Some Students Spent Between 6 And 13 And A 1/2 Hours On Testing Yesterday

Yesterday three Regents exams were given - Global History, English and Geometry.

All over the city, high school juniors who had previously failed the Global History and/or Geometry exams were taking those tests again.

Many were also taking the English exam.

Here's how the schedule went yesterday for students slated to take the ELA Regents exam and one or two more exams:

9:00 AM - 12:00 PM - Global History Regents Exam
1:00 PM - 4:00 PM - English Language Arts Exam
4:00 PM - 7:00 PM - Geometry Regents Exam

A student taking two exams yesterday spent six hours on the tests.

A student taking all three exams yesterday spent nine hours on the tests.

And some students from the special education department who receive extended time testing accommodations spent as long as 13 and a 1/2 hours on the tests.

Think about that for a moment.

Think about how much is riding on these tests for the students (who need them to graduate), for the teachers (many of whom are tied to the scores for their APPR teacher evaluation rating despite the claims of the UFT and NYSUT to the contrary) and for the schools (which can end up in receivership or closed based upon those scores.)

I keep hearing from Carl Korn of NYSUT that test scores don't count for teachers anymore, that the pressure is off for students and schools too.

I've heard similar from some of the UFT and NYSUT shills on Twitter (one of whom told me that there was "zilch, nada, bupkis" in his rating tied to test scores.)

Apparently the union hacks at NYSUT and the UFT are unaware of the stakes tied to tests that continue to ride high in high schools for students, teachers and the schools themselves.

Does anybody want to guess how well a student who took two tests back-to-back for six hours yesterday did on those tests?

How about students who took all three for a nine hour testing extravaganza?

How about special education students who had extended time and could have been taking the tests for as long as 13 and 1/2 hours?

Does anybody want to guess what the test component/teacher evaluation ratings for teachers whose student took three tests in one day are going to look like?

It's absurd to think that the geniuses at the Board of Regents and the State Education Department decided to shove as many tests as possible into as small a window as possible, knowing that some students would have to take more than one test a day, some as many as three.

But it's not a surprise.

Because these people DO NOT CARE about children or teachers or schools.

They care only about test scores, expediency and compliance.

And by that gauge, everything yesterday was swell - three tests knocked off, grading starts today for those three, some more tests today, with that grading to begin on tomorrow and so on until it's all done by Sunday.

And there you have it - testing on a tight schedule, all done so that schools can get the scores in by the weekend, the next semester's scheduling completed by Monday and the Spring Semester off to  a start by next Tuesday.

Now if you ask, does this system serve children, teachers or schools, the answer would have to be no.

But remember, the members of the Board of Regents and the educrats at NYSED don't really care about that.

Scores, expediency, compliance - that's what matters.

They ought to be brought up on child abuse charges for what was done yesterday and what will continue to be done this week.

But they won't be.

Hell, they won't even be taken to task by the union leaders at NYSUT or the UFT since the union heads are too busy claiming there's a test score moratorium in APPR and attacking any teachers who point out how wrong they are.

How much has changed as a consequence of Governor Cuomo's Common Core Task Force?

In high schools just about nothing has changed.

What will it take for NYSUT and the UFT to admit this?

I dunno, but it certainly will take more than my efforts, since I keep telling NYSUT's Carl Korn this and he keeps ignoring me.

In fact it seems politicians, the unions and reporters all keep saying so much has changed in education when, in reality, little has changed at all.

Yesterday's insane Regents exam scheduling was the latest iteration of that.

Governor Cuomo keeps telling us he's reduced testing in schools.

I wonder how well he would have fared taking 13 and a 1/2 hours of history, math and English tests yesterday?

Regents Exam Season Begins, But NYSUT Says The Scores Are Not In APPR (Even Though They Are!)

You can see here the fun I had on twitter with an NYSUT hack over the APPR test score moratorium that isn't actually a moratorium since high school teachers are not effected by it in the least.

Today starts Regents season - the ELA Regents, along with a math and history test are all today.

More Regents exams continue the rest of the week, including Common Core math exams.

The ELA test today is the Common Core variation and it will indeed be part of my APPR rating, thus making the claim that Common Core state tests are not part of APPR ratings an erroneous one:

Teachers with SLOs that are based on Regents assessments will not be impacted and must continue to use SLOs with such assessments.

This is footnote 3 from the Q & A from SED:

Please note that teachers and principals whose APPRs do not include the grades 3-8 ELA and math State assessments or State-provided growth scores on Regents examinations are not impacted by the transition regulations and their evaluations shall be calculated pursuant to their district’s/BOCES’ approved APPR Plan without any changes. For example, a building principal of a CTE program whose APPR utilizes CTE assessments as part of the student performance component of their APPR will not be impacted by the transition regulations.

