A post on the NYC Parents Blog tells the sad story of a middle-school student who was not allowed to graduate with her class because she had supposedly failed the ELA exam. She was an honor student, and it made no sense, but the NYC Department of Education was adamant. The tests don’t lie, do they?
When her class walked across the stage to pick up their diplomas, she was not among them. She felt awful.
Except the tests were wrong. She had not failed the test. There was a mistake. She did pass the test. So many weeks after the graduation, she was able to report to the school and pick up her diploma, like picking up a letter, not like walking across the stage with her classmates in a meaningful ceremony.
And she was not the only victim of the mistake. Thousands of students like her were denied their diploma because of a testing error.
Why do we let fallible machines govern our lives? Why have we become so hostile to human judgment? Surely her teachers knew that she deserved to graduate. Yet we let the machines, which may be more error-prone than mere humans, destroy the lives of children.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
My first thought is that the 8th grade test should NOT be used for promotion. It is not a test of curriculum for which a student can study, it is a test of skills– especially the ELA. If she were my daughter, I would sue. No NY suburban high school that I know of uses the 3-8 tests for promotion purposes. NONE. Retention also does not work, but that is another matter.
LikeLike
It’s not the fallible machines. It’s the cold, unwavering intent of “reformers” who have decided that losing and abusing other people’s public school children as a result of bad practice/bad tests/fallible machines is an acceptable cost.
I’m assuming that clever people are behind the mechanisms of reform, and that they know what they are doing. They’ve briefly compared the “collateral damage” costs in human terms to the profits waiting in the CCLS curriculum and testing (and data gathering) industry. It’s not THEIR children, whose private schools will continue to enrich them, and whose trust funds will grow on the fat of speculative investment gains from publicly traded reform company stocks. It’s the children who will be funneled towards the “public” choice schools who will bear this burden. Building high the data walls of their path toward indentured service industry or military servitude will solidify the caste system and offer more insulation for the powerful.
In addition, the partnership between reform profiteers and policy makers/politicians is motivated by political gains to be had. By pushing tests and an easily gamed data-focus they can show failure when and where they want it to, allowing reformers to make teaching a tenuous and frightening career, diminishing the power and cohesiveness of teacher unions, painting union involvement as more greedy and self-interested than their reform agenda.
Unless they keep getting caught and keep having their destructive plans exposed to the light of public debate.That is why you will surely be seeing heightened security around every aspect of the test data=teaching movement.
LikeLike
Arne Duncan’s kids attend a public school in Arlington, Virginia. Can you imagine them being subject to such tests? And if they had such tests can you imagine what would have happened if the test had said his kids couldn’t graduate?
LikeLike
As a VA public school teacher, let me assure you that the VA state tests are as bad as the NY State tests. I did my undergraduate degree in NY. It was very hard for my university to find me a second special education student teaching placement since I did the last 2 placements in spring semester, and none of the classroom teachers wanted to turn their rooms over to a novice just before state testing. Virginia schools have the Standards of Learning (SOL; as a non-native of VA, I was stunned at the names of their state tests. In military parlance, SOL stands for Sh___ Out of Luck). The 8th grade tests are not used for promotion, but until recently they could count for high school graduation in the case of students with disabilities. Students in VA start testing in grade 3, and test every year thereafter until they are high school seniors. We had major issues with testing software and a new math test last year, as well as a new 8th grade Reading test. The year before that, it was the history exam. A teacher at my school went from a 87% pass rate in self-contained and team-taught special education classes to less than 35% pass rate in a regular education class (he is dual-certified and changed to primarily regular education 2 years ago). I am also dual certified and teach primarily self-contained special education history classes; until this year, I taught all 4 of our history classes, plus case managed students with significant developmental disabilities (as opposed to learning disabilities). None of my students in my self-contained classes have ever passed the exams, which is now 30% of my evaluation score (and due to rise to 40%). I can’t imagine why anybody would willingly teach special education… Especially significant disabilities since our state test for those students is now aligned identically to the regular education grade level tests. Blech.
LikeLike
SOL is perfect for what hese poor kids have to go through.
LikeLike
I really need to proofread before I hit reply!
SOL is perfect for what THESE poor kids have to go through.
LikeLike
Yeah, I need to proofread, too. I’ve found that some of my errors stem from my habit of missing the far-off spots on the virtual keyboard, but most are from “auto correct gone wild.” Sometimes I wonder just how intuitive all these tech gadgets really are. Perhaps they’re as culturally savvy as the 20-something tech geniuses in Silicon Valley who write their programming…apparently, I have nothing in common with them. 😛
LikeLike
Autocorrect creates some extremely strange substitutions. It teaches us to proofread. I am not careful enough.
LikeLike
I despise auto correct! I make fewer mistakes without it! My iPad is also programmed for German. Sometimes I will accidentally toggle between the two languages. Fortunately I easily catch these mistakes, but the gibberish that’s created can be very funny!
LikeLike
Unbelievable. It is a bad policy to begin with–why even have eduction professionals monitoring student progress in classrooms if schoolwork doesn’t matter? Couple a horrible policy with incompetence at carrying out said policy, and you have a failed system. If a teacher did anything remotely like this, the public would be calling for his or her resignation. How many heads rolled from this, I wonder, and why wasn’t one of them the Mike Bloomberg? After all, rotting fish stinks from the head.
Another note:
“The move [to hold separate graduations after the error was discovered], a joint effort by City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and the Department of Education, came after The Post reported that 7,000 students in third through eighth grades had been wrongly assigned to summer school based on their preliminary test results.
When the final scores came out in mid-July, they showed that the students had actually passed the required math and reading tests — but only after many of them had been blocked from graduation or stepping-up ceremonies.
Their wrongful placement into summer school also forced families to postpone or cancel summer trips.”
So who paid the bill to fund unnecessary summer school, the same tax-paying families whose children were wronged? I think the funding should come out the salaries of the “eduction officials” who erred. Since this error was corrected in the middle of the summer, how many previously employed summer school teachers were suddenly laid off? I think the same “education officials” should pay them, too, for wrongful unemployment. Also, each family should receive damages. What a nasty mess, yet largely unknown to people outside of readers of the NY Post.
LikeLike
This posting convinces me yet again of another pattern on the rug: edubullies start with teachers, go on to administrators and other school staff, and end with students and their families.
Of course there are exceptions: they wouldn’t dream of directing the same behavior at the parents, students, and staff of such schools as Sidwell, Cranbrook and Chicago Lab. After all, THEIR schools don’t need rheephorming, only OURS.
LikeLike
How often do teachers hear “kids first!” from their automaton administrators? So much so, that one can hardly meet the gaze of a colleague when it’s spoken, or all composure would be lost. It’s become such a joke!
This young lady- these thousand- young people will never forget what the educational system did to them. They will never forget the disappoint and humiliation that ended their middle school experience.
LikeLike
…and at our school, parents pay for the graduation gown, senior trip and yearbook weeks in advance. BTW none of it is refundable if the student is listed as NOT graduating because of state exam scores
LikeLike
Sigh…so much wasted time and effort and for what? Who’s getting rich is the question to ask.
LikeLike
Child abuse, pure amd simple. I hope her parents have a lawyer. Mental anguish, anyone?
LikeLike