NYSUT, The New York State United Teachers, issued a blistering fact check of State Commissioner MaryEllen Elia’s claims about the state tests.
You have to open it to get the full flavor because NYSUT, not normally outspoken, shreds Elia’s claims.
Elia writes in Orwellian Newspeak about value of the tests.
NYSUT response: Because of the lack of movement by SED on NYSUT’s suggested changes to the testing system, the current tests do not provide any useful information to parents or teachers or any real information on how a district is performing. The results do not accurately predict future student success. In fact, the tests mislabel more than half of the test takers as failing, while more than 80 percent of students go on to graduate from high school. The results of the current tests are not only useless, but also damaging to students.
There are several such exchanges.
Bear in mind that no one but the testing company is allowed to know student responses to questions. So teachers learn NOTHING about the strengths or weaknesses of their students. Teachers, students, and parents get a score but nothing of any diagnostic value.
All students in grades 3-8 should OPT OUT of these pointless tests.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Excellent piece. Love the format: teachers make check-mark/ correction to Elia– in red.
I agree. The point by point corrections in red could be summarized as a grade of F for failing to understand anything about the tests.
Elia is not stupid and has had the issues about the tests explained to her many times.
Unfortunately for her, she can not use ignorance as an excuse at this point. She has had YEARS to come to an understanding while she continues to earn a quarter million dollars a year.
It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the “errors” she is making are not the result of simple “misunderstanding”.
Why do people like Elia continue to get the benefit of the doubt?
Why are they allowed to go from one screwup (in Florida) to the next (in NY) with nary a challenge?
Why does the public allow them to continue to fail upward?
State testing is all part of the data mining hustle. Finally, NYSUT has taken a stand. Standardized testing based on the CCSS is doing a disservice to students by wasting their time, narrowing curricula and causing unnecessary stress in young people. The tests serve no useful academic purpose to teachers or students, and the cut scores are rigged to make public school appear inferior. The proof is that many so-called failing students go on the pass the Regents and complete college. The assertion that these tests measure career and college readiness is totally false. The state should stop participating in what is a fraud against the state’s young people that only serves to collect inaccurate data and enrich testing companies at taxpayers’ expense.
No one can defend the CC, 3 to 8 test score v. Regents test score discrepancy. Why the state chose to purposefully fail and stigmatize the vast majority of young learners at the most vulnerable ages defies all we know about child development.
It makes no sense for the state to suspend learning in order to subject students to this stigmatizing ordeal.
BTW, I need to fix my earlier dangling clause. …fraud against the state’s young people. It only serves to collect inaccurate data…
Not only inaccurate but more importantly COMPLETELY INVALID data.
As a New York City public school teacher (as well as a New York City public school student), I can tell you that regents are content-based. If you memorize and explain the content, you are golden.
The CCSS was aiming to do something greater than memorizing and explaining facts. To completely erase the CCSS is plain silly. History has proven that education reformers loves to build and destroy and re-build again from scratch. Why can’t we LEARN and IMPROVE instead?
And let’s be honest, the CCSS is NOT revolutionary. It is just one step ahead of the Massachusetts standards. They are very similar. The MA standards are realistic standards – the CCSS feels more like a high goal to achieve than a standard. We should be asking the state to take it down a notch, that’s all.
No one, absolutely no one, has judged the CCSS ELA to be superior to the MASS ELA standards. The opposite is true. The MASSELA standards were recognized as the best in the nation and were replaced by the untested CCSS.
Regents tests are high school graduation tests intended to ensure appropriate and standardized instruction in a wide variety of content areas. Far from perfect, Regents curricula/tests at least provide students with a set of reasonable and concrete goals during high school. The value of this point of focus should not be understated. Ever since 1995 when NY started requiring ALL students to pass five Regents exams for graduation, the cut scores have been significantly watered down.Regents teachers seldom deviate away from the known (i.e. tested) content which is unfortunate.
The CC standards are a far cry from MA standards which were the best in the US before the edu-meddlers like Gates and Coleman intervened. These tools could have saved everybody a lot of wasted time and money and energy by simply adopting MA standards while eliminating the test-and-punish component that has ruined the K to 8 school experience for a generation of students.
The Regents exams were once written to a high standard. Passing them was a mark of distinction. When New York decided that ALL students had to pass five Regents exams to graduate, the standards had to be watered down. Not everyone is in the top 20%.
I apologize when I said “one step ahead.” I meant one year ahead. Example: The MA standards for seventh grade standards is very similar to CCSS for sixth grade. There is really nothing special. They just used the MA standards as a guide – and changed it by a year for “rigor.”
Not so. The MA standards are research-based and contain great literature at every grade level. They have years of experience behind them. CCSS had none.
question from a non new Yorker: how to get her out of her job? ditto the chancellor who brought an awful record with him….
Glad to hear about a union that works for the right interests- those of members, kids, communities and the nation.
AWrenchintheGears.com posted about the NEA and digital learning in 2017. Not surprising then that NEA and Gates-funded SETDA* (tech directors from every state ed. department in the nation) are among the sponsors of CoSN’s project. CoSN (Consortium for School Networking) is going to “debut its reports in 2019” related to its “headway in driving K-12 innovation”. (I presume the schools for the rich will continue to reject the billionaire schemes delivered to the schools of the middle class and poor.)
Apparently, SETDA has a lot of juice in D.C. for its self-appointed role to, “take action in important issues facing public education”…to foster public private partnerships and digital learning. Last year, Betsy DeVos was one to its featured speakers.
Would just one state show some backbone and say “no” to Gates? Public employees leaving SETDA would be a start.
Elia really is shockingly ignorant about testing. At a Regents meeting she once defended the statewide exams as “standardized” because everybody took the same test. I guess it doesn’t matter that kids can take widely different amounts of time to finish the test or some take them on computers while others use #2 pencils. No matter how the procedures or conditions differ under which the tests are administered they are STANDARDIZED. Off with your head! She said so.
I bet she is even more ignorant about test development/writing. Current New York, Common Core (Next Gen) ELA (3 to 8) tests produced by Questar Assessments continue to misuse the MC format by using it for highly subjective standards. You know something is really wrong when the author of a selected passage cannot answer these subjective, finely parsed, and completely subjective items using what should be a purely objective format.
ELA testing produces nothing useful for for every single stakeholder, except the testing companies. STOP pretending that subjective reading and writing skills in children can be accurately quantified. They know it is impossible but continue the charade. Its like banging heads into walls; it will feel really good if we stop.
“Ignorance” = “does not know”. As SDP points out above, it is simply unbelievable at this point that Elia does not know how bad the tests are. What’s the word for knowing something is harmful and doing it anyway…?
Stupid or malevolent?
Evil.
NYSUT leadership stepped up to the plate on this because our members demanded it. In solidarity there is strength!
Followers shouldn’t have to push the leaders forward. But, I’m glad for the outcome.
At a minimum, members should expect their union leaders not to sabotage them.
Good job, NYSUT. Thanks.
Agree.
“All students in grades 3-8 should OPT OUT of these pointless tests.”
And so should all of their teachers and adminimals.