You and Sue have been on the case a long time. Your analyses of NYS/NYC skewed results and spin over the years--using the NAEP as a true barometer of non-progress have offered us continuous proof of the sham we have had to endure. When does institutional lying become an act of malfeasance?
All of it is of the same piece with a lack of transparency at the core.. To the assiduous work you have done to uncover and chronicle the fraud, let me add a few tricks behind the good news stories manufactured shamelessly via political press officers (now known as information officers, to hide their intention to manipulate the media).
I helped Erin Einhorn design and implement her experiment in 2007 leading to her expose--which became the Daily News front-page headline "Math Test Shock" on the first day of school that year. She showed that the so-called equating of tests from one year to the next in order to claim results comparable--yielded tests that were, in fact, not comparable. When the same kids simultaneously took two of the "equated" tests, they got different results. Q.E.D.
Einhorn's study came a mere 26 years after Wayne Barrett's Village Voice cover story, "City Cheats on Reading Tests" which showed how the use of the same test in back-to-back years caused NYC scores to go up by 10 percent from 1980 to 1981, conveniently a re-election year for Mayor Koch. That put more than half of our students above the national norm for the first time. And anyone old enough to remember those days will recall that Koch wanted and took credit for being responsible for education.
Not to rest on his laurels, Mayor Koch and his Chancellor, Frank Macchiarola, rolled out the Promotional Gates Program in 1981, ushering in tough standards -- holding kids back a year in third grade if they were more than one year below grade level. Barrett wrote his second feature piece in 1982, "The Politics of Flunking - Using Tests Against Kids." The promotional policy was put together in haste, received favorable press, but there was little planning behind it in the way of what to do with the hold backs, except to send them to summer school. based on a single test score. In short, it was a policy in search of a program. Four years later and four outside reports on its shortcoming later--the gates were dismantled. I'm proud to say I was Wayne's source for these two detailed stories.
Fast forward back to 2007--two years after Mayor Bloomberg won re-election--coming off startling 10 percent gains in the 2005 4th grade reading scores. He had gotten the state legislature to make the school system a mayoral agency, thereby gaining control of its governance. And despite the failings and critique of Koch's promotion policy, Bloomberg and his non-education chancellor Joel Klein, did the tough standards/hold us accountable dance and set up a hold-back program that ignored the gross flaws of its predecessor.
Let us also remember that Mayor Bloomberg's establishment of the Department of Education, newly headquartered in the Tweed Courthouse, coincided with the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act. In those years testing occurred in the 4th and 8th grades. But the stakes were starting to become higher after that--with the mandate that all students would be proficient in reading and math by 2014. To that impossibility there was attached a 95% participation rule and vague consequences for schools that didn't make adequate annual progress. This would be followed by ever-evolving models for evaluating teachers, rating principals and reorganizing or closing schools.
I digress. By 2007, I had been able to FOIL the DOE for information that took more than a year to obtain. It showed that the 2005 gains were spurious, half of which were achieved by denying promotion to low scorers in the third combined with a waiver that allowed NYC to exempt more English Language Learners form testing. Subtracting both of these groups from testing in Grade 4 took students out of the test population who would otherwise have kept a lid on the 2005 results. Juan Gonzalez reported this deception in May 2007, too late to impede the mayor's ride to victory in 2005. But clearly this had been a deliberate attempt to rig the results
In short order NYS scores became inflated. In 2009, the cut off score was so low that children could guess their way to Level 2. That was significant, because it meant that a child could mark his/her answer sheet randomly and escape Level1, which was the criterion Bloomberg used for to keep children back. Thus, when Bloomberg ran defiantly for his third term--he could claim that under his educational leadership, virtually all children were able to pass.
Scores at the state level had risen so preposterously that Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch recognized they couldn't be sustained. She set forth her education reform agenda that soon led into more "rigorous" tests and the Common Core era with core-based testing under contract with Pearson, Inc. Again--top-down coercion, with NCLB leading to Race to the Top and forced compliance with a new set of exams. This spurred the opt out movement, the need for which remains great to this day.
I'd be remiss if I didn't note two more dirty secrets: In 2013, SED began to do stand-alone field testing on a mass scale, in an effort to perpetuate the development and administration of unsound exams. Parents realized this extra testing amounted to having their children serve as guinea pigs for the test publisher and learned there were no negative consequences for pushing back against this scheme. And finally, SED, sensing how the winds of test resistance had picked up force, did what it often does--tried to stay one step ahead of parents and teachers by making concessions that are too little too late--such as removing time limits in 2016 (really an admission of bad test design). And now we have two days of testing instead of three and standards that have a new name.
Before we are marched off blindly once again by SED and City Hall, into a third year of exams supplied by the latest test vendor Questar, I hope we will demand disclosure of information that will reveal how Questar's instruments functioned in 2017 and 2018. If we can't have immediate access to such data, allowing informed judgments to be made about the quality of the exams, I would urge boycotting them on April 1.
Fred
-----Original Message-----
From: leoniehaimson <
leonie...@gmail.com>
To: nyceducationnews <
nyceduca...@yahoogroups.com>
Cc: 'Susan Edelman' <
sede...@nypost.com>; changethestakes-open-forum <
changethestak...@googlegroups.com>; cts-internal <
cts-in...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Mon, Feb 11, 2019 3:33 pm
Subject: RE: state test score inflation, past and present
Apologies to Sue; she just pointed out that her story that I linked to below was from 2011! So she couldn’t report on the recent wave of test score inflation without being psychic and predicting the future!
Thanks Leonie
Sue Edelman recounts the rampant state test score inflation that occurred from about 2006 to 2009, and puts the blame primarily on Commissioner Mills, who is conveniently dead.
But many others are also to blame, including Merryl Tisch, then Regents Chancellor, Bloomberg and Klein. The latter two tried to take great credit for the rising test scores despite mostly flat NAEP scores.
Also to blame, the NYDN edit board, who continued to trumpet the great improvements though the intrepid reporting of Erin Einhorn and others on their own staff showed it to be fraudulent, and the NY Times, which continually refused to unmask the scam.
So did Shael Suransky, then Deputy Chancellor, quoted here as a so-called independent “expert”, when I debated him at NY Law school – though sadly, the school at DOE’s behest refused to allow anyone including Lindsey Christ of NY1 to videotape the debate.
But guess what? Sue left out that the same test score inflation is happening again, with the same false claims of improvement by Elia, de Blasio, Carmen Farina and now Carranza.
