New York State Allies for Public Education (NYSAPE) issued a statement demanding the resignation or firing of State Commissioner MaryEllen Elia.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: April 17, 2018
More information contact:
Lisa Rudley (917) 414-9190; nys.allies@gmail.com
Jeanette Deutermann (516) 902-9228; nys.allies@gmail.com
NY State Allies for Public Education – NYSAPE
Commissioner Elia and the Board of Regents Continue to Fail New York’s Children;
Parents Demand the Immediate Removal of Commissioner Elia
Parents across the state demand that the Board of Regents act immediately to remove Commissioner MaryEllen Elia. It is time the Board of Regents exercises control over the State Education Department to stop the runaway train of anti-public school “reform” that the commissioner represents.
Last week’s 3rd-8th grade ELA testing was an epic–and avoidable–fail for the children of New York State. The problems began before the tests were even administered, continued during their administration, and will persist unless there is a radical shakeup in the leadership of the State Education Department; in the way in which information about the tests and participation in the tests is communicated to families; and in how the tests themselves are constructed, administered, and scored.
The twin disasters of this year’s botched computer-based tests and an even more flawed than usual ELA test design prove that Elia is unequal to her duties and lacks the competence to helm the education department. Our children deserve better.
Leading up to the tests, some districts sent letters to parents asking whether their children would be participating in the assessments. Others, including the state’s largest district, New York City, sent home testing “info” riddled with spin, distortion, and outright lies regarding test refusal and its consequences. Many disadvantaged communities told advocates that they did not know they had a right to refuse the tests, even though it is their children who are most likely to suffer the negative effects of school closure.
Amy Gropp Forbes, a mother active in NYC Opt Out, wrote in a letter addressed to Chancellor Betty Rosa, “I urge you to issue a formal statement that clarifies a parent’s right to refuse state testing for their children. If the state allows some parents the right to opt out of state exams, it MUST give ALL parents this right, and consequences to schools and districts across the state must be equitable.” Gropp Forbes received no reply.
That the BOR and SED stood by and let this situation transpire despite having been made fully aware of the inequity–a statewide NYSAPE letter writing campaign generated over 200 complaints of “misinformation and intimidation”–is inexcusable. The absence of state-issued guidance also allowed some schools and districts to intimidate potential test refusers by instituting “sit and stare” policies.
Further evidence of a dereliction of duty on the part of BOR and SED came last week during the state ELA exam. The problems far exceeded the typical complaints associated with the state’s standardized exams. In fact, the problems were so egregious that one Westchester superintendent felt compelled to apologize to his entire community for what students had to endure. Social media flooded with teacher and proctor reports of children crying from fatigue, confusion, angst, hunger, pain, and more.
“Any good teacher knows how to judge time in lessons and assessments,” stated Chris Cerrone, school board trustee from Erie County. “As soon as I saw the format when I received the instructions I knew something was wrong. Day 1 would be short. Day 2 would be too long.”
Jeanette Deutermann, founding member of NYSAPE and LI Opt Out questioned, “Who was actually responsible for the construction and final version of these assessments? SOMEONE is responsible; that someone is Elia and the Board of Regents. The worst test since the new rollout has happened on their watch. Until a more capable leader is in place, we demand that all work on the construction of future tests be suspended immediately.”
Ulster County parent, educator, and NYSAPE founding member Bianca Tanis attributed last week’s fiasco in part to the state’s adoption of untimed testing. “Both SED and members of the Board of Regents continue to ignore the egregious consequences of untimed testing, misleading the public by claiming that the tests are shorter. For many educators, administering this test was the worst day of their career. The truth is out, and it cannot be ignored.”
“Enough is enough,” declared Dr. Michael Hynes, Superintendent of Long Island’s Patchogue-Medford district. “Not only are children and educators suffering, but with this untimed policy the state is in violation of its own law, which caps testing at no more than 1% (9 hours) of instructional time. Where’s the enforcement?”
