Mercedes Schneider posted a letter written by a Néw York algebra teacher to parents of his students.
He begins:
“Dear Algebra Parents,
“The results from this year’s Common Core Algebra exam are now available and have been posted on the high school gymnasium doors. They are listed by student ID number and have no names attached to them. The list includes all students who took the exam, whether they were middle school students or high school students.
“I’ve been teaching math for 13 years now. Every one of those years I have taught some version of Algebra, whether it was “Math A”, “Integrated Algebra”, “Common Core Algebra”, or whatever other form it has shown up in. After grading this exam, speaking to colleagues who teach math in other school districts, and reflecting upon the exam itself, I have come to the conclusion that this was the toughest Algebra exam I have ever seen.
“With that in mind, please know that all 31 middle school students who took the exam received a passing score. No matter what grade your son or daughter received, every student should be congratulated on the effort they put into the class this year.
“Although everyone passed, many of you will not be happy with the grade that your son or daughter received on the exam (and neither will they). While I usually try to keep the politics of this job out of my communications, I cannot, in good conscience, ignore the two-fold tragedy that unfolded on this exam. As a parent, you deserve to know the truth.
“I mentioned how challenging this exam was, but I want you to hear why I feel this way.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Thank goodness I went through public school in NY ages ago when competent, reasonable people were actually running education and the state as a whole.
People like Meryl Tisch and Andrew Cuomo are actually an embarrassment to the state.
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You got this right for sure, SomeDAM Poet.
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Ditto! What a travesty to our students.
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This is a travesty but AT LEAST he has the itemized results for each student as opposed to the elementary ELA and Math tests which the teachers can neither really look at or discuss in any way. These teachers and students NEVER see how they did on individual items. There is NO transparency. The teachers cannot try to figure out what happened or how they might better teach a concept in general or specifically to children who are confused by that one. I think that is a HUGE part of the problem with the CCLS and testing. And that is only the tip of the iceberg for my complaints. I am so impressed this teacher will offer free review sessions for his students. How will that figure into next year’s VAM score I wonder. Oh, right, not at all.
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I don’t know about New York, but the “itemized” results for the tests in Utah are useless. They have three subcategories for the results: I think they’re “comprehension,” “mechanics” and something else. That’s the itemizing. Useless.
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It really is out of whack when the very people who are closest to children, teachers, have no say in how children are to be educated. Come to think of it, though, has there really ever been a time when career educators, preferably with direct classroom experience, have been the ones guiding policy? Somehow, it always seems to be a triage effort, like the one this algebra teacher is conducting, to save our children from the worse missteps of the latest folly. Certainly it is a noble role to play, but in today’s climate where career teachers are being discarded for drive-by temps, there will be fewer people who even know how to salvage something that even looks like learning, much less creativity or critical thinking.
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Please stop using words like “toughest” and “challenging” when what you really mean is bogus. Testing kids on material they haven’t learned and aren’t ready for isn’t “challenging’, it’s downright unfair and abusive.
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Instead of apologizing after the fact why didn’t he REFUSE to take part in the nefarious process. His continued support, through his actions including the letter, serve to justify the educational malpractices that are educational standards and standardized testing.
“So instead of just sitting back and accepting it for what it is, I’d like to offer you the best that I have. I’m willing, I’m ready, and I will be running review sessions free of charge this summer prior to the August administration of the Common Core Algebra Regents. This will be open to any student who wishes to retake the exam.”
GAGAer through and through, lacking the cojones to stand up to the edubullies who insist on instituting malpractices. If that is the “best that I have”, well, perhaps he shouldn’t be teaching to begin with. He is part of the problem not part of any viable solution at all. “Oh, hey let’s do better on the test next year” (that way my evaluation won’t be so crummy). Hogwash!!
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At least she or he wrote parents to let them know what is going on. What about every other ninth grade math teacher in NY State?? But I agree, instead of more test prep, he or she should be spending his time and energy rallying his colleagues to band together and fight this abuse.
