that after the students were told that they would be given extra time to finish the test, they were gathered together. “We went into my class,” the teacher said. “I said, ‘O.K., guys, turn to the last part.’ So they turned to the last part and they said, ‘We did this.’ So I thought, Why do I have you here? I said, ‘Flip through and see if there are parts you didn’t do.’ Each had one question that wasn’t done, or whatever.”

The Case of the Early Test Scores and Resulting Confusion by Anna Phillips - GothamSchools

There is nothing like gaming the tests to make charters look good. This is out and out fraud..!

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When the New York Post ran a story last week praising a Harlem charter school network’s test scores, a few principals wondered why their own schools’ scores hadn’t arrived.

State and city officials were also puzzled. City eighth graders sat for the science and social studies exams only weeks ago and the state won’t release the results for months, so how did Harlem Village Academies have their scores?

Harlem Village Academies Chief of Staff Matt Scott explained that because the network grades its own tests and the state publishes scoring guides online, it was able to figure out how its students fared in advance of the state’s official release. According to the network, all of its eighth grade students passed the state’s science and social studies exams this year.

“We do not release test scores for Science or Social Studies until the school report cards for 2009/2010,” said SED spokesman Tom Dunn. “They are not scheduled for release until next winter. The charter school promoted their own performance.”

The early release highlights the different ways that charter and district schools grade their students’ state tests.

Charter schools can grade their own students’ exams because in the eyes of the State Education Department, each charter school is treated as its own school district, or “local education agency.”

New York City’s district schools grade their tests collectively, as they’re all part of the same local education agency. Every year, the city pulls teachers out of their classrooms to grade state tests — these could belong to their school or other schools — but in most cases charter schools grade their own.

The exception is the math and English exams. Most of the city’s charter schools grade these tests together as part of a consortium run by the New York City Charter School Center. Similar to district schools, each charter school that participates sends teachers to grade for several days, though the Center uses software to ensure that teachers do not grade their own schools’ exams, said Charter Center head James Merriman. But the grading consortium is optional and charter schools must pay for the service, so some schools choose not to.

City Schools See a Spike in Students Failing State Exams by Anna Phillips - GothamSchools

How's that teaching to the test and mayoral control working out for our kids..?

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Public school principals were told this morning how many of their students passed the state’s annual math and English exams and from what we’re hearing, the numbers aren’t pretty.

One principal wrote in to say that the percentage of his students who scored so low they didn’t meet promotion criteria has quadrupled since last year. On the English exam, his percentage of low-scoring students is more than ten times higher. Almost all of his special education students and most of his students who are recent immigrants didn’t pass the exams.

“It’s not like the kids have gotten dumber or the teachers worse, it’s just the tests are being looked at differently,” the principal said.

A Department of Education official confirmed that because the city and state set higher score cutoffs this year, fewer students will meet the standards for promotion to the next grade. As a result, the city expects that more students will be required to attend summer school this year.

“We are committed to raising the bar for our students, so we’re using preliminary results on this year’s tests to set higher promotional cut scores than last year,” said DOE spokesman Matt Mittenthal. “We will guarantee a seat to every student who requires summer school.”

“We’re going to have a huge summer school program now,” the principal said. “No question about that.”

Schools haven’t received their students’ raw scores — they only know whether a student met the promotion criteria or didn’t — and the DOE is not releasing the cutoff scores.

NY Passes Students Who Get Wrong Answers on Tests by Carl Campanile and Susan Edelman- NYPOST.com

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When does 2 + 2 = 5?

When you're taking the state math test.

Despite promises that the exams -- which determine whether students advance to the next grade -- would not be dumbed down this year, students got "partial credit" for wrong answers after failing to correctly add, subtract, multiply and divide. Some got credit for no answer at all.

"They were giving credit for blatantly wrong things," said an outraged Brooklyn teacher who was among those hired to score the fourth-grade test.

State education officials had vowed to "strengthen" and "increase the rigor" of both the questions and the scoring when about 1.2 million kids in grades 3 to 8 -- including 450,000 in New York City -- took English exams in April and math exams last month.

