The New York City Council Committee on Education held a hearing to discuss overtesting in the schools, and the Department of Education’s chief academic officer announced a plan to increase testing to be sure students are ready for the state test.
The Department will add four off-the-shelf standardized tests to replace the school-selected interim assessments.
New testing requirements are in the offing for city schools—even as teachers, students and advocates blasted a culture of excessive exams at a City Council hearing Tuesday.
City Education Department officials said schools may soon be required to test students several times a year to see how they’re doing before the high-stakes, state-mandated exams arrive at the end of the year.
The irony wasn’t lost on City Council Member Mark Treyger (D – Brooklyn), who convened the hearing.
“We just had a whole discussion on the impact test have on our schools,” Treyger said, “and we’re saying we’re going to implement another one.”
Mayor Bill DeBlasio controls the Department of Education.
it seems as though most of the school year will focus on standardized tests.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Increase testing to address too much testing?
Makes perfect sense.
Perfect sense to people who do not care about education, just the almighty test scores.
My thought exactly.
Machiavelli nailed it: “The tests justify the practice tests.” The practice tests justify the pretests. The pretests justify the test prep… We all need to practice twiddling our thumbs to prepare for more twiddling.
He–with the cigar dangling from his mouth, the black glasses, the moustache & the googly eyes–said.
I’m sorry–this reply was meant for SDP up there at 12:02 PM.
BTW–do you look anything like Groucho? You’re damn near as brilliant (& funny)!
New Mexico went down this wasteful road and look what it got us. Absolutely nothing. Teachers spent the whole school year preparing to take test after test after test. The results were negative. This is what happens when non-educator try to teach Educators has to educate our children. Seems the dumb get dumber each day.
yes
Bad idea!…..ask me how I know?…..2 kids – been there, done it! Testing and test prep as an education isn’t really an education at all.
The tests haven’t worked, by their own measures. They haven’t closed achievement gaps, and they haven’t improved outcomes. They have utterly failed. Therefore, . . . wait for it . . . drum roll . . . let’s DO A LOT MORE OF THEM!!!
Idiots.
My biggest concern now is that the kids probably need some tests to be prepared for these pre-tests. I’m surprised these experts didn’t think of that…yet.
Instead of baby toys, retailers should just sell pre-tests for the pre-tests for the pre-tests. Never too early to start.
Ha ha ha
It’s an “infinite retest”
This is a recipe to make students hate school, endless testing and data mining instead of real teaching and learning. Maybe this is all part of the evil plot against public education!
It is a big reason why we pay for child #2 to go to private high school. He now loves school and comes home talking about how much he learns and how much he likes his teachers. It’s kind of sad because we live in a really high tax area and a lot of those tax dollars are spent on the public school system. Unfortunately, our district is tied to test scores and US News and World Reports and the parents here just eat it up…..go figure.
Perhaps the most insidious part of the Common [sic] Core [sic] testing regime is that the tests have completely distorted curricula and pedagogy. And this goes FAR, FAR beyond encouraging teachers and administrators to make their kids do interim practice tests and have data chats and do online and print test prep.
The exam language and exercise types have metastasized throughout textbooks and online curricula to such an extent that even where it’s not explicitly test prep, these days, it’s test prep nonetheless. The bright ELA people I know in the educational publishing industry are quitting in droves because they are no longer able to plan curricula and to use pedagogical approaches that make sense. Instead, they have to mimic, over and over again, the test question types in exercises in applying some moronic “standard” from the Gates/Coleman list to some snippet of text. And the math people are being driven crazy by the insistence in the early grades on teaching that is developmentally inappropriate.
Gates and his hireling Lord Coleman have laid waste to enormous swathes of US K-12 education with their puerile bullet list. They have brought both innovation in educational materials and coherent development of those materials to a screeching halt.
I don’t think many people realize how MUTANT schools have become. They’re nothing like the real schools of yore. Take “literacy” alone. What is “literacy” class? It’s this brand new species of learning (mostly test prep on pseudo-skills like a generic ability to find the main idea) that, while pretending to be super-beneficial, actually leaves no significant residue of learning. No literate person in the world ever went through anything like “literacy” class. IT DOESN’T WORK. It’s fake learning. It’s mutant education. And it’s misery-inducing to boot.
