Daily News Reveals Fifth Grade NY State Test

They really set students, teachers and schools up with these tests:

A concerned educator leaked the Daily News a copy of a new, more challenging state reading exam for fifth-graders, and it’s as much of a doozy as it is controversial.

It’s full of long, dense, off-the-wall nonfiction passages on making wind tunnels, soil formation and studying whales. There are two short stories, both set overseas. And there’s a vague selection from a poem about loneliness that students must interpret before choosing among four answers that contain two arguably correct selections.

Students got 90 minutes to complete the 32-page test, which contained 42 questions based on six written passages.

The News asked testing experts, teachers and parents to analyze the test, which state and city education officials have kept under lock and key. Everyone who saw it was left dumbfounded by the killer questions.

“You might as well just put ‘failure to students’ at the top of the exam,” said Tracy Woodall, a stay-at-home mom whose son is a fifth-grader at Public School 1 in the Bronx. “There’s no way they’re going to pass this.”

...

The questions on the fifth-grade reading test, designed to test comprehension, were enough to stump a city high-school teacher who reviewed it.

“Have these students had an opportunity to build up to that complexity? The answer is no,” said the teacher, who asked for anonymity for fear of getting sacked. “This test is coming at them like an anvil to their face.”

The problem here is not that the tests have gotten more difficult and complex.

 

The problem is that they have gotten more difficult and complex overnight, without the support for teachers and schools to help students master this material or level of difficulty and complexity.

 

The tests got difficult overnight without the added supports because there is a political agenda behind the tests.

 

The corporate education reformers are trying to use this tests to show how "failing" all the schools in the state are - not just schools in inner cities, which have been their favorite targets so far, but also schools in far wealthier suburbs like Scarsdale and Garden City.

 

When the dramatically lower scores from these tests come in, they're going to go on an extended p.r. campaign to convince parents and voters around the state that we need drastic changes to the public schools all over the state.

 

Rick Hess laid out the blueprint for this agenda in his  Common Core Kool Aid blog post at Education Week:

When I ask how exactly the Common Core is going to change teaching and learning, I'm mostly told that it's going to finally shine a harsh light on the quality of suburban schools, shocking those families and voters into action. This will apparently entail three steps:

 First, politicians will actually embrace the Common Core assessments and then will use them to set cut scores that suggest huge numbers of suburban schools are failing. Then, parents and community members who previously liked their schools are going to believe the assessment results rather than their own lying eyes. (In the case of NCLB, these same folks believed their eyes rather than the state tests, and questioned the validity of the latter--but the presumption is that things will be different this time.) Finally, newly convinced that their schools stink, parents and voters will embrace "reform." However, most of today's proffered remedies--including test-based teacher evaluation, efforts to move "effective" teachers to low-income schools, charter schooling, and school turnarounds--don't have a lot of fans in the suburbs or speak to the things that suburban parents are most concerned about.

And this brings us to the crux of the matter. After failing miserably to convince suburban and middle-class voters that reforms designed for dysfunctional urban systems and at-risk kids are good for their children and their schools, Common Core advocates now evince an eerie confidence that they can scare these voters into embracing the "reform" agenda.

All of these New York State Common Core tests need to be made public so that when these scores come down and they're as bad as Merryl Tisch and John King and the rest of education reform true believers want them to be, we can analyze just how accurate a gauge of student, teacher and school performance they are.

Because it is both unfair and unethical to raise test levels by two or three grade levels overnight without the needed supports and use those scores as a bludgeon against students, teachers and schools.

 

Parents know this as well as teachers, even if the education reformers in the political, education and media worlds refuse to acknowledge this.

And that's the last point I want to hit on here.

The media has hammered people who point out the problems with these tests as "whiners" who are afraid of accountability, teachers worried about having their performances exposed as lacking, parents worried that their "little darlings" (as one Daily News editorial termed children) will be exposed as not as "smart" as the parents think they are.

But this is a straw man argument.

What critics of these tests are most pointedly saying in their criticism is that these tests have been set-ups to fail students, teachers and schools.  

The tests were given to students before the curriculum was fully developed and given to teachers, so students are being tested on material they have not seen before or a level of difficulty and complexity they are not used to.

There was no way they could do well on these tests.

As one parent told the Daily News, “You might as well just put ‘failure to students’ at the top of the exam...There’s no way they’re going to pass this.”

 

Indeed.

 

And that is the whole point of these vaunted new Common Core tests - to fail the children, the teachers, the administrators and the schools and, as Rick Hess put it, "shine a harsh light on the quality of suburban schools, shocking those families and voters into action" and "scare these voters into embracing the 'reform' agenda."

 

The fix is in, the tests were rigged, and the propaganda campaign is in full swing.

 

That's why these tests need to be released by the state, if not voluntarily, then by court order.

 

There are enough high stakes attached to them that I do not see how the NYSED, the Regents, or Pearson can keep them secret.

 

Not when they start using these test scores to fire teachers and close schools.