 The politicians keep saying there's a moratorium on state test scores in APPR.

The unions are running ads saying the same thing.

The education reporters are writing about the moratorium in their education stories.

Except the "moratorium" doesn't actually exist.

It's been learned long ago that if you repeat lies often enough, they become truth.

This is what has happened with APPR.

The lie just keeps getting repeated over and over and over.

Here is the truth:

• The Education Transformation Act of 2015 requires that 50% of  a teacher’s evaluation be based on a student performance measure. This will not change unless the law is amended.  

• Although teachers will still receive a growth score based on state tests, a 4 year moratorium has been passed on the use of state-provided growth scores for NYS Grades 3-8 Common Core ELA and Math tests in teacher evaluations. 

• ALL teachers will still be subject to a 50% test-based evaluation as per the law. Schools must administer an additional, locally determined assessment  (approved by the state department of education), and scores from that test will supplant the state test derived growth score in a teacher’s evaluation. 

• Teachers will receive a “transitional score” during the moratorium. 50% of this score will be based on observation, and 50% will be based on the locally-determined assessment. This transitional score will be used for making tenure decisions, and as per the law can be used to fire a teacher.

• While growth scores derived from the state tests may not be used for purposes of evaluation during the moratorium, they will still be recorded, and upon request be made available to parents. Teachers evaluated by Regents exams and by the 4th and 8th grade science tests will still be evaluated using those scores.

• Once the moratorium is over, NYS will move to a three year average growth score. In other words, teachers will receive a growth score based on student performance from the previous 3 years. It is unclear whether or not state test growth scores captured during the moratorium will be used in the average growth score for the 2019-20 school year.

• Based on flawed growth scores, schools will continue to be placed into receivership and subject to autocratic control. This will happen disproportionately in schools located in economically disadvantaged Black and Brown communities, as laid out in the Economic Policy Institute’s report, “The Racial Achievement Gap, Segregated Schools, and Segregated Neighborhoods – A Constitutional Insult.”

Note To MaryEllen Elia, NY Pols And NY Press: Test Scores Are Still Part Of APPR Evaluations

Keshia Clukey at Politico NY:

ALBANY — As education commissioner MaryEllen Elia updated a Senate panel on her agency's 2016 priorities Wednesday, lawmakers noted a "different vibe in the room.”

Her meeting with the Senate Education Committee came a little more than six months after she took over heading the agency from John King, a champion of the Common Core learning standards who became a polarizing figure in the state after their troubled rollout. He left for the federal agency and is now acting secretary of education there.

...

Among the priorities that Elia detailed Wednesday were revising the principal and teacher evaluation system, involving teachers in revising the Common Core learning standards and creating state assessments.

The Regents board has already put a moratorium on the use of student test scores in teacher and principal evaluations through the 2019-2020 school year while the system is under review. It has also made changes to the state tests, shortening them and increasing the time allotted, and the Education Department is reviewing the standards, assessments and evaluations.

Moratorium?

Is this a "moratorium"?

Common Core grade 3-8 scores won't be used for teacher evaluations until 2019 but other tests will still be in there including high school Regents Exams unless they are tied to a state growth model. Does going from a growth model to a Student Learning Objective (SLO) system constitute an end to high stakes testing?  I don't think so.

Footnote 10 in the SED Q & A states:
Teachers with SLOs that are based on Regents assessments will not be impacted and must continue to use SLOs with such assessments.

This is footnote 3 from the Q & A from SED:

Please note that teachers and principals whose APPRs do not include the grades 3-8 ELA and math State assessments or State-provided growth scores on Regents examinations are not impacted by the transition regulations and their evaluations shall be calculated pursuant to their district’s/BOCES’ approved APPR Plan without any changes. For example, a building principal of a CTE program whose APPR utilizes CTE assessments as part of the student performance component of their APPR will not be impacted by the transition regulations.

For math and ELA teachers, the Regents exams are the new Common Core exams, many with low passing rates - especially in math.

Moratorium on using Common Core test scores for teacher evaluations?

Hardly.

When will the education press stop writing stuff like "the Regents board has already put a moratorium on the use of student test scores in teacher and principal evaluations through the 2019-2020 school year while the system is under review"?

Because it's not true - NYSED's APPR Q&A lays that out quite specifically, as did Governor Cuomo a while back.

The more accurate description is, there is a partial moratorium on test scores for some teachers while the rest continue to be linked to test scores - including Common Core Regents test scores for some high school teachers.

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.)