City Screws Up Spanish Test

The geniuses at the NYCDOE forgot to put the last page of the high stakes June 2012 city Spanish exam into the exam booklet.

That last page included the last part of an essay question plus the rubric for students to use to check over their work.

Oops!

But we'll still use this test for high stakes results, including judging students, teachers and schools.

Because as Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch said, anybody who's against using these tests for high stakes decisions despite their flaws is just against accountability.

Even when the high stakes tests are as badly designed, badly written and badly proofread as the ones that the NYSED, the Regents and the NYCDOE are giving.

You know, we don't even have the new "local assessments" that are supposed to be part of the vaunted new Cuomo teacher evaluation plan in place yet, and there have already been a multitude of screw-ups by both the state and the city in their testing regimes.

First we had Pearson's infamous "Pineapple and the Hare" section on an ELA exam, then we had the NYSED pulling a total of 30 questions from various 4th-8th grade math and ELA exams because they had too many correct answers or no correct answers or the passages didn't make sense or the questions didn't make sense or the translations didn't make sense.

Now we have the NYCDOE forgetting the final part of a major essay on the 2012 Spanish exam.

Will anybody at the NYCDOE be held accountable for this mess?

Doubtful.

No one at the NYSED or the Regents has been held accountable for the Pearson mess.

In fact, NYSED Commissioner King tried to pawn all the errors in the tests off on the panel of teachers that rubberstamp the exams for the NYSED.

Nice try, John - those screw-ups were yours, baby, just like this one today is Chancellor Walcott's and Mayor Bloomberg's.

If you're going to use high stakes standardized tests to hold back students, fire teachers and close schools, the least you could do is, you know, proofread them and make sure they're correct.

But that's asking too much.

Let's face it, the people in power don't really care if these tests are any good or not.

They simply want to use them as political tools to promote their political agenda, which happens to be closing schools and firing teachers.

And so we get tests that are missing the last page of an essay or questions that have too many correct answers or no correct answers or a passage that doesn't make sense or a question that doesn't make sense or a translation that doesn't make sense and in the end, when you point out that these high stakes standardized tests are compromised and shouldn't be used for the vaunted new Cuomo teacher evaluation plan, you're attacked by the Regents Chancellor or the NYSED Commissioner as someone who is "against accountability."

But enough is enough.

It is time to hold the people in power accountable for these testing debacles.

I'm not against accountability.

Let's start by holding NYSED Commissioner King, Regents Chancellor Tisch, Chancellor Walcott, Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Cuomo accountable for all of the testing errors this year.