“For a decade or more, SED and its vendors have proved themselves incapable of creating valid, well-designed, non-abusive exams that can be reliably used for diagnostic purposes or to track trends in student achievement over time,” said Leonie Haimson, Executive Director of Class Size Matters.
“Since the Common Core was introduced, these problems have only gotten worse, with tests so difficult and confusing that teachers themselves are at a loss as to how the questions should be answered. A recent report from the Superintendents Roundtable revealed that the NYS exams were misaligned to excessively high benchmarks, meaning far too many students are wrongly identified as low-performing,” said Marla Kilfoyle, Long Island public school parent, educator, and BATs Executive Director.
Brooklyn public school parent and founding member of NYC Opt Out, Kemala Karmen, is calling on SED to notify every single parent of their right to refuse May’s upcoming math assessment. She added, “The state can and should halt its hellbent race towards computerized testing, for which it is clearly ill-prepared; stop farming out test construction to dubious for-profit companies; truly shorten the exams; and, most important, remove high stakes attached to the assessments.”
Here’s a compilation of observations made by parents, administrators, and teachers about the numerous problems with this year’s NYS ELA state test, and the suffering it caused students.
NYSAPE calls on the Board of Regents to stand up for equitable and authentic learning & assessments and immediately remove Commissioner Elia.
#OptOut2018 Test Refusal Letter: English & Spanish
NYSAPE is a grassroots coalition with over 50 parent and educator groups across the state.
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Diane Ravitch's blog 
I agree 100%.Elia continues to drive the reformist agenda of those looking to destroy public education in NY. It’s time to send her back to Florida.
Her so called listening tours were nothing but a sham in which we were expected to listen to her.
Now that the Democrats control all 3 branches of NYS government it’s time to reverse coarse and put all of the garbage onto the ash heap of history. Contact your legislator today.
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She can’t go back to Florida. She was fired from her last post as Superintendent of Hillsborough County.
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Florida doesn’t even send its bad alligators to NY.
That’s how bad Elia was.
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Why would Elia resign now?
She’s got the gig down pat.
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“For a decade or more, SED and its vendors have proved themselves incapable of creating valid, well-designed, non-abusive exams that can be reliably used for diagnostic purposes or to track trends in student achievement over time,”
There can never be a “valid well-designed, non-abusive [standardized] exam”. Never. Noel Wilson has shown us all the onto-epistemological errors and falsehood and pychometric fudgings that occur in the standardized test making, giving and disseminating of results that render any conclusions COMPLETELY INVALID. A completely invalid test can never be “reliably used” for anything as without validity, reliablility means absolutely nothing. NOTHING!
The continued reliance on false and error filled educational malpractices such as is standardized testing completely baffles my mind. Can’t comprehend why anyone would use such idiocies for anything.
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Duane, are you saying that only school tests are invalid? Or only some school tests are invalid? What about driving tests? Or tests given to people who want to obtain the American citizenship? Or tests to become a President? Oops, we don’t have those, but if we did, do you think Trump would fail them, and if yes, would you consider the result valid?
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I have no problem with properly made teacher made classroom exams. Properly made meaning tests that go over the curriculum that is covered in class.
Driving tests? Discuss that a little in my book. Usually there are three components, a vision test, a written test that one must score 70 percent correct to be able to then take the driving test. How accurate do those come to sorting out who and who will not be decent drivers? I’m not so sure.
Citizenship tests should be like well-constructed class tests in that there is a limited curriculum from which the applicant must learn and answer questions about. So in that sense I have no problem, but at the same time the results really say nothing of the human qualities that make a citizen of the person taking the test. It is of limited value in my mind, other than having immigrants learn a little, and it’s very little of our country and culture.
And your last question: NO as far as validity and couldn’t care less about what Trump may or may not do on one. Hypotheticals are a baited hook, and I ain’t no suckerfish.
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AGREED to the nth degree, Duane!
(& why, in 2018, are we still having to have this discussion?!)
