Ed watchers in NYC consider Erin Einhorn of the Daily News one of the best of the breed of ed reporters. Today's stories on the high math scores being due to an easier
test in 2005 (remember the election for mayor?) and the possibility that NY State Ed commish Richard Mills just might be complicit in political machinations is the highlight of the day. As usual, some great chit-chat on Leonie Haimson's NYC Education listserv (if you are not there, you are square.) We'll get some of their great stuff up later in an update to this post.Hmmm, NY Times, where are you on any of these types of stories? Maybe they can't make nice charts like these.
Ed Notes has long called for Mills' resignation and for some total revamping of the NY state ed dept, including getting rid of the politically tainted Board of regents. Let's look as other states to see what they do, including elections for these positions.
The UFT will never explode any testing myths because they want to play both sides against the middle, claiming high scores are due to teachers, not the other machinations that rank and file teachers know are going on.
When tests were being marked a few years ago during mid-winter break, calls and emails started coming in to our Ed Notes call-in center (based in my kitchen) that the rubric being passed down from the state ed dept was a total joke and supervisors were telling teachers to jump levels when they could. I sent around an email to my press list and immediately started getting responses from reporters.
Even the NY Times called, the reporter wanting me to give names. I suggested a visit to a testing center to interview people and the reporter was shocked. To his credit, former NY Post reporter Dave Andreatta was ready to come out to Rockaway but teachers involved seemed to be getting cold feet over possible repercussions.
Calls started coming into UFT HQ to such an extent, Randi Weingarten went over to the Region 8 marking center to check it out. Naturally, she found nothing wrong and the UFT PR machine's response killed the activity.
The UFT covering up for BloomKlein and the state ed dept? How shocking!
Update:
Posted on NYCEducation News listserv by mathman180:
Late or not, thanks to Erin Einhorn for getting into mass media print a practice and pattern that those of us with strong mathematical background have long suspected. The ridiculous demands of NCLB and the relentless Bloomberg/Klein emphasis on metrics and measurement for every conceivable aspect of education have made this sort of testing puffery inevitable. Can anyone possibly think that the success of 38 US states in meeting NCLB criteria for increasing test scores while staying level or declining on NAEP exams (our only truly standardized, national, non-politicized metric) is not related to the exact same behaviors? Can anyone possibly think that testing companies like McGraw-Hill don't want high pass rates and increasing scores in order to protect their contracts with NYS SED and NYC DOE?
If the p-values of each year's exams (or all the questions on those exams) are indeed publicly available or obtainable through FOIA, it would be a logical next step for the Daily News to get them and publish them all. This is as good a proxy as we will have for interyear comparability of NYS or NYC exams, and these statistics will shed important (and likely disturbing) light on the Bloomberg/Klein claims of score increases due to their policies. Perhaps the p-value scores will even reveal that there has been a modest "real" increase in test scores, given the amount of time teachers are diverting away from other subject areas and activities.
If NYS SED and NYC DOE were truly interested in fair and open reporting, these p-values would be reported every year for every standardized test. Isn't there some way we could get the Education Committee of the NYC Council to demand that they be publicly reported? After all, it's the only fair way for the parents and citizens of NYC to gauge whether Mayoral control is actually raising student achievement.
By the way, anyone interested in learning more about p-values and how they affect standardized testing should find themselves a copy of THE TRUTH ABOUT TESTING by W. James Popham.
Chart above Now online at http://www.nydailyn
Einhorns superb article is only the tip of the iceberg regarding the manipulation of student standardized test scores by this administration.
ReplyDeleteGreat job by Einhorn. I'm surprised the News ran it.
ReplyDeleteWhen a mayor's political career rides on the backs of little children and their test scores, this is what happens. We need to get business and politics out of the schools.
ReplyDeleteI'm surprised the daily news would print anything so detrimental towards education during the bloomklein administration. I won't say kudos though. 99 percent of teachers are still doing their best to help children. The daily news still loves to print the 1 percent of teachers that don't help in bold print.
ReplyDeleteOnce again, mathman180 is on point!
ReplyDelete