“There is something rotten in the state Education Department.”
Diane Ravitch in this morning’s NY Post:
There’s something rotten in the state Education Department. Year after year, New York officials have been claiming impressive gains in student achievement — claims we now know to be false. Based on these misleading claims, however, tens of millions of dollars in bonuses have been handed out to teachers and principals, and thousands of students have gotten false reports about their progress.
Last spring, the state triumphantly reported that 87 percent of New York fourth-graders were proficient in math. This was a striking improvement over 2006, when the state said that 78 percent had reached that goal.
The reported gains across the state were amazing. In Buffalo, the proportion of students in grades 3-8 who reached proficiency on the state math test leapt from 28.6 percent in 2006 to an incredible 63.3 percent in 2009; in Syracuse, from 30.1 percent to 58.2 percent — and in New York City, from 57 percent to 81.8 percent .
But on Wednesday, the federal government released the results of its independent testing program and produced very different results for New York.
Math is my thing. We knew the claims were false right along.
But those who depend on anti-teacher data require test numbers to learn what they could have found out just as easily by asking any one of us: test prep is off the scale, the tests seem easier, the cut scores are lower.
And no, there has been no recent improvement in mathematics education (except in my class…)
Jonathan