CLOSE ENOUGH: New York City fourth-graders were able to get partial credit for blank or incorrect answers on state math tests. A concerned teacher blew the whistle on the practice.

But scoring guides obtained by The Post reveal that kids get half-credit or more for showing fragments of work related to the problem -- even if they screw up the calculations or leave the answer blank.

Examples in the fourth-grade scoring guide include:

* A kid who answers that a 2-foot-long skateboard is 48 inches long gets half-credit for adding 24 and 24 instead of the correct 12 plus 12.

* A miscalculation that 28 divided by 14 equals 4 instead of 2 is "partially correct" if the student uses the right method to verify the wrong answer.

* Setting up a division problem to find one-fifth of $400, but not solving the problem -- and leaving the answer blank -- gets half-credit. (See Photo Above)

* A kid who subtracts 57 cents from three quarters for the right change and comes up with 15 cents instead of 18 cents still gets half-credit.

* A student who figures the numbers of books in 35 boxes of 10 gets half-credit despite messed-up multiplication that yields the wrong answer, 150 instead of 350.

These questions ask students to show their work. The scoring guidelines, called "holistic rubrics," require that points be given if a kid's attempt at an answer reflects a "partial understanding" of the math concept, "addresses some element of the task correctly," or uses the "appropriate process" to arrive at a wrong solution. Despite flubbing the answer, students can get 1 point on a 2-point problem and 1 or 2 points on a 3-pointer.

The Brooklyn teacher said she and peers who had trained to score the tests were stunned at some instructions.

"Everybody in the room was upset," she said.

The teacher had scored tests with some "controversial questions" for several years, but "this time it was more outrageous," she said. "You feel like you're being forced to cheat."

Scorers joked about giving points to kids who wrote their names, brought a pencil or shared gum.

However, score inflation is not funny, the whistleblower said.

"The kids who really need the help are just being shuffled along to the next grade without the basic skills to have true success. They are given a hollow success -- that's the crime of it. The state DOE is doing a disservice to its children."

Some testing experts are also troubled.

Ray Domanico, a former head of data analysis for city schools, said kids deserve a little credit for partial knowledge but agreed the scoring system "raises some questions about whether it's too generous."

State Education Department spokesman Tom Dunn defended the scoring.

"All teachers who score exams receive clear training and rubrics that detail scoring criteria for every question on the tests," he said. "Students who show work and demonstrate a partial understanding of the mathematical concepts or procedures embodied in the question receive partial credit."

But a few extra points can let a failing kid squeak by.

A year ago, Chancellor Joel Klein boasted that the city was making "dramatic progress" when 82 percent of city students passed the state math test and 69 percent passed in English, up sharply from 2002. And fewer kids have been left back in recent years.

What officials didn't reveal was that the number of points needed to pass proficiency levels has, in most cases, steadily dropped.

The state Board of Regents, which oversees the tests, has postponed the release of results until late July, but let the city Department of Education set its own "promotional cut scores" to decide which kids may be held back. The DOE will release those scores in the next two weeks, a spokesman said.

Time Out From Testing - Join the Postcard Campaign to First Lady Michelle Obama to End High Stakes Testing in Our Schools...

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Time Out From Testing and other organizations and individuals from across the country are launching a postcard campaign to First Lady Michelle Obama asking that she encourage the President to put an end to the use of High Stakes Testing. When she was on the campaign trail she had the following to say about the Bush Administration’s No Child Left Behind Program:

“No Child Left Behind is strangling the life out of most schools.” “If my future were determined by my performance on a standardized test I wouldn’t be here. I guarantee that.”

Thousands of us agree with her criticism. we need her help to end the reliance on high stakes standardized tests.

Here is what we need to do: On May 29th send a postcard to Michelle Obama with this message:

Dear Michelle Obama:

We want the same education for our public school children that you provide for Malia and Sasha. Our child is not a test score.

Encourage the President to end the use of high stakes standardized tests!

