Pressure Increases As Testing Season Nears

By SARAH GARLAND, Staff Reporter of the Sun
January 8, 2007

Testing season begins tomorrow for the city's 1.1 million public school children, and the stakes may be higher than ever this year.

With new federal requirements forcing more limited-English students to take the exams, and progress reports coming out at the end of the year that will grade city schools partly by how well students perform, city schools will be under the microscope.

With city support, state officials have criticized a new federal ruling under the No Child Left Behind act that requires students who speak English as a second language to take reading tests after one year of being enrolled in an American school, saying it doesn't give them enough time to master the language.

"We remain concerned about the effect the federal decision will have on the schools, teachers, and most of all the children," the state education commissioner, Richard Mills, said a open letter to state educators released at the end of 2006.

Previously, limited-English students in New York could wait at least three years before taking mainstream reading tests. For this year at least, limited-English students will be taking up their no. 2 pencils to bubble in answers just like everyone else, although the city won't use the test scores of students in the country less than three years to decide whether to promote them to the next grade, as it does with English-proficient students in grades three, five and seven.

Last year, test results were released in October, several months after promised by state officials — and nine months after testing began in January. More than a thousand New York City students were sent to summer school unnecessarily as a result of the delay in the scores, which officials blamed on a larger number of tests being given. This year, state officials have promised that scores will be released by June.

The city teachers' union is using the beginning of testing season to launch high-stakes testing speakouts for parents and teachers in every borough to fight to No Child Left Behind testing requirements as the act comes up for reauthorization in Congress.

"It's reaching a crescendo this year," the United Federation of Teachers's vice president for education, Aminda Gentile, said. She criticized what she described as the Bloomberg administration's emphasis on testing, including a new accountability system that will use test scores as a part of a grade given to schools on a scale of A to F.

"Testing is not all bad. We are for testing, we are for accountability," Ms. Gentile said. "But there should not be a test that says yea or nay about a school or a student."

The progress reports will grade schools based on three components. The year-to-year progress of individual students on statewide tests will determine 55% of the grade. Thirty percent of a school's annual grade will be based on how many students pass the test that year. Fifteen percent will be based on surveys about the school taken by students, parents, and educators.

The main point of the progress reports is "to be a valuable tool for schools and for parents," a Department of Education spokesman, Andrew Jacob, said.

"It's going to give them more information than ever before on how well students are performing," he said.

There was some concern among educators and advocates that the increasing pressure could tempt more educators and students to cheat this year. According to a report released last week by the city school district's special commissioner of investigation, Richard Condon, four cases of test tampering and grade changing were substantiated last year. In the previous four years combined, there was only one substantiated case.

"It's one of those human breakdowns that happens when there's an inordinate amount of pressure to show results," a professor at Columbia University Teacher's College, Madhabi Chatterji, who has written a book on education assessment, said. "People are scrambling, even when it goes against their sense of professionalism."

A spokesman for the state's Education Department, Tom Dunn, said strict monitoring procedures were in place to prevent cheating and catch it if it occurred, including an analysis of irregular patterns in test scores and audits by independent test contractors.

Pressure Increases As Testing Season Nears

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