Students from a Chelsea high school have to retake their English Regents exams today after their original tests fell off the back of a truck on their way to be graded, the teachers union said last night.
The United Federation of Teachers said about 75 11th-grade students from Chelsea Career and Technical Education HS have to retake the test after education company McGraw Hill lost the booklets.
“We were told that the test booklets were on a truck, somehow the boxes of tests fell out,” said English teacher Jan Scott. “Some they recovered, but not ours.”
The city Department of Education did not respond to a request for comment.
“All my students know is that no one ever found their test,” Scott said.
McGraw-Hill and the NYCDOE make the mistakes, the students at Chelsea Career and Technical High School are forced to pay for those mistakes.
How come the people in charge of this system, the ones who talk so often and so passionately about holding others accountable, are never held accountable themselves?
And there's a class and race angle to this story.
The student body at Chelsea Career and Technical High School is 91% black and Latino.
70% of the students receive free lunch.
That's why the NYCDOE is making these kids take the ELA Regents exam again.
You can bet had this happened to white and Asian kids at Stuyvesant or Brooklyn Tech, the NYCDOE would have sent emissaries out into the community to assuage outraged parents over the mess.
But a majority black and Latino school with 70% of the student body receiving free school lunch?
Screw 'em, Walcott and Bloomberg say.
The next time you hear Walcott or Bloomberg or Polakow-Suransky or any of the functionaries at Tweed say how much they care about the kids while teachers are only in it for themselves, remember the kids from Chelsea Career and Technical High School.
Tweed's definition of Accountability - never having to show that you care about minority students.
ReplyDeleteI'm a fed-up parent of a NYC middle-school student, and I've been casting around for tactics to fight this madness. There's a great short story by Ursula K. LeGuin, "She Unnames Them," which deals with human conceit (in this instance, the conceit of naming the animals) and begins: "Most of them accepted namelessness with the perfect indifference with which they had so long accepted and ignored their names."
ReplyDeleteI've made the following modification: "Most of them accepted low standardized test scores with the perfect indifference with which they had so long accepted and ignored high standardized test scores."
Join NYC parent group Change the Stakes.
DeleteWhat idiocy. Students and parents as well as their teachers should be out there protesting. Those who got into colleges..well the colleges should say screw the regents this year. Would the state be doing this if the students were from Stuvesant, Brooklyn Tech or any of the other "elite" high schools? I'm sure the exams would have been waived.
ReplyDeleteWasn't McGraw Hill responsible for the ISTEP testing screw up last spring in Indiana where the computers went down just sat the high stakes testing was to begin?
ReplyDeleteFell off the back of a truck. Where I live in Eden NY, home of Cornfest, we have a name for people whose stuff falls outta their trucks. Un effing believeable.
ReplyDeleteIf George Bush didn't "care about black people" , then Bloomberg must be out to ____ them between "Stop and Frisk" and this latest "Testgate".
ReplyDeleteThese people in power do not care about the powerless. They use helping the powerless as an excuse for their reforms, but you can see when some outrage like this occurs how they truly feel about powerless people.
ReplyDeleteIs that really true? Can't believe it.
ReplyDeleteGadget Reviews