Educators Must Stand Up To The McCarthyites And Smear Merchants At The NY Post

The NY Post has another attack article on NYC teachers/NYC schools/Chancellor Farina/Mayor de Blasio that makes the claim schools are teaching ridiculously easy texts to students like "The Three Little Pigs," therefore making a high school diploma in NYC essentially "worthless."

Arwen E at NYC Educator's blog dispatches with this piece of Post yellow journalism here, explaining that the "Three Little Pigs" was used as a five minute DO NOW exercise to discuss point of view and bias in the college-level texts taught in the class, not as the main text.

Educators know that when you have students who struggle with texts, it's useful to use easier texts as a lead-in to the harder texts, but the Post writers either don't understand that teaching technique or care about it.

The idea behind this kind of lesson would be to use "The Three Little Pigs" to show how point of view in a story changes the inherent bias in the text - for example, if the text had been written from the wolf's perspective instead of the pigs' perspective - then use that frame to take on more difficult texts (say Beowulf and Grendel.)

But that kind of explanation didn't serve the agenda of the Post owner, editors or writers, so instead that piece of information is buried in the article and the main gist is "Hey, kids are reading kindergarten texts in de Blasio's high schools, a de Blasio diploma is worthless."

This piece of "journalism" is so yellow it looks like fall foliage and should be called out as such.

But so should the two writers whose by-lines appear on the article.

This is agenda-ridden propaganda, not journalism, that uses any old story they can (no matter how slim on the facts) to try and smear a NYC diploma under Mayor de Blasio as "worthless."

They ought to be embarrassed and ashamed as so-called journalists to contribute their efforts to it but as they work for Rupert Murdoch, I doubt they're capable of either embarrassment or shame.

The Post's agenda is, in the short run, to take away mayoral control of schools from de Blasio, and in the long run, to send him packing in 2017 (as symbolized by the ridiculous countdown clock they have at a website called DeBlasio.fail.)

This piece of yellow journalism is just one volley in a constant barrage of attacks the Post has been launching against NYC schools and teachers, part of a larger war they have launched against Mayor Bill de Blasio (see here and here.)

These are McCarthy-level smears and attacks based on half-truths and lies, they're funded by Murdoch (who is said to be losing $20-$30 million a year on the NY Post) but they're written by the "journalists" at the NY Post and published by the editors and so it's a group effort in McCarthyism.

It's time for teachers and administrators in New York City to stand up to the NY Post and call them what they are - smear merchants and McCarthyites.

They have no sense of decency, no care for the damage that their recklessness and carelessness do - they have only a political agenda and a lack of shame and embarrassment in pursuing it no matter how much they have to twist, manipulate and deceive.

Their agenda is to destroy de Blasio, but they have no compunction about destroying NYC schools and NYC schoolteachers in the process with their lies and smears.

Why A School Would Want To Have Some Regents Tests Rescored

The NY Post reported that 55 schools out of 860 schools in NYC had some Regents exams "rescored."

Four of these schools were "Renewal" schools.

This is supposed to make readers think that these schools - and the de Blasio NYCDOE - is cheating in order to improve test scores.

But if you know anything about the Regents exam grading process, you'd know why some exams need to be rescored.

Regents exams are now scored outside of individual schools, either during the school day or after school when teachers are paid extra to score exams.

This is supposed to ensure objectivity in the scoring of the exams and prevent cheating in individual schools (where teachers and administrators have a lot riding on the scores.)

Alas, the "norming" process for training the teachers to do the grading is often haphazard at best, incompetent at worst.

I've graded both during the day and after school for per session and I can tell you, I've seen some people lead the "norming" process who had no idea what they were doing.

In one case, the person leading ELA "norming" a few years ago gave some erroneous information about the grading of exams that was only corrected because several veteran teachers at the session pushed back against the information that was being given out.

In other cases, I have seen "norming" sessions in which most teachers present have agreed upon the way to approach the exam only to have one or two teachers say "I don't care what the rest of you say about that - I'm going to grade this way!"

One year, during the electronic grading, I saw a teacher who decided to grade the Part 3 ELA responses with her own grading system rather than the one the state had given in the grading materials.

She gave 0's to short response paragraphs that clearly should have been 1's and 1's to short response paragraphs that should have been 2's.

Given that she was grading both parts of the Part 3 section, she easily could have been the difference between some students passing the exam or failing it.

Now "quality control" is supposed to catch this kind of thing, and after a while, a supervisor did approach her and tell her she wasn't grading according to the state standards.

But what happened to all the tests she had already graded?

Were they rescored?  Or were the grades kept and they simply took her off the scoring going forward?

Another problem with scoring the exams is that teachers are often under the gun to get the tests graded by a certain deadline.

I saw this first hand with history exams last year, as teachers were "speedgrading" tests the night before the last day of school.

How accurate were the grades during the speedgrading sessions?

Hard to say - maybe teachers are more forgiving during "speedgrading" sessions and apt to give students the benefit of the doubt, maybe they're more apt to grade severely because they're feeling stressed.

In any case, one thing I do know - teachers weren't able to give much thought to the grading process that last day.

Schools are allowed to request rescoring of some exams if they see egregious errors in the grading process or believe they have evidence that the scoring was unfair and contrary to the state standards.

These requests are not always granted - a few years ago, I know a school that asked to have about a half-dozen exams rescored out of hundreds scored because the grading of the essays in these half-dozen tests was clearly contrary to the state standards that were released in the grading materials.

The request was denied.

Would some of the six students who ended up failing the exam have passed if the exams had been carefully (and fairly) rescored?

You bet.

The NY Post wants you to think the grading process is competent, objective and professional.

They want you to believe that the scores that come from the Regents grading process are sacrosanct, like Mosiac law from the mount, and any requests to rescore exams tantamount to "scrubbing" or cheating.

The truth is much more complex than that.

Is it possible some schools are looking to raise grades by having some tests rescored?

Sure.

But it's also likely that there have been breakdowns in the grading process around the city and many of the schools that asked to have exams rescored had legitimate concerns about the grades their students received.

Of course, the NY Post doesn't cover this complexity because they're not much interested in anything other than pushing their political agenda - public schools suck, public school teachers are incompetent and dishonest, de Blasio is inept and his "Renewal" program doomed to failure.

But it's important to correct the record here and point out that the grading process for Regents exams is often chaotic, sometimes a complete a mess, and can lead to unfair grades for students (and teachers and schools.)