Sincerely,
Name, Address and Signature

Mail to: First Lady Michelle Obama
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW

White House, Washington DC 20500

Some of you may want to tweak the wording a bit. All that we ask is that you don’t dilute the main message of ending high stakes testing. Remember that once she receives the first 50 postcards, she and her staff won’t be reading them but instead will be counting them.

One way to ensure the success of this campaign will be to go viral and use our list-servs and Facebook. However, it requires that people go to the post office , buy a postcard and then write the message and address it. In this day and age we fear that will not happen in mass numbers. So we have designed some other ways to make sure we reach our goal of between 50,000-100,000 cards on May 29th.

For this we need the support of all our organizations to go into the community and make this happen!!!!

Here are our suggestions for success:

1. Set up tables in your schools when parents drop off and pick up their kids and get them to sign the card. you will need to buy them and put the message on yourself. Ask for a 25 cent contribution. some will give a dollar and some won’t give so it should balance out.

2. Ask teachers to circulate the cards and get them back to you.


3. Set up tables in front of the busiest stores on a saturday/sunday and collect signatures on the card.

4. Set up card signing at your local church.

5. Remember to take them to the office, family gatherings, birthday parties, soccer/baseball games.


6. Remember anyone can sign the card---kids, parents, teachers, friends, colleagues, relatives.

The important thing is that you keep a record of how many got sent due to your outreach. We will need a count sent to us at info@timeoutfromtesting.org so that when we hold a press conference on that day, we will have an accurate count.


We have very little time to make this happen but we know that if all of us pull together over the next several weeks it will happen.

Thanks so much for your time and effort,

TIME OUT FROM TESTING - FAIRTEST
Education Justice at Education Law Center
Citizens for Public Schools

My Opposition to Kindergarten - Second Grade 2 Standardized Testing by NYC Department of Education (DOE)

My comments to the District 27 Community Education Council regarding - "My Opposition to Kindergarten - Second Grade 2 Standardized Testing by NYC Department of Education (DOE)" got picked up by The Huffington Post via Room8...Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Good evening, District 27 CEC board members and Superintendent Lloyd-Bey. Many of you know me, but for the record my name is David M. Quintana - I am the former District 27 representative to the Chancellors Parent's Advisory Council and former Co-President of the Parent's Association of MS 210.

I am also a former student and graduate of District 27 having attended PS 97, PS 60, MS 210 and John Adams High School many, many years ago.

It has recently come to my attention that the DOE (Tweed Administration) is planning to begin subjecting students in grades kindergarten - 2 to standardized testing. I am vehemently opposed to this testing and will outline the reasons for my opposition, as follows.

• 1. School needs to be fun, exciting, and motivating for young children. Children need to read books they enjoy, discover how to solve math problems, learn to communicate and work with their peers, engage in science, civics, social studies, music and art, take field trips, and develop a capacity to imagine and think deeply. This does not happen within a testing environment.

• 2. Testing takes precious time away from teaching and learning. Also, teaching and curriculum change with this kind of testing because teachers and schools feel pressure to prepare their students for the test. Test prep becomes the curriculum.

• 3. The DOE bosses (Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein), if allowed to go forward with this, will store the test score data in their $80 million ARIS computer system and use it to rate teachers and schools, negatively affecting the quality of instruction being given to 5, 6 and 7 year olds.

• 4. I ask, what evidence do we have that all the test prep (that has been forced on children in grades 3 - 8) has done anything to improve their learning? The NYC and NYS National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP - a national test - frequently referred to as the "gold" standard of testing) results in 2007 in ELA and Math - and in 2009 in the Math NAEP - show no statistical improvement - NONE. (The 2009 ELA NAEP results are due in a few weeks - which I predict will also remain flat.)

• 5. Testing young children is highly unreliable due to the varying timetable of the academic/cognitive development in early childhood. It is unfair and potentially harmful to judge a child on testing tasks for which she/he is not developmentally ready.

• 6. Young children may not be able to meet the demands of a standardized test for a myriad of reasons: hunger, boredom, fatigue, illness, anxiety or simply the developmental inability to sit still for protracted stretches of time. And, as any experienced educator or knowledgeable parent knows - any child can simply have a bad day. Yet, if a child receives a low score, it may set up expectations for parents and teachers that this child is, and always will be, a poor learner. Such expectations can negatively affect their future learning experience.

