I was told I was “giving too many threes” and ordered to start “giving fours and fives.”
I told Miss Daniels that I would be happy to justify any of the scores that I had given, and had given fours, fives, and even a six or two when the student earned the score.

She was lauded last year for her impressive work in scoring in the top 10% [15%?] of the Borough.
Meanwhile, the students are scoring in the 30th and 40th percentiles on the LSATs and SATs.

I scored exams for Massachusetts one summer- (here in NY State) you were not allowed to grade for them if you were a teacher in the state of Mass.

There’s no reason to assume that NYSED would get honest and go back to a regional scoring system for elem. and middle school tests, nor create one for Regents and RCT exams when it ditched one just as NCLB went into full swing. And even regional scoring at BOCES was open to some question, since BOCES’ superintendents are both the supervisory superintendents over all the districts in their areas – but are also, by law, NYSED officials. We should go to a system like most states have where mandated exams are graded by outside firms.

As for Regent Tisch, I have yet to see any actual reforms in how NYSED functions in any area at all since she ascended to the Board of Regents throne. We’re getting good verbiage – and much tighter control of what appears on NYSED’s web site for the public and media. But real positive changes? I’d love to see some evidence – actual evidence, not just speeches and p.r. spin – re the testing system or anything else of importance NYSED does. But I’m not holding my breath. I’ve watched 20 years of NYSED “reform” and all I’ve seen is new noise, same behaviors.

Q. Secretary Duncan, you cooperated with Steven Levitt’s investigation of teacher and principal cheating on high stakes tests when you ran Chicago Public Schools. Levitt’s dismaying findings were reported in “Freakonomics.” As a NYC high school teacher I have blown the whistle on test tampering which is not only rampant in our schools, but also covered up by the DOE and UFT which exploits rising counterfeit scores for their own ends. Since RttT [Race to the Top] rates schools and teachers on test scores, what will you do to stop the fakery which only cheats our students? Blind grading is the answer.
A He said this too is one of the issues that will affect who gets what from the Race To The Top fund. 
Translation: Drop dead.
Which is the same answer we get from Chancellor Klein and President Mulgrew. But maybe not Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch. She seems to be the honest type.       

To be blunt, NYSED is what is called a “captive regulatory agency.” Wikipedia has a nice quote re captive agencies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture.

Economic rationale – The idea of regulatory capture has an obvious economic basis in that vested interests in an industry have the greatest financial stake in regulatory activity and are likely to be less hindered by collective action problems that might riddle those affected by regulation (like dispersed consumers each of whom has little particular incentive to try to influence regulators). As well, we would expect that when regulators form expert bodies to examine policy, this will invariably feature current or former industry members, or at the very least, individuals with contacts in the industry.

Some economists, such as Jon Hansen and his co-authors, argue that the phenomenon extends beyond just political agencies and organizations. Businesses have an incentive to control anything that has power over them, including institutions from the media to academia to popular culture, and thus will try to capture them as well. When this happens, they call this phenomenon “deep capture.”

What we have in NYSED is a “deep[ly] capture[d]” regulatory agency which has self-defined its mission as the tender care and feeding of its self-defined clientele, i.e., school districts. It doesn’t matter what area of NYSED functioning you examine. When you get past the intentionally-incomprehensible verbiage it spits out like clockwork, you discover that what it really does is ignore just about everything it is supposed to do – for kids – and either does nothing at all or does whatever it takes to insure that districts keep getting as much money as possible. Laws and regulations notwithstanding, there are no real strings attached to districts’ use of these funds and no real constraints on their behavior at the State level.

In terms of testing, it means that a sham system has been set up to make things as comfortable as possible … for the districts. The result is a testing system – test construction; test administration; test grading – which is a complete sham.

