And not just in New York. The only entities that are benefitting from the state's testing system are the testing companies as follows:
"Since its inception, CTB/McGraw-Hill, NCS Pearson and Questar have received state contracts to provide the tests and their scoring, amounting to $130 million. The state comptroller’s Open Book database details the combined cost of these services."
Once you factor in administrator, counselor, and teacher time in administering these tests, the actual cost of this system—and these systems nationally—is astronomical. We don't need to keep following bad money with good money, my friends—particularly when we consider that these are folks' hard-earned taxpayer dollars going right into the coffers of these private companies. At some point, we have to cut our losses.
A healthy first step is indeed to admit that these testing systems have failed us miserably.
-Angela Valenzuela
Admit it: Testing our kids has been a failure Up to 1.2 million students, including 400,000 in New York City, will take the English Language Arts (ELA) exam. The math tests will come a few weeks later.
It’s time to end the March madness.
The program was set forth in 2001 when Congress passed the No Child Left Behind Act, mandating annual English and math tests. Here we are 20 years later, still adhering to the regime without asking what we’ve gained and lost. A primary aim of NCLB was to close the test performance gap between Black and Hispanic students, on the one hand, and white and Asian-American students, on the other. This elusive goal has not been realized.
Since its inception, CTB/McGraw-Hill, NCS Pearson and Questar have received state contracts to provide the tests and their scoring, amounting to $130 million. The state comptroller’s Open Book database details the combined cost of these services.
Results have fluctuated wildly across the years, in large part because the state’s standards and grading procedures keep changing, pressure on students, teachers and principals to do well has been constant, stemming from functions and high-stakes decisions beyond the capacity of the test data to support. In 2006, 51% of students citywide were deemed to be proficient on CTB’s ELA exams. By 2009, the proficiency level had risen to 69%. The increase in math went from 57% to 82%. Observers knew gains of such magnitude were not plausible. One Board of Regents member questioned the wisdom of releasing the inflated, too-good-to-be-true results to the public.
More rigorous exams were then ordered by the Regents in 2010, and ELA proficiency suddenly fell to 42%. This began the transition from CTB to Pearson, ushering in tougher learning standards, aka the Common Core. By three years later, the 42% tanked to 26%, as Core-aligned exams became the new baseline. Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch said it was time for students to “jump into the deep end of the pool.”
Under Mayor Bloomberg, parents began to feel the stress placed on children who could be denied promotion if they failed to reach an arbitrary test cutoff point, they were supposed to be held back. And teachers spent an inordinate amount of time preparing students for the exams, which meant bonuses if they scored high.
As if that weren’t enough, Gov. Cuomo sought an accountability system to weed out ineffective teachers and principals on the basis of scores entered into incomprehensible formulas.
In 2013, an opt-out movement took root because of the harm testing had wrought in the classroom, where weeks of time and resources were wasted drilling children for the tests and fostering anxiety. Pushback grew strong on Long Island and upstate. By 2015, proficiency stood at 31%. Pearson was despised, and the parent-led resistance peaked in 2015 and 2016, with one out of five students abstaining despite ominous warnings from school authorities of dire consequences.
Mayor de Blasio kept parents confused while his old-school chancellor, Carmen Fariña, said testing was a part of life and kids should show up for the exams.
Cuomo saw growing political risks, and had second thoughts about continuing to back the Common Core. It had been launched without sufficient instructional materials and lesson plans that are essential before tests can meaningfully measure whether learning standards have been met.
Through it all, National Assessment of Educational Progress has shown New York’s growth in achievement to be incremental, varying little over time. Based on NAEP’s carefully calibrated exams — which are given to a representative sampling of kids in grades 4 and 8 in just two hours every two years, not 200,000 students statewide per grade over a two-day period every year. The percentage of students proficient in reading ranged by only eight percentage points between 2003 and 2019.
In addition to seemingly perennial changes in publishers, standards and scales, other factors have scrambled efforts to interpret the yearly results. These include shifts in test population; the removal of time limits from the exams; and an uneven phase-in of computer-based tests. Footnotes in results released by the state concede that data cannot be compared from one year to the next.
So what are we really accomplishing here? The testing ritual was halted by COVID-19 in 2020 when the mandate was suspended, but the feds said testing had to resume in 2021. The State Education Department sought waivers. Under the disruptive circumstances, parents had the flexibility to opt out. A stunning 58% statewide and 78% citywide did not participate.
The last two years have confirmed that education can survive without the exams. Yet the testing cycle is about to begin again, even as COVID-related chaos has jolted schools the entire year. When will we come to our senses?
Smith was a testing specialist and administrative analyst for the city’s public schools.