• 7. Standardized tests have a long and notorious history of misrepresenting the intellectual capabilities of young children based on race, class and immigrant status.

• 8. Test scores are not perfect measures, therefore no single test should ever be used alone to make a critical judgment about a child. Yet, the DOE, has a long history of using single test scores to judge our children and schools, a policy that I fear will be perpetuated with kindergarten through second grade testing.

• 9. During this period of financial crisis, it would be an utter waste of money to spend millions of dollars on a testing policy that the research and education communities nearly unanimously decry as unreliable and potentially harmful to children. This is not the time to be taking money out of the classrooms to enrich large corporate testing companies.

I am urging CEC27 to thoroughly review this matter (further statistical information can be found at timeoutfromtesting.org) and issue a resolution condemning this practice in OUR NYC Public School system.

Thank you.

David M. Quintana

http://davidmquintana.blogspot.com

quintana.david@gmail.com

Meeting Date: Monday, November 16 @ 7:30 PM

Meeting Place: PS 124 129-15 150 Avenue, South Ozone Park, NY 11420

Read the whole story: Room Eight

Tell Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein That You Oppose the Plan to Expand Standardized Testing to Students in Kindergarten through Second Grade...

Tell Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein that you oppose their plan to expand standardized testing to students in kindergarten through
second grade. Standardized tests do not appropriately measure the complexity of a young child’s growth and development...

This is a campaign by Time Out From Testing to Stop Standardized Tests in Our Public Schools...Please help...Thanks..!!

Dear Queens Parent,

Please join our efforts at Time Out From Testing to stop K-2 standardized tests in our public schools!

Can you help us?

Below is a link to a letter (in English and Spanish) of opposition to K-2 standardized testing. We need parents to help us organize this letter-signing: make copies of the letter, have adults sign the letter, COLLECT the letters and then get them back to us. If you can help with this effort, that would be terrific!

We have found that parent-teacher conferences are a great time to get the letters signed. Parents set up a table in the school lobby (with permission from the principal) and ask parents to sign as they come into the school.

We also have a link to a resolution for SLTs and PTAs to pass and sign, stating their opposition to K-2 standardized testing in their schools. We ask that you get your school's PTA and SLT each to pass and sign this resolution, and then to give us copies.

Thanks so much and if you have any questions, feel free to email or call us.

Jane Hirschmann
917-679-8343

Don Freeman
917-750-7180

Parent Letter in English:
http://www.timeoutfromtesting.org/k2testing_parentletter.pdf

Parent Letter in Spanish:
http://www.timeoutfromtesting.org/k2testing_sltpta_letters_spanish.pdf

SLT/PTA Resolutions:
http://www.timeoutfromtesting.org/k2testing_sltpta_letters.pdf

NYC Test Scores Raise Serious Questions About Testing by Gabe Pressman | NBC New York

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Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein hail the big gains on state math tests this year in the city's public schools.

But Merryl Tisch, the chancellor of the state's Board of Regents, warns there is strong reason for caution in analyzing these results.

"Just because scores have gone up dramatically does not mean that our youngsters are ready to go to college," she told the New York Times.

While she complimented Bloomberg and Klein for moving the school system in the right direction, Ms. Tisch told me that "the time has come to raise the bar in the testing process. It's time to start a conversation about testing.

"When we look at the graduation statistics, we find that many students are not prepared to enter college. Seventy-four percent are in need of remediation when they reach college."

In plain language, Ms. Tisch thinks the tests are too easy. She believes young people are graduating without basic skills. She's not saying that we're cooking the books. But she is raising a serious question: are the tests really telling us how well the educational system is doing?

I talked to a veteran teacher and administrator at a Queens school. She didn't want her name used but she had a lot to say about the tests that our young people are taking. "The tests are too predictable. And teachers, including myself, are training kids to pass the tests.