Why is this allowed to go on? Well, who appoints NYSED’s Board of Directors – the Regents? Turns out that Sheldon Silver, in his absolute discretion, makes these decisions in secret, and then almost every spring, like clockwork, new Regents sprout up like mushrooms on rotten logs. Then the Legislature, in its infinite wit and wisdom, votes in a joint session to rubber stamp what Silver has decided. Why is NYSED really answerable to? The Legislature, as a group, and to each and every individual State Assembly Member and Senator. Period. Numerous recent scandals outside NYC have shown that folks from local political organizations in every area of the State – the organizations which get these legislators nominated and elected – have no show sham “jobs” with their local districts and BOCES, despite the fact that they do absolutely no work for the districts as legitimate employees. Protection of these and other similarly-unsavory relationships between local political organizations and local districts is these legislators’ prime objective – not getting money for their districts for legitimate programs and services for kids.

So of course NYSED is going to have a sham system of testing and accountability. It does what it does to get funds for districts who “flunk” accountability and want the money, although nobody has a clue as to what it is really spent on. It does what it does to not have districts which don’t want these funds deemed “in need of improvement.” And it does everything else in between … to keep its real clientele, districts’ administrators and legislators well paid and happy. What happens to kids in these districts? Consider them collateral damage on NYSED’s road to the tender care and feeding of its real clientele.

We need a fundamental reorganization of how public education is handled in New York State, starting right at the top. As a baby step, a truly independent Inspector General’s office should be established with authority and budget to audit and investigate everything NYSED does … and doesn’t do, and which has the willingness and ability to send information it has gathered to the right prosecutors and federal Inspector Generals. I can’t see anything else that will work. In fact, I can’t imagine anything else that will even start to work to clean up NYSED’s functioning.

Please keep in mind that the number of correct answers needed for a 65 is abysmal anyway. Depending on the exam in question, a student can have a raw score of 35-40% for which the scaled score becomes a 65%. In other words, they only managed to answer about 1/3rd of the questions correctly but are awarded a passing score based on the curve. Statistically, a student should be able to get a 25% raw score through random guessing just to put things into perspective.

The other side of this scandal is that teachers are directed to go into classes where their subjects are being tested and “assist” students with any questions they might have. I’ve witnessed teachers being pulled by APs from exams they were proctoring in order to be placed into rooms in order to help students who are being tested in that teacher’s subject area.

When I recommended blind Regents grading to Randi at the Delegates Assembly, she demurred. When I suggested the same to Michael Mulgrew, he stonewalled me. The UFT does not have the moral courage, unlike the Chicago Teachers union, to face up to teacher cheating. Thus we collaborate with the DOE’s corrupt graduation stats and thereby betray our trust, consigning unprepared students to almost certain failure in college.  

To Jeff S.
Your comments are off the mark. Cheating is the issue, not human factor quibbles about point differentials on subjective internal scores. Required thirds readings attend to wide discrepancies.

Consider Steven Levitt’s observation re teacher and administrator cheating on high stakes tests in Freakonomics: “Schoolchildren, of course, have had the incentive to cheat for as long as there have been tests. But high stakes testing has so radically changed the incentives for teachers that they too now have added incentive to cheat. … And if a teacher were to survey this newly incentivized landscape and consider somehow inflating her students’ scores, she just might be persuaded by one final incentive: teacher cheating is rarely looked for, hardly ev er detected, and just about never punished.”                                                         

Regan recommended, amongst other things, that State Ed. and the Regents further investigate and, where appropriate, discipline the adults who were found to have changed kids’ answers. State Ed. and the Regents flat out refused, saying that doing so was a district responsibility and not their job! This had nothing to do with essay answers – it was simply an audit of scoring on multiple choice sections of these exams.

This had, and has, nothing to do with assuring that a student is given all appropriate credit for a “constructed” essay answer. It was just plain, old adult cheating then. What we see in the current DiNapoli audit is that State Ed. and the Regents basically have the same position these days: effectively monitoring and supervising the system for grading mandated tests is not, ultimately, State Ed. and the Regents’ responsibility, and they aren’t going to do it. What we have in NYS is a now widely-discredited system for legitimate test construction; a discredited and non-transparent system for test score point assignments, and a discredited system for test grading. And if history predicts, what we’re going to get is a series of paper pronouncements from State Ed. and the Regents re how they’re going to fix the very broken system, followed by a total failure to implement the fixes. It doesn’t matter whether you’re looking at “bubble in” multiple choice answers or essay responses.