ILL-Annoy is not administering CCRAP next year, but I dread to hear what will replace it (after all, Pear$on owns the former Scott, Foresman campus in a Chicago area suburb). If you happened to have seen the movie “Bad Teacher” (NOT the awful tv show…the funny movie w/the great cast: Cameron Diaz, Lucy Punch, Molly Shannon, Justin Timberlake , Jason Segal, Thomas Lennon, Eric {forget his last name!} from “Modern Family” & Michael {forgot his last name, too, but he was the misogynist announcer in the “Pitch Perfect” movies & was in all of Christopher Guest’s terrific spoofs–“The Mighty Wind,” “Best in Show.” etc.}, you will see Diaz’ “bad teacher” illicitly obtain a copy of that year’s ILL-Annoy Standards Achievement Test {I.S.A.T.}; the cover was a really good facsimile of that test we administered for years before the CCRAP.
It was pretty bad, as well…
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“A recent report from the Superintendents Roundtable revealed that the NYS exams were misaligned to excessively high benchmarks, meaning far too many students are wrongly identified as low-performing.” — This statement is devoid of facts, and I am not paying ten bucks to see more bars. Does the report contain ACTUAL questions given to students?
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You can go on the website and look them up.
As a parent who HAS made a concerted effort to examine the state tests my kid takes each year, I will tell you that the problem is not JUST the high benchmarks. It is that high benchmarks are going to be impossible for kids to achieve when you have designed a test that doesn’t test what children have learned, but tries to trick them for no good reason except to see if they can.
If you ever look at the tests PRIVATE school kids in NY take (because they woulddn’t be caught dead giving that stupid state test to their kids), the questions are very straightforward.
Here is the difference. A child is given a paragraph to read and the paragraph includes some difficult vocabulary words that good readers often know or can figure out from context.
Private school kids get this question:
In the sentence:
“Susan Jones was an invalid and confined to bed. Sometimes her friends would visit and sometimes a doctor would come but she was lonely.”
What is the meaning of the word “invalid”?
A. Sickly person B. Criminal person C. Lonely person
Public school kids get THIS question on Common Core tests:
Which word in the above paragraph best helps the reader understand what “invalid” means?
A. Doctor B. Bed C. Confined
Every one of us will get the private school test question correct and choose A.
But which answer is the correct one for the public school question?
(HINT: No matter what answer you choose, I will tell you why another one is “more correct”).
And that’s how you guarantee that no matter how good their teachers are, some kids in the class will choose the wrong answer.
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I’m glad you get to at least see questions. Utah has NEVER released a single question from its standardized testing.
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Thank you, NYCpsp. I was a sp.ed. teacher in ILL-Annoy &, as such, could “read aloud” math tests (&, at that time, we had science, as well). The Pear$on-publi$hed te$t$ were beyond awful: ridiculous ??, ?? above grade level, ?? having NO correct answer & ?? having MORE than one correct answer.tests. My L.D. resource students would cry, hide under their desks, fall asleep, fill in any circles at all, just to be done or fill in circles on Scantrons to make patterns (I retired in 2010, just before test administration was done on computers). There is NO (& never has been) quality control for these tests nor any local, state or federal oversight. The publishers just publish the nonsense & make the $$$$. Test questions (& answers) have not improved since the year of the “Pineapple Question.”
&, again, not a state superintendent, school board or federal agency holds the testing company accountable for their lousy material, material which confuses, frustrates & tortures our children, in addition to robbing them of valuable learning time (even kids who opt out are subject to day-in & day-out test prep).
Nothing has changed since Todd Farley’s landmark “standardized” testing expose (2009–almost TEN YEARS AGO!!), “Making the Grades: My Misadventures in the Standardized Testing Industry” (a MUST read!).
And don’t get me started on WHO grades these tests/HOW the tests are graded (look up some older posts {esp. the comments} on this blog; there’s a good one on December 27, 2012 {interview w/Todd Farley}).
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Just to clarify, I made up that question.
But it is similar to the kind of convoluted questions young students get on these state exams.