As a parent, I intend to contact the math AP and do my best to inform other parents.
I don’t think Diane printed the most telling part of the letter. Apparently the curve helps students at the bottom but hurts the ones at the top. It would seem that the powers that be do not want students to score an 85, which would show mastery and, of course, affect teacher evaluations.
I know my 9th grader received a final grade of 93 in class and apparently mastered the material on the test, but that is not reflected in her score. I have heard of students in advanced math courses scoring in the 70s.
Here is another excerpt from the post:
Additionally, students were met with the toughest curve I’ve ever seen on a Regents exam as well. Typically you think of a curve as something that will add a few points onto every student’s exam to account for the difficulty level of that exam. All Regents exams have some version of a curve or another, and while this curve did help the lower-performing students, it also HURT the highest-performing students. For example, a student that knew 94% of the exam received a grade of 93. A student that knew 86% of the exam received an 84. When you look at the class as a whole, only two students met the “85 or above” that they were striving for all year long.
As if that isn’t alarming enough, let’s look at the difference between a grade of a 70 and a grade of a 75. You may look at those two and think that they are just five points apart, right? Well the way the scale works, a student who knew just 47% of the material got a grade of a 70, while a student who knew 71% of the material got a 75. Therefore, a student who got the 75 may have actually gotten almost 25% more of the exam correct than the student who got the 70! This creates one of the worst bell curves I have ever seen.
Now let’s put that into perspective. The old-style (Integrated) Algebra exam was also given this year to a small subgroup of students. None of the middle school students were eligible to take this exam. However, were I to apply the curve that was assigned to that exam (which was a MUCH easier exam), a student who knew 78% of the exam would be given a grade of an 85. All in all, over half of the class would have gotten an 85 or above had that scale been used instead!
Let me sum up what the last three paragraphs really say: the exam did a serious disservice to your child and will be reflected in their grade. It’s not a fair representation of what students knew, what they did all year, or what they were capable of. There is nothing that your son or daughter could have done to have been better prepared for this exam. Words cannot describe what an injustice this truly is to your child.
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What you describe is called “psychometric fudging” by Noel Wilson wherein those that pay for the test pre-determine what results they want and then the test maker (psychometricians) makes sure the result will happen. From my summary of Wilson’s work “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. And a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”.
In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it attempts to measure “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)”
Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
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NO: If the teachers first see the exam as they are handed out, they have no time to discern whether or not they are appropriate or not, and even if he did, to put the kids in the position of not being able to take it would be shocking. This letter is brave, but more importantly is specific, showing the exact flaws in the test by number, so I applaud the teacher.
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“. . .If the teachers first see the exam as they are handed out. . . ”
Demand to see the test beforehand. I refused to monitor the ACT test that is required of all juniors in the Show Me State. I asked if I could see it ahead of time and was told No. I let them know that for me it is unethical for a teacher to give a test without first having vetted it, so “No thanks, I won’t be proctoring the test” and they found some other GAGA sucker to give it.
“. . . to put the kids in the position of not being able to take it would be shocking.”
Yes, damn shocking that the teacher would have had the cojones to protect the students from such a nefarious, harmful educational malpractice. One can’t be a GAGAer by acting ethically.
“This letter is brave, but more importantly is specific, showing the exact flaws in the test by number,”
Pointing out the flawed questions isn’t “brave”, that should be a normal part of the process. But to a certain extent it misses the whole fact of the matter that the whole testing process itself is COMPLETELY INVALID. When one attempts to improve a flawed, invalid process one only gets more flaws and invalidities when one doesn’t address the fundamental flaws in epistemology and ontology that are embedded in the educational standards and standardized testing regime. Paraphrasing R. Ackhoff: “Doing the wrong thing righter results in being wronger” and more harms to the most innocent of society the children who are subjected (yes, this testing regime is a “human experiment” with no consent asked for nor given, in other words, an abomination) to this porcine excrement.