My kids would have ELA in the morning for an hour and then they would have ELA data analysis for an hour in the afternoon. This was elementary school. They didn’t need parent volunteers in the schools in the afternoon so I think this was their way of hiding all the test prep. They did the same for math but it was only for 30 minutes in the afternoon. Data analysis sounds so technical…so it must be good? Fooled most of the parents.
This genetically-modified curriculum wouldn’t be so bad if it actually worked. But NAEP scores are flat. SAT scores are flat or sinking. All this time ploughed into “literacy” and kids are less literate than ever.
Literacy is knowing stuff. As in, “environmental literacy”, “emotional literacy”, “nutritional literacy”. The all-round literate people are the all-round knowers –the ones with the most general knowledge. Yet this mutant brand of literacy teaching claims to be able to produce literacy without transmitting any knowledge. To them it’s about practicing pseudo-skills like “making inferences”. Sorry, but practicing making inferences on Topic A does not make you better at making inferences on Topic B. Inference making is knowledge-dependent. You make good inferences about what you know. A veteran fisherman can make good inferences about what’s on the other end of the line because his brain is saturated with knowledge of fishing. A kid who has 12 years of inference practice but who has never fished will still have no clue. There is no substitute for knowledge. It turns out our forebears knew what they were doing when they made school about knowledge. Our country is on a radically wrong track with respect to education.
I went to work for a publishing house once, Ponderosa, that had a series of reading “supplementals” written by one of these “literacy experts.” The company president asked me for an assessment of them. So, I went through one of the books, lesson by lesson, and explained how utterly confused the author was about basic literary and rhetorical terminology and how utterly lacking each lesson was in any substantive instruction. A typical lesson would say something like, writers should strive to develop a unique “voice.” Then, that would be followed by two examples, one with “voice” and one without “voice,” and then the student would then be instructed to write a piece with “voice.” Or a lesson would start by saying that it’s very important to learn to “think critically,” and that one important type of “critical thinking” was “making inferences.” And then it would give the student some paragraphs to read and ask the student to “draw inferences” from them. NOTHING THERE. But there was a whole cult around this person, and her books sold like new iPhones. It was astonishing that so many “educators” would take such completely vacuous crap at all seriously. Oh, we’re practicing developing a “voice.” Oh, we’re practicing our “inferencing” skills. Completely idiotic. Never, in any of these books, each of which had a chapter on “developing voice,” did the “literacy expert” teach the student a single stylistic technique that might distinguish one author’s “voice” from another’s–anything that the student might actually use in a piece of writing. Not once. Never did she explain any variety of inference or how to make it. She seemed to be totally oblivious to the fact that there are many, many varieties of inference and whole sciences devoted to the various types and to rules for making them. Idiotic. Utterly lacking in substance. And very, very popular on the education carnival midway.
As you can imagine, the president of the publishing house did not give me this author’s stuff to edit for the next editions. LOL. But the publisher was quite happy to keep turning out this drivel as long as people were buying it.
Much of this “teaching literacy” drivel is a substitute for having done the long, hard work to learn, for example, what characteristics make the style (in EdSpeak, the “voice”) of one piece of writing different from that of another piece of writing so that the educator would then know concrete techniques that can be taught. It’s vague mumbo-jumbo that serves as a cover for ignorance–of rhetorical techniques, of varieties of figurative language, of types of diction, of syntactic structures, of dialects and idiolects, of genre motifs, of discourse structures, and of much, much else that goes into making one style or voice different from another. Contrast the teacher who has actually learned such things and can teach kids how to use them.
And, of course, a general “finding the main idea skill” or “inferencing skill” is as mythical as were Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s fairies. These are examples of reification–of imagining that because one has a name for something, it exists.
I have found that often when the rabidly pro-charter NY Daily News reports a story, they are looking to bash de Blasio and Carranza.
I suspect the story is much more nuanced than this replies, just like when they trashed some poor Bronx Science students doing stupid things, with the NY Times education reporter getting a kid arrested after running headlines that insulted the students at Bronx Science. Just like their endless stories about the honors and awards and amazing results that Success Academy manages to get with the same exact students you find in the failing public schools because her charters’ newly minted “energetic” teachers are not lazy like union teachers.
