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.
