Tim Farley is a public school parent and advocate in upstate New York. In this post, he describes the way that the New York State Education Department has manipulated test scores to avoid providing needed academic interventions for students who fail.
With the Common Core tests producing a failure rate of 70%, who will give the students the remediation to which they are legally entitled?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Add this to the list of unfunded mandates here in ny….. Job well done
As if remediation were possible! The roots of reading and writing capacity are deep and complex. There isn’t and will never be a plug-in program that can remediate reading and writing. Read City on a Hill by James Taub to see how decades of herculean remediation effort at City College fell flat. Ask any teacher: kids who go into “reading intervention” in fourth grade still need it in twelfth grade. The only hope is rich and steady word and knowledge diet from an early age.
Correction Ponderosa, as if remediation were needed for all 70% of the students landing in the “not proficient” zone! The tests were designed and the scores were cut to achieve that percentage. NYS students did not suddenly become *less smart* as a group.
What in fact this odious system has done is to make it harder to identify and provide for the struggling students who truly need AIS.
In Illinois we had a 67 percent “not proficient” for high school ELA, and an 83 percent “not proficient” for high school math. Yet our state just keeps cutting education funding (except for the $59 million wasted on CRAPP tests) and refuses to raise taxes on the rich,
All is going according to the Rheeformer plan. *SIGH*
Every single person pushing this monstrosity needs intensive ethical remediation. Is that in the budget?
You can’t teach ethics to sociopaths and psychopaths. They have no conscience and will never care what harm they cause.
This post points out the hypocrisy in the governor’s agenda. The New York state test references the actual need for compensatory service ( based on a 1 to 5 scale) in reading and math as the test reflects grade level expectations. The tests based the CCSS with the rigged subjective cut score and content and skills that are on the frustration level of the students are purely political. They serve no purpose other than to destabilize public education.
I am an upstate teacher also, very few children who need remediation receive it in my district. We are doing a one size fits all education, we need to give special services and a different type of instruction to very low performing students. Students with particular problems must be sorted from the entire group according to scores and who is special education and ESL. Then we need to examine the scores and see who is reading and who is not. Special groups should be formed offering 2 hours of instruction in the morning. Retired teachers could be hired to do this. These children need our attention and deserve to get the instruction they need. All students do not need the same instruction.
The remediation will be provided by corporate entities in the future, once the goal of proving that organized public school teachers are the problem is completed.
The answers to all of our seemingly sharp questions designed to expose the vacant nature of the reform movement are the same: corporate entities paid by the public. Thats always going to be the answer. That is their goal.
Its tiring that we keep this up, this always trying to prove we are right. We are right. Being right though is not enough. They are interested in winning. They are dominating narratives. They are actively pursuing their goals. We are trying to prove again and again that we are right. We have arrived at a gun fight with plastic knives.
Alot of energy we are using exposing the “dirty secrets” of the reform movement. There are no secrets. They’ve been loud, legible, and very well distributed for years. We know what they are up to.
Two sets of books. One to say which kids are “proficient” each year. The other to separate the improficient ones further, so that we don’t have to pay the piper for misclassifying too many of them as being in need of costly interventions.
My school in a nice middle class NYC school district had about 30 kids getting ones and low twos in 2013-14, but not this was not enough to warrant any money for AIS services. Last year, the principal squeezed together some money from the budget to have me come in one or two days a week to provide AIS for these students (I retired last year and used to provide at risk services). I volunteered to be paid per diem and not at the part time rate so that my school could afford the service. Obviously, it was not enough. It was like putting out a forest fire with a dropper.
By the way, the DOE plays the same game with summer school. Many students who end up failing the CCLS tests never get invited to summer school because it is based on a cut score in NYC. To get a summer school slot, the student has to get less than 10% of the part I questions correct on either the ELA or math Common Core pieces of garbage. Therefore, students have to get less than 5 out of about 42 multiple choice items correct. Students who score that low on the multiple choice section, need more than 19 days of summer school to have a prayer.
By sheer probability kids should get at least 10 points on M-C items.
Yep! Most that cannot usually are ELLs, FELLs or have diagnosed disabilities.
The NY Dept. of Education, based on my experience, also plays games with its on-line
comment function at its website. The manipulators’ “reply” has no answer. And then, when the commenter returns the e-mail, noting its lack of answer, they respond that they are unable to reply, b/c the comment has been identified as “answered”.
Albany is a cesspool.