The bottom line really is that the student scores, and thus student graduation numbers, reported by NYS schools, school districts, and by State Ed. itself, should be deemed virtually completely unreliable in terms of usefulness for making any judgments whatsoever about what and how well kids have learned, and even more pointedly, what and how well schools, districts and our state’s public education system have taught. In other words, the data reported is what IT professionals call “GIGO” – Garbage In: Garbage Out. The flat NAEP and SAT scores for NYS and NYCDOE tell it all – no meaningful progress for kids; vast increase in adults’ official excuses. State Ed. and the Regents – and school districts and schools – have nothing to do with constructing or scoring these exams. In areas where State Ed. and/or districts and schools do have some power to influence results – well, that’s what the staggeringly high percentages of NYS and NYC kids who were allowed modifications and/or accommodations on NAEP was about, wasn’t it? These were provided so frequently that serious questions are being raised about the validity of NAEP scores here. If anyone ever audits records documenting the propriety of these mods and accoms being granted, five will get you ten that State Ed. and the NYC DOE announce that they were not ordered to retain documentation, and thus did not do so.

The kids deserve better. They do not need to be awarded paper diplomas which do not reflect what they have learned and/or what they can do. All this gets them is the need for remedial coursework after graduation from high school and flunking entry-level employer aptitude tests.

We can argue ’till the cows come in re whether individual students’ Regents scores should be corrected when school grading improprieties are identified. Essentially, this would be penalizing kids for the misconduct of adults. The real remedy for scoring inflation should be to require that scores reported for implicated schools and districts should be corrected and the corrected scores used when NYSED calculates all NCLB-related indices – AYP, etc. This way, the adults who cheated are denied the benefit of their bad conduct, as would be those who are, or were, responsible for allowing it to happen. Who knows how many schools and districts which “made” AYP should have flunked it? I’m betting it’s a lot.

When NYSED rejects correcting reported scores, it’s really protecting schools and districts from being held accountable for their misconduct. Since there are no downside risks or penalties for inflating scores, schools and districts will keep on doing it. Why shouldn’t they?

In fact, if pushed, NYSED will say that reporting (and, hypothetically, correcting reports) is a district responsibility, not its responsibility. Since districts benefit from inflated scoring and do not suffer any penalties when caught doing so, there is absolutely no reason why they should stop.

What this audit report will do, ultimately, is spread the word to superintendents, principals and others who supervise test grading that it’s really okay to inflate scores – in case they hadn’t already heard. Unless some serious, verifiable, transparent system of auditing, monitoring and supervising test grading at the state level is put into place – and fully implemented – by NYSED, we should expect that test grade inflation will get even worse over the next few years. We should also assume that while reports of better exam scores and more students graduating multiply, NAEP and SAT scores will – as they have in the past – remain essentially flat. That’s because schools and districts don’t grade NAEP or SAT tests.

The only way that NYSED itself will be held accountable for intentionally allowing this widespread and pervasive fraud to continue is if the US DOE puts its foot down: starts rejecting all NYSED’s reports which contain or are based on such scores and then refuses to give NYSED federal funds for programs which require such reporting. The fish rots from the head. That’s NYSED and … its test scoring system is quite, quite rotten.

That’s basically what I thought I said, or was trying to say.

When the Principal of Cobble Hill High School conspired with the Region 8 LIS to cover up my tampering allegations through a phony and illicit in-house investigation, I went over their heads to SED. In turn, SED ordered the Superintendent to have the city, via OSI, conduct a true investigation.

SED audits randomly. The DOE investigates specifically. 

Yes, the city, via OSI, investigates complaints about malfeasance in test scoring. The SED, however, looks the scoring of the exams at individual schools as part of what I assume is their auditing authority.

It is not as if just because Albany says one thing that they are always right.