"This math test has been most predictable. We know what's going to be on it from examining past tests. We practice constantly and the ultimate result is the kids are likely to score well but not necessarily know more than they did last time they were tested."

The Mayor and Chancellor Klein insist that the achievement gap between city students and those in other parts of the state is closing. Also, they say, the gap between students of different races is closing.

"This is a big victory for the city," Klein said. "And we should bask in it."

But the leader of the state's entire educational system, Ms. Tisch, insists otherwise.

"No one should interpret (the recent test-score results) as an enormous victory," she said. "We're moving in the right direction but just because scores have gone up dramatically does not mean that our youngsters are ready to go to college."

She has a point. When three-fourths of those who reach college need remedial work to qualify for courses, it's clear there's something rong here. We can understand Tisch's concern.

And we can also understand why the seasoned teacher who talked to us says, "We're teaching to test and the results are predictable, but not necessarily beneficial to the students.

It angers me that there is so much emphasis on tests and so little on the well-rounded education that can only come in the classroom from the relationship between teacher and students."

There is a danger in this election year that the statistics can be used for political purposes. Let's hope, for the sake of the kids, that this won't happen.

'Achievement Gap' in City Schools Is Scrutinized by Elizabeth Green - The New York Sun

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Scores of both black and Hispanic students on some state and national tests have gone up since Mayor Bloomberg took over the Department of Education in 2002, and by some measures the "proficiency gap" between black and Hispanic students and white and Asian ones has begun to close.

But by one other measure — not the test scores of black and Hispanic students alone or the percentage of them that met the bar called "proficiency," but a more subtle and relative measure known as the "achievement gap" — progress has been more elusive.

RELATED: Aaron Pallas's Achievement Gap Analysis | Department of Education Achievement Gap Analysis.

Three researchers studied that measure at the request of The New York Sun by analyzing detailed data the city Department of Education previously had not released. They found that the actual gap between different racial groups' test scores has not budged by most measures, and in some cases it has widened.

In the most encouraging case — the difference between black and white students' scores on an eighth-grade English test -- the gap has narrowed slightly. Yet it remains wide. In 2008, 74% of black eighth-graders in the city scored below the average white eighth-grader on the state English test, compared to 79% in 2002.

How much this achievement gap matters depends upon whom you talk to.

In an interview at Tweed Courthouse, the schools chancellor, Joel Klein, said the achievement gap is "an issue," but he said it should not obscure the significant gains black and Hispanic students have made under his watch.

Though in some cases the achievement gap is steady because no students have made gains on standardized tests, in other cases it is staying constant because scores have risen for all students — white, black, Hispanic, and Asian.

"If the way to close the achievement gap is to pull whites down, that's not a strategy that any intelligent person or any responsible school district would ever follow," Mr. Klein said.

Others say the relative differences between races the achievement gap exposes are important.

"In the real world, no one looks at proficiency scores to determine the likelihood of someone getting ahead," one of the researchers that analyzed the data for the Sun, Aaron Pallas, a professor of education and sociology at Columbia University's Teachers College, said. "What really matters is how people do in relation to one another. And so if you have groups remaining the same distance apart, then the group ahead is still going to remain ahead when you look at selection into colleges and the labor market."

Messrs. Bloomberg and Klein have previously said that New York City's achievement gap is narrowing.

"Over the past six years, we've done everything possible to narrow the achievement gap — and we have," Mr. Bloomberg said in testimony to Congress this summer. "In some cases, we've reduced it by half."

Their statements draw on two measures of progress. The first is actual improvements made by black and Hispanic students on standardized tests.

At some grade levels, more black and Hispanic students are passing both federal and state tests than ever before.

The percentage of black fourth-graders scoring above the "basic" level on a federal math test soared to 72% in 2007 from 58% in 2003.

In other grade levels -- notably the eighth grade -- there has been little if any change in the number of black and Hispanic students attaining proficiency on both state and federal tests, and in some cases the number of black and Hispanic students passing tests has declined.

The second measure is the percentage of students in different racial groups that meet the bar known as "proficiency." The gap between the percentage of, say, black students and white students who pass that bar is what Messrs. Bloomberg and Klein have been referring to as the achievement gap.