Here is what this City Council member said when presented with de Blasio’s idea to make sure that specialized high schools didn’t have 1% African-American students anymore:
“I won’t support a plan that solely abolishes an exam, which was essentially the Mayor’s plan,” Treyger said.
Treyger and the other city council members insist that the way to get more diverse specialized high schools is to keep the SHSAT and make sure that African-American and Latinx students can prep and prep and do more prep and do more prep — “free prep” so it’s all good! as the solution.
I am fairly certain that this story is not about Carranza pushing more testing on kids, unless he is doing so because the cowards on the City Council go running for the hills if confronted with ending the SHSAT and insist that all students need is more free test prep to compete with students who start going to weekend classes in sixth grade.
By the way, my kid brought home the opt out of having your name sent to charter schools form. It’s a brilliant way to allow parents to do this without triggering a massive PR campaign that will lead to Albany forcing NYC to open 100 new charters.
I can’t read the NYDaily News article, but from what I read, it seems like this was idea that the DOE was considering. And frankly, that is what we want — a DOE that tells the City Council what they are considering so a discussion can be started.
^^sorry for typos. It should read:
“…just like when they trashed some poor Bronx Science students doing stupid things, with the NY DAILY NEWS (not NYT) education reporter getting a kid arrested after running headlines that insulted the students at Bronx Science.
NYC public school parent (which is what I am too), I was at the hearing. The Daily News absolutely did not make this up to “get at Carranza or the mayor,” nor is this a matter of interpretation. Council Member Treyger asked Linda Chen of the DOE point blank whether she could confirm that DOE was planning to institute new assessments. She said yes and added in the part about needing to test that students were ready for state tests. (We in the opt out movement had actually heard rumors a couple of weeks prior that this had been announced to principals at the end of the summer. To my knowledge Chen’s answer at the hearing was the first public confirmation of that rumor.) Chen did not clarify what grades this would be for, nor did she say which assessment it would be, though I have since heard from other channels that it is the MAP. If you want to listen yourself, the archived livestream is here: https://councilnyc.viebit.com/player.php?hash=ynP2oK86DbHz Treyger asks the question around 1:30
Teachers at Garfield High School in Seattle boycotted the MAP and refused to administer it.
kk,
Thank you, I appreciate getting more information about that.
I do think that is interesting because if you think about the reality of NYC, it is now easier than ever to opt out of testing. And the DOE seems to want to move away from using academic screens — especially state test scores — for middle and high school admissions.
Do you think the DOE thinks this is “low-stakes” testing versus “high-stakes”? I’ve been a public school parent long enough to remember when the state tests were annoying but they weren’t being used for anything that mattered. You got your kid’s score and either decided it was meaningless or interesting. Sort of like the Iowa tests I took many decades ago.
I read further since I posted this, and it does sound like a useless test. I’m trying to figure out why a DOE that has been genuinely trying to make sure the state tests are no longer high stakes for kids would want more testing. But thank you again for more information.
NYCpsp,
I actually dispute your claim that it’s “easier than ever to opt out of testing.” The pressure on folks NOT to opt out (threats of summer school, being held over, etc) was so bad last year that the Chancellor of the BOR and the SED Commissioner took the unusual step of issuing a joint statement telling admin and districts to back off. (New York State Allies for Public Education catalogued district and school scare tactics that were reported or passed along to the organization. Scroll to p. 9 to see NYC complaints: https://www.nysape.org/school-scare-tactics-to-parents.html) In certain pockets of NYC this may not seem to be the case, and you, like me, may live in, or your kids may go to school in one of those bubbles. It’s not the norm.
The increased pressure not to opt out may have originated from the fact that 2019 was the first year that test participation rate figured into the calculations for whether or not a school would be placed on a struggling schools list. Given the arm twisting, it’s kind of a miracle that opt out rates remained relatively strong, dropping only a few points. (Thanks, state ESSA plan!) But at any rate, to the extent that NYCDOE informs parents about opt out at all, it says that parents must “meet with the principal.” It’s hard to understand why they would say this other than that the principal has been instructed to try to dissuade the parent from their purpose–and in fact NYC Opt Out has received many confirmations of this over the years, including a recording of one such meeting. Imagine how a “you should meet the principal first” policy might feel to any parent who, say, struggles with English, has their own traumatic history of schooling, or simply can’t come in during school hours. More enlightened districts in the state simply backpack home a check-off form: Yes, my child will take the test or No, we will opt out.
