Okay, they're looking for a high failure rate at SED on the ELA Regents exam, that's for sure.
Students need to get 20 out of 25 multiple choice questions right in order to get only a 6 on their writing component.
Given how hard the passages were, I suspect we are going to see lots of 6's on the writing components.
That means we're going to get lots of failures.
The chart is even harder than last August's when students had to get 19 out of 25 multiple choice right in order to pass with a 6 out of 10 on their writing components.
That was a brutal test too.
But IMO the Regents and the SED saved the best for the latest - a truly brutal test with a brutal scoring chart.
It's not an accident that as teacher evals have been tied to Regents scores, the charts and tests have gotten harder each time.
Commissioner King, Regents Chancellor Tisch and Governor Cuomo have a political agenda here - to prove that public schools are failing and public school teachers are failures.
The children of the state just happen to be collateral damage in all of this.
I have some students from a remedial class who have failed the exam three or four times, depending on whether they took it over the summer or not.
It is really difficult to see any of them passing today's exam with the scoring chart handed down from King and Tisch.
I don't know what to say to them when they say "You mean I have to spend another five months preparing for this exam I can't pass?"
SED , John King and Tisch are insulated from reality and they are politically tone deaf. Possibly , they have grand delusions of professional competence in educational administration.
ReplyDeleteOr they just wanted to give the finger and say "@#$% you, everybody! We'll do what we want and there's nothing you can do to us because Bill Gates has our backs!"
DeleteThat's exactly the answer and they will give everyone the ceremonious middle finger while Gates stands on the sideline holding a big bag of dirty dollars for them.
DeleteThis reminds me of this true story from 2012 when I was grading the 5th grade NYS Math test. As detailed here, the "right" answer provided by Pearson was in fact wrong: http://www.wnyc.org/story/302903-state-officials-throw-out-another-pearson-test-question/
ReplyDeleteWhen I pointed this out to the woman running the scoring she told me we were grading it anyway. I asked her why we were grading it if they were throwing out the question. She told me, "They may not be throwing the question out". I then asked her if we were going with the real correct answer when grading it or if we were going with Pearson's wrong "right" answer. She said to go with Pearson's.
So I asked, "What you are telling me is that in order for the students to get the question correct they have to get it wrong?"
"That's right." she said.
"If they get the real correct answer, can we give them credit for that too?" I asked.
"No." she told me.
At this particular scoring I was also given a sheet to sign stating that I was not allowed to talk about the test, the grading, or anything that was on the test. That I was not allowed to use anything resembling the test in my classroom. (In theory, shouldn't what you do in class at least somewhat resemble what is expected to be on the assessment????) That anything breaking these rules could result in a 3020A and me being fired. I refused to sign it.
"You have to sign it." she said.
"Nope. I don't. You can send me back to school to teach, but you can't make me sign it. If you want to take this any further I would like union representation." I replied.
She told me we'd talk about it later and never brought it up again.
At that time it was probably the most bizarre thing that happened in my career. It has since been buried by a mountain of common core bullshit.