That measure has indeed been sliced in half in some cases. For instance, in 2002 the black-white gap on a state fourth-grade math test was 35 percentage points, with 76% of white students scoring "proficient" compared to 41% of black fourth-graders. By 2008, the gap had narrowed to 18 points: 91% of white students now score proficient compared to 73% of black students.

The proficiency gap is closing even as the achievement gap stays essentially the same because each gap represents a different kind of improvement. Proficiency rates detect movements across the proficiency bar, rising when students who had been below it learn enough knowledge and skills to reach the standard, but registering no change if students who were already meeting the standard surge even further above it. The achievement gap, on the other hand, is sensitive to changes both above and below the proficiency bar.

Black and Hispanic students are more likely to start out with scores below the "proficient" mark. That means that the proficiency gap can close even though all groups of students might be rising by equal amounts.

One of the three researchers who analyzed the achievement gap data for the Sun, Howard Everson, said that he puts more stock in proficiency scores, which are also the measure the federal government's No Child Left Behind law uses to judge schools and school districts.

Mr. Everson, a psychometrician at Fordham University, is the lead testing adviser to the New York State Education Department and an adviser to the federal government on its testing regime.

He said the proficiency figures are important because they contain not only information about test scores but also a professional judgment on whether a student has adequate skills and knowledge. Expert math and English teachers set "proficiency" bars, and Mr. Everson said he takes their judgments seriously.

On those grounds he said, "I think overall it looks to be pretty good news."

The third researcher who analyzed the data for the Sun, Robert Tobias, a New York University professor who was the city's testing director for 13 years, said he puts more stock in the achievement gap than in the proficiency gap because it reflects changes in students across the spectrum -- not just those who moved above or below the proficiency bar.

Mr. Tobias said the achievement gap's changes contradict claims the Bloomberg administration has made of impressive progress, which he said he has read in press releases and newspaper articles. "When one looks at this presentation, the picture is a lot more modest," he said.

The three researchers found that the gap between black and white students' average scores on an English test has closed slightly, as has the gap on that test between Hispanics and whites, and that no gap has closed on a mathematics test. It also found that the gap between Asian students and their black and Hispanic peers has widened slightly since 2002.

In some cases the gap remains wide because black and Hispanic students are making no progress and neither are white and Asian students. In other cases, black and Hispanic students are gaining some ground -- but white and Asian students' scores are improving at roughly the same pace.

The Department of Education also conducted an analysis of the achievement gap, reproducing the same process the outside researchers conducted. Pointing to small changes in figures, the department's analysis concluded that the gap has closed across the board even by this measure. "We are closing the achievement gap," the analysis said.

The researchers challenged that conclusion.

"This is not strong evidence that the gap is closing," Mr. Everson said. "The only thing you can say is that they're relatively flat, that the gap is relatively stable."

The achievement gap can also be examined by looking at New York City students' scores on a federal test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which is known as the nation's report card.

An analysis by the National Center for Education Statistics, the research arm of the federal Education Department, concludes that no achievement gaps have narrowed at all in New York City between 2003 and 2007. The only gap that moved in any significant direction is the one between poor students and the rest of the population, which widened slightly, that analysis said.

The National Center for Education Statistics also concludes that upward trends in the reading scores of black and Hispanic fourth-graders lauded by Mr. Klein are not statistically significant.

Mr. Klein criticized the National Center on Education Statistics analysis.

"Those are just confidence levels. Nobody is saying this is a science," Mr. Klein said. He added: "If three points is flat, and four points is statistically significant, then what you're doing is, you're playing something of a game."

Mr. Klein said he stands by his positive stance on New York City's success at closing the achievement gap.

"My view is that our black kids in the fourth grade are outperforming all black kids in America," Mr. Klein said. "Our kids are ripping the leather off the ball of the other kids around the country."

Others drew a more discouraging conclusion.

Mr. Pallas said the results should lead people around the country to question whether they should reproduce the policies being enacted in New York City.