Finally, as to why the DOE would add more tests? Yes, it certainly does seem inconsistent on the surface. But if you look more closely, the specialized high schools plan didn’t disavow using standardized tests–it merely swapped out the SHSAT for the state tests. Another new initiative that received a little attention at Tuesday’s hearing is something the DOE calls Edustat and is modeled on NYPD’s Compstat. So it seems to me that this NYCDOE hasn’t really learned anything from past administrations and continues to believe that education outcomes can be improved only through the imposition of top-down measures that gather a lot of data points. As Council Member Treyger said, invest the millions that will be spent on these things directly in the schools instead. Add social workers. Reduce class size.
Finally, finally CM Treyger didn’t ask, so I don’t know whether this is the case, but the new law on teacher evaluation no longer stipulates that state tests be part of a teacher’s eval, but it does require that some test be used. Perhaps that’s what these new tests are really for?
kk,
Thank you again for such a comprehensive and informative answer!
Your last paragraph was very interesting. Could it be that doing this is actually to help the classroom teachers, because if the city is mandated by law to use tests to evaluate them, perhaps they want to find something more acceptable? Has the head of the union spoken up? I do think in the environment we have now, that the DOE would likely not want to bring up that they are trying to find an alternative test to fulfill that evaluation mandate. Because anything that might be something the union wants becomes subject to vicious media attacks where de Blasio is just “doing what the union wants”.
Adding four new standardized tests is unconscionable. Despicable.
This decision belongs to Mayor DeBlasio and Chancellor Carranza.
No one else.
I agree that the buck stops with de Blasio and Carranza.
But my question is what is the union position? If de Blasio is legally mandated to use some kind of test to evaluate teachers, and he and everyone else concedes that the state tests are terrible, what kind of tests do they use instead?
I don’t think it is fair to say that the DOE should simply not offer any alternative if all that means is that the schools are evaluated using the state tests instead. Or maybe the union is fine with that. But maybe I misunderstand, but it seems that until someone changes the law — which is entirely outside of de Blasio’s power to do — it is either using the state tests or something else. So I wondered what the position of the union was and if they just wanted to keep the status quo which unfortunately seems to mean the state tests.
I could certainly imagine trying out various types of tests which have absolutely no high stakes for the students taking them, with educators giving input into whether any of them would be significantly better than the state tests, which would apparently be absolutely used if the DOE doesn’t have something else to use.
It seems all too easy for the DOE to do nothing and then everyone is stuck with the ONLY evaluation being the state tests. It definitely seems like it is politically easier to just keep the status quo regardless of how terrible it is for everyone. And it takes a lot more courage to look for a better system that is not going to please everyone but will be significantly superior to what would be used if the DOE does nothing.
I concede that I may be completely misunderstanding the situation, because I had not realized until reading the post by “kk” that the DOE was legally obligated to had their schools evaluated by a test, but that they were now able to choose something other than the reprehensible state tests.
Huh?
The deformers are getting rich off the backs of our young and their teachers. Ka-Chiang.
Sickening. I worry about America and our.citizens.
and it is almost impossible to get people over age 40 to fathom how much change has hit the schools: those who graduated before NCLB hit districts often believe that what they personally experienced is still today’s solid and impossible-to-change reality.
This is the truth. Follow the testing money and you will not find anybody that cares about your children.
“The New York City Council Committee on Education held a hearing to discuss overtesting in the schools, and the Department of Education’s chief academic officer announced a plan to increase testing to be sure students are ready for the state test.”
I had to reread this a few times because I thought, I misread it. So more tests as a reaction to overtesting?
You need a test to prepare for a test to prepare for a test and ad infinitum.
What’s lost is education.
The ALEC plan coming to fruition. Helping to ruin public schools & not educate “other people’s children” since 1971.
How about ending state tests completely and leaving any testing to the decision of the school?
More testing = less instruction
These students have already lost 9 weeks of instruction to prep and testing. I don’t understand why parents are not fighting for their children.