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and test making companies getting rich off of the test-score “accountabilty” legislation know very well that they can look to making future money when kids FAIL, not succeed…
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One of the fundamental flaws of the ELA tests is that the writers are forced to use the objective, four item MC format for subjective questions. However, don’t blame the test writers, the problem lies in the standards. As written, the Common Core standards (or their bastard children) are not suitable for MC test items. Multiple choice item writing requires only one correct option and three clearly incorrect, but “plausible distractors”. MC item writers are usually required to defend the plausibility of each distractor during test development. “Plausibility” means no silly or very obviously wrong distractors.
MC item that is objective and contains plausible (valid) distractors
1) Which type of tree is classified as a conifer?
MC item that is objective but contains implausible (invalid) distractors
2) Which type of tree is classified as deciduous?
MC item that is subjective and contains more than one possible answer
3) Which is the best shade tree?
Many ELA items resemble sample item #3.
Blame the standards, not the test writers.
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I’m sorry but I’m going to keep blaming the writers! But I won’t argue with you that the standards are also at fault.
Question 3 would be valid if it followed a paragraph in which different types of trees and their ability to give shade was discussed. For example: “Maple trees have leaves that provide excellent shade. Oak trees don’t provide good shade. Flowers that need good shade to flourish never grow well under spruce or willow trees.”
Then when you ask a 4th grader “Which is the best shade tree?”, answer A is the obvious choice.
The questions on state tests now that are not seen in tests given to private school kids are generally worded as I wrote above:
In the paragraph above, what word in sentence 3 BEST helps the reader understanding the meaning of the word “invalid” in sentence 1.
The student can know the meaning of the word “invalid” and comprehend the paragraph perfectly and still not guess correctly as to whether the word “doctor” or “bed” best helps her – as a reader – understand the meaning of the word “invalid”.
Because it doesn’t matter whether the word “doctor” or “bed” or “confined” helped that particular student on that particular day understand the meaning of the word “invalid”.
The question is designed to get wrong answers from some portion of the students no matter what – to guarantee failure.
Which is why no NYC private schools will allow their kids to take the exam despite the fact they are free to opt in to taking the test (they’d rather pay tens of thousands to take a test that won’t mark their students as failures.)
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To NYCpsp at 10:51 AM: Yeah, I got that you made up the question (& it was a doozy!).
As I wrote in my diatribe, earlier, I actually saw & read questions that were so much worse. &, to add, not only did my kids engage in my aforementioned test-averse activities, several were psychologically damaged (“I’m JUST STUPID!!! I’m a STUPIDHEAD!!”),& others resorted to self-harm (pounding themselves on the head, banging a head against the desk, scratching an arm until blood appeared) & had to be sent, immediately, to the one school social worker (for 450 students) in the building.
Not to mention how disruptive this was–every time it happened with one or the other–disrupting any concentration of the rest of the class, members of which would, naturally, lose their place & fill in the wrong bubbles on the Scantrons.
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Insanity, eh, rbmtk. How can we ethically do this sort of thing to children?
Wow, extremely sad, disgusting and many more desultory descriptors.
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I grew up in an era where 3rd graders took “Iowa tests” (as we called them).
I was in a public school where less than the half the high school graduates went to college, and of the ones that did, most went to commuter community colleges.
But I never saw any kid stressing out about taking the Iowa tests. It was just another test not noticeably different than a test you might take in class. I don’t think most kids ever knew what they got since it was mailed home separately to parents a long time later – and I’m sure some never bothered to look at it since it was meaningless.
As a parent I don’t particularly mind my kid taking a low-stakes standardized test per se — the way private school kids do. I mind my kid taking a standardized tests designed only for public schools that is intentionally ambiguous so that more students will fail.
And I mind schools who believe it is anything but harmful to tell kids there is a right answer — a “more correct” answer — to a question that anyone with half a brain can knows there is not. Teaching kids to ignore their own ability to think and instead try to figure out what someone else thinks is “most correct”.
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