The BenCen Blog

Informing Public Discourse in the Hudson Valley and Across the State

Category: Education

There’s a Good Chance Your Kid was Baffled Reading These Test Questions. How About You?

by Fred Smith, retired administrative analyst with the New York City public school system, with Robin Jacobowitz, Director of Education Projects at the Benjamin Center.

Our recently reported research, New York State’s School Tests are an Object Lesson in Failure, indicates that many students have been unable to understand readings and write intelligible answers to Common Core-based questions about them on the statewide English Language Arts (ELA) tests.

Remember: Parents and teachers complained to no avail that reading passages on the tests were developmentally inappropriate, particularly for 3rd and 4th graders. Here we ask: Were these critics right all along?

A Recap
Just to catch you up, our first report concentrated on the overall impact of the statewide exams on the 1.2 million students taking them each year. This included separate analyses for the 440,000 children in New York City—37 percent of the State’s test population. These tests were prepared by Pearson Inc. We showed that they had the most dire effect on eight-and nine-year-olds after they were aligned with the Common Core Learning Standards. For third graders the switch to Common Core-aligned exams resulted in a surge from 11 percent of students who got zeroes—meaning their answers were deemed entirely incomprehensible—to 21 percent. And for fourth graders, the jump was from five percent to 15 percent.

English Language Learners, students with disabilities, and black and Hispanic students were particularly hard hit. This was clear from the data we obtained from the New York City Department of Education, which allowed us to analyze the test’s impact on each of these groups.

Two follow-up blogs dug into both the broad impact the tests had, and the specific impact they’ve had on minority and English-as-a-second language learners.

Read and Weep
Now, to the readings and questions that stumped our kids. Continue reading

The Benjamin Center Update

An ongoing look at our research, events, and news coverage by and about our scholarship.

Calendar

November 6th
The Benjamin Center’s associate director, K.T. Tobin, will be a guest of Radio Kingston talking about Sam Sinyangwe’s studies of police violence against African American communities. This will be ahead of Sinyangwe’s visit to the SUNY New Paltz campus (see next listing). Tobin will be on air at 4:30 PM and you can stream the station live on your computer or phone. 

November 8th
Sam Sinyangwe will be a guest of the Benjamin Center for an event at SUNY New Paltz at the Lecture Center at 6 PM. Sinyangwe is a data scientist who works with communities of color to fight systemic racism through cutting-edge policies and strategies. He connected with fellow activists DeRay Mckesson, Johnetta Elzie and Brittany Packnett following the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and together they founded Mapping Police Violence, a data-driven effort to quantify the impact of police violence in communities. Sinyangwe is also a co-founder of Campaign Zero, a platform for advancing reform proposals to end police violence. Along with writer Clint Smith, he also hosts “Pod Save the People,” one of the most popular news and politics podcasts in the U.S. This event is free and open to the public; click for more information.

November 14
After his series about the City of Poughkeepsie’s failure to follow its own plans for a successful economic, social, and business environment, and its unfair tax lien system that puts homeowners at risk of losing equity in properties seized by the city, the Benjamin Center’s senior research associate, Joshua Simons, will be part of a panel discussing a land banking system. The event, Understanding Poughkeepsie’s Tax Lien System and Opportunities for Land Banking, will include guests, Tarik Abdelazim, Associate Director of National Technical Assistance, Center for Community Progress, Jennifer Holmes, Assistant Counsel, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and Madeline Fletcher, Executive Director, Newburgh Community Land Bank. It will be held at the Mid-Hudson Heritage Center, 317 Main St., Poughkeepsie, from 5:45 to 8:00 PM; click for more information.

BenCen in the News

City & State: Why Cuomo never had to debate Molinaro
Bloomberg: Molinaro has no Chance
White Plains Daily Voice: Westchester to use Benjamin Center Guidelines to save County Tax Dollars
The New York Post: New York School Testing’s Epic Failure
Gotham Gazette: The Attorney General’s Real Job
Wild Earth: Hopeful Signs for Kids Learning from Structured Outdoor Play

In New York State’s Tests The Achievement Gap Has Grown Worse

by Fred Smith, retired administrative analyst with the New York City public school system, with Robin Jacobowitz, Director of Education Projects at the Benjamin Center

New York’s Common Core testing has failed our children. Our recent series, New York State’s School Tests are an Object Lesson in Failure, shows that many students are unable to effectively answer questions on the written portion of the English Language Arts (ELA) tests. (You can access any part of this series via the links box at right.)

A BenCen Series
New York State’s

Testing Failure

Your taxes are paying for a deeply flawed testing system. This series looks at those flaws — and at fixes.

Our analyses show that a substantial percentage of children, particularly third and fourth-grade kids, were unable to write comprehensible answers to three or more written response questions out of the nine or 10 on each ELA exam. That is, they received a zero score on at least three of these questions, which were billed as measuring analytic reasoning and critical thinking. A zero means that a trained scorer deems a response to be “totally inaccurate, unintelligible, or indecipherable.”

If that’s not disheartening enough, we found that the news was even worse for black and Hispanic students in NYC. New York City data allowed us to look at the impact of the exams on different groups; we found that black and Hispanic students received high percentages of zeros on at least three of the questions. It is not insignificant that black and Hispanic students comprise 68 percent of the citywide test population.

Continue reading

Beyond Despair! New York State ELA Tests Are Failing Our Kids

by Fred Smith, retired administrative analyst with the New York City public school system, with Robin Jacobowitz, Director of Education Projects at the Benjamin Center

New York’s Common Core testing hasn’t worked.  The tests have consistently failed our children, especially the youngest kids, English Language Learners, students with disabilities and minorities. In our most recent research on this subject, we found that far too few students are able to tackle the written portion of the English Language Arts (ELA). For a closer look at this subject, see the entire series, New York State’s School Tests are an Object Lesson in Failure.

This series and report examined results for all 1.2 million students in grades 3-8 across New York State from 2012–2016 when Pearson, Inc. was the test publisher. More detailed information was provided for children in New York City by its Department of Education. Students there make up 37 percent of the test population. This allowed us to analyze data within subgroups for the questions that required students to construct a response.

Our analysis shows that a substantial percentage of children were unable to write comprehensible answers to five or more questions out of the nine or ten on each ELA exam. That is, they received a zero score on at least five of these questions, meaning that their responses were deemed to be “totally inaccurate, unintelligible, or indecipherable” by trained scorers.

We call this criterion the Threshold of Despair.

A dramatic change occurred when exams were aligned with the Common Core. NYC’s overall data show that in 2012 fewer than five percent of third and fourth graders crossed this threshold. But, with the advent of Common Core-aligned exams in 2013, the percentage more than doubled: yes, that means it got worse, not better.

Continue reading

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