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i took regents exams in the late 60’s . The questions were designed by teachers. They published previoys copies of exams so we could practice with them. The questions related to the curriculum and I thought were a fair measure of knowledge. We spent the year learning and then for part of June practiced old exams for test prep. i don’t think the standards were lower than today and without the kill and drill test prep teachers could include critical thinking on classroom exams and in classroom discussions. There was no teacher or administration cheating as their ratings didn’t depend on those scores. The scores were always available on the last day if school so no agonized waiting. I bet the system was cheaper. The only reason we are doing things this way is political. My daughter has dyslexia and ADHD and would opt her out if I could but then she wouldn’t get a diploma. She may not get one know because disabilities will not allow to show hat she has learned on these exams and the new exams are similarly unhelpful. When daughter could show her knowledge by a a portfolio, maybe a powerpoint after every unit. That however would not make money for Pearson, case closed.
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I took Regents tests in the 70’s with the same experience.
What is going on now (with CC, Regents, VAM and rest) is a cruel joke.
Clowns like Tisch are destroying what was once a good public education system.
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Totally agree…but the general public does not realize that the Regents is no longer the same as what they once knew. Also everyone did not have to take the Regents back in those days.
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“. . . I thought were a fair measure of knowledge”
No, they weren’t a “fair measure of knowledge”. They didn’t measure anything. They attempted to assess a students learning of X subject matter but they never measured anything. There are no logical measurements of the teaching and learning process just as there is no educational standard from which to measure that teaching and learning process.
We have all been so conditioned to believe that we are “measuring” something with standardized tests, teacher made tests and the grading of students. WE ARE NOT MEASURING ANYTHING. The “measuring” concept is COMPLETELY INVALID. To understand why read and comprehend Noel Wilson’s work I referenced above.
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Where is the,apology from the .NYSED? Where are the names of the people who created this exam? It is,amazing that a teacher is apologizing when the actual culprits should answering questions for this horror show called the,regents exam.
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There oughta be a law against the crooked scoring that was described here.
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Then all psychometricians, you know those descendents of the marriage of phrenologists with eugenicists, would be in jail. Because that “crooked scoring” is their livelyhood.
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A fundamental algebra test for high school freshmen that excludes solving by proportion but includes trig and algebra II problems. Seriously?
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A MICROCOSM: This is not too different from how grade 3-8 students and teachers are evaluated. First, institute inappropriate metrics that make it impossible for the average individual to achieve effective grades. Then, have a series of levers and variables that allow the results to be skewed in any direction.
When kids take the Common Core exams, the cut scores allow the state to prescribe any percentage of passing/failing grades they desire. Then also, the withdrawal of questions after-the-fact makes a second round of manipulations possible, although this stage is done in secret. For example, this year they artificially boosted the scores of 3rd graders by 11% this by withdrawing test items long after the tests were scored.
Teachers have ratings that are tied to student test scores, which means we are beholden in part to the same arbitrary (or agenda-driven) outcomes, but then we have the observation portions where suburban NY administrators pumped up the ratings to near-perfect in order to “rescue” teachers.
Teachers also saw a second “safety net” offered that would nullify the lowest rankings for a two year transition period. It was drafted by the legislature and touted by Governor Cuomo prior to the elections, but immediately after the elections, it was withdrawn in an startling breach of honor and integrity.
Just last week, the legislature passed into law a provision that Common Core tests be examined for grade-appropriateness before they are printed. It is unclear who will be on the committee overseeing this, but they will become judge and jury deciding which content belongs in which grade, something that should be determined and announced long before the school year begins.
Finally, we have the question of why the last few years of testing policy were plunged into this chaos and who is responsible. If we were wise, we would not be putting patches on these laws and regulations, we would be removing those responsible from their positions. Until we recognize that their objective is to destroy public education and de-professionalize teaching, we will be playing whack-a-mole forever. The solution is electoral, but also to hasten court cases that require them to demonstrate the scientific and statistical validity of their test-based policies.