"We need to be aware that what we're doing right now to close the achievement gap may not be working," Mr. Pallas said. "If what we're doing isn't working, we need to be aware of that and perhaps think about doing something else."

Lawrence Feinberg, the assistant director for reporting and analysis at the National Assessment Governing Board, the group that oversees the federal test, wrote in a memo last year that Mr. Klein's conclusions about progress by black students are "incomplete." The conclusions "may be questioned by his critics" because they depend on trends in test scores and do not take into account whether increases are statistically significant, the memo said.

The interim executive director of NAGB, Mary Crovo, to whom the memo was addressed, said in a telephone call to the Sun that the memo was an internal staff memo that was not meant to reflect the official position of the governing board. Asked whether she supported the memo's argument, she said, "I think the data in the memo are accurate, and that's as much as we can say."

A spokesman for the city's education department, David Cantor, called the memo "a politicized gloss" and said the outgoing executive director of NAGB, Charles Smith, had called Mr. Klein to apologize.

Study Sought Of Test Score Gains in N.Y. by Elizabeth Green - The New York Sun

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A top adviser to the state Education Department is pushing Albany education officials to scour their test results for possible score inflation.

So far, state officials are not biting.

The adviser, Howard Everson, a psychometrician at Fordham University who is chairman of the state's Technical Advisory Group and also advises the federal government on its testing regime, said he is confident that New York's tests are not getting easier, as some have speculated in the wake of large test score gains this year.

But Mr. Everson said he is concerned that the rises in scores could partially reflect an inflation phenomenon, in which practices at the school level make test scores rise regardless of whether true learning has occurred.

Practices can include teaching test material to the exclusion of other topics; "gaming" to get around rules by, for instance, giving students extra time, and outright cheating.

"I feel very comfortable that the tests have not gotten easier," Mr. Everson said in an interview this week. "I don't feel comfortable in saying to you and anybody else there's no such thing as score inflation. There are certain practices that are going on by school leadership; teachers; curriculum specialists — a whole range of folks whose jobs are in some ways on the line."

He added: "So are they doing inappropriate things to raise students' scores? Well, it's likely that some of them are."

Mr. Everson and a colleague, the Harvard education professor Daniel Koretz, are crafting a research project that would attempt to isolate real improvements from inflated results by rewriting tests as "self-auditing assessments." They approached an assistant commissioner of the state's education department, David Abrams, with the idea last year, asking if New York would consider participating.

"David wrote that NYSED was not prepared to participate at that time, in part because of the workload it would impose, but he did not rule out participation at a later date," Mr. Koretz said in an e-mail message yesterday.

A spokesman for the education department, Tom Dunn, said: "We have discussed a study and at this point the researchers are trying to determine a methodology and source of funding."

Asked about score inflation, Mr. Dunn said: "We already check for scoring reliability by reviewing a random sample of tests."

Mr. Everson said he believes real improvements are happening in New York's schools.

Vowing confidence in the tests themselves, he described a long battery of statistical tests that the state and its test maker, CTB/McGraw-Hill, use to ensure that measurements are comparable from year to year.

The confidence contradicts challenges from some education observers.

Writing in City Journal, the Manhattan Institute fellow Sol Stern argued that a main explanation for the improvements is "the degree of rigor (or lack thereof) of the specific state tests."

Other people have argued that blame may lay with test-making companies, which would appear to have an incentive to please its client by facilitating score increases.

Mr. Everson said the incentive is actually the reverse: To keep their contracts, companies take pains to avoid the kind of mistakes that led thousands of SAT takers to receive incorrect scores two years ago.

"The contracts can be null and void on the spot if there's a scoring error," Mr. Everson said. "That will put a testing company out of business."

Yet Mr. Everson said that concerns about score inflation have not been sufficiently addressed. "We don't want people like the mayor and the governor going around saying that the schools are doing very well when it could be inflation," he said.

The city's test score increases are the subject of a new television advertisement that airs this week, paid for by a nonprofit that works to raise donations for Bloomberg administration education projects, the Fund for Public Schools.

Mayor Bloomberg makes an appearance in the ad, touting the system's "progress."