As we saw with this Regents debacle, the unproven, unproven theories of Common Core learning and standardized test-based education have been thrust onto live children instead of being piloted and examined for flaws in real world conditions. We all stood by as this happened – teachers, parents, unions, legislators, pundits and students. The question is, will we be restarting it all over again in September?
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Jake,
Overall your in the ballpark in your concerns about the educational standards and standardized testing regime.
“The solution is electoral, but also to hasten court cases that require them to demonstrate the scientific and statistical validity of their test-based policies.”
They can’t demonstrate that supposed validity because the epistemological and ontological underpinnings are so fraught with errors and falsehoods that no “scientific and statistical validity” can ever be established. For a short read why read Noel Wilson’s discussion of validity as it is delineated in the testing bible “Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing” in his “A Little Less than Valid: An Essay Review”
Click to access v10n5.pdf
“We all stood by as this happened – teachers, parents, unions, legislators, pundits and students.”
NO! “We” didn’t all stand by. Some of us have been fighting this nonsense since we first heard the term “data driven decision making” on PD days back before the turn of the century. Some of us have been driven out of our teaching positions for challenging this utter bullshit. Some of us have been hounded and hassled for having the cojones to stand up to the nonsense. So no “WE” didn’t ALL stand by and some of us are continuing the fight even after retiring-many of whom post here.
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As a New York State High School teacher of mathematics, I am appalled at the inaccuracy of much of what this particular teacher says.
#24 – Students are not expected to solve the compound inequality. They are simply asked to calculate an average over an interval. The question basically says that if the cost of an event is $750, how many students must attend if the average cost per person is to be between $0.50 and $1.00. The “compound inequality” is simply the range of students. This type of inequality has been presented many times over the course of the year in nearly all the modules, including the 6 point graph question.
#28 – The teacher forgot to mention to the parents that the big, scary fraction was 1/2. I think most kids, especially those equipped with a calculator that can provide answers in fractional form, could handle this.
#37 “The graph” – Any good instructor always shows their students how to use the tools at hand. Yes, the equation was messy, but the students, by law, must have a graphing calculator. One of the first things we teach our students is that when an interval (i.e. compound inequality) is given (in this case 0 < x < 150) you enter that domain as the bounds of the graph in the graphing window (usually called xMin and xMax). Then they can use the ZFit function on the calculator which sets the range (y-values) for the given domain (x-values). My guess is that this instructor is not aware of this function and probably had his/her students graphing everything in a standard -10 < x < 10 window, which is odd since the modules are littered with examples of these "messy" functions.
Now, I have only been teaching for 22 years, but in my limited experience, I have found this exam to be one of the best that New York State has administered. It was challenging, fair, and expected a high level of rigor.
Having said that, what all of us MUST BE CONCERNED ABOUT is the ABSOLUTELY ABSURD curve the state dictated regarding this exam. According to New York, the following is a true statement:
35 = 65
You see, sum of the points on this exam was 86, but ONLY 30 POINTS WERE NEEDED TO PASS (i.e earn a grade 65). Now, I realize everyone hates percents, but go on your calculator and do 30 / 86 * 100 and you will see that by scoring 35% correct, you earned a 65%.
So, I really disagree with this teacher on their point about, "every student should be congratulated on the effort they put into the class", and "students were met with the toughest curve I’ve ever seen on a Regents exam". If your child passed this exam with anything less than an 80 (which, incidentally was actually 80% correct of the exam), they probably don't know any algebra at all and will definitely struggle through geometry and algebra, Don't congratulate them, but instead make them learn the algebra they were supposed to.
In summary, teachers who can't teach should not be allowed to complain about Common Core.
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I fully understand this teacher’s feelings, and because I feel similarly and that I failed my students, I’m going to leave teaching. I’ve only done this for 11 years, but this was the worst Regents exam that I have seen. My students really struggled with this test, and I feel that I didnt do a good job. I had a 30% failure rate and I have spent the last 2 weeks talking with parents and explaining the results. Thank you for your work. Teacher from upstate NY
Sent from my Verizon Wireless 4G LTE smartphone
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