TEN years, approaching 200 BILLION DOLLARS, several “REORGANIZATIONS”, decimation of the Teaching Corps with administration and what we have here, is a result of the tremendous inane and insane ineptitude of administrative terrorists that know nothing about how to educate children in NYC!

Bloomberg & Klein nwould serve the world better as the glorified CPA’s they are, having little to no teaching experience in the trenches! Their incompetence is only exceeded by their arrogance, ego and the snowjob they’ve done to New York!

The lack of accountability on their part is murderous! Their spin has been horrendous! The lack of public outcry and apathy is SCARY!

So, apparently, the current state of the American conscience is summed up by the credo: money talks & bs walks”!

Sycophants, brown-nosers and mercenaries of the gangs of the Banana Republic of New York at the New Tamany Hall, Tweed, you must be proud of yourselves, but the chickens will all soon come home to roost!

Everyone in the schools were commenting about
how EASY the tests were this year! And yet, THE SCORES STILL WERE DOWN!!!

FIRE BLOOMBERG & KLEIN!

I found your entry interesting thus I’ve added a Trackback to it on my weblog …

Gee, this is a simple one to accomplish. Pick a few hundred kids randomly and go in and test them – in late September. Then really see the fur fly.

Why not issue a ban on all test prep and test prep materials? Oh, poor McGraw Hill and all the other vultures- so don’t ever expect this to happen.

Not that teachers – motivated by tiny little threats of being fired – how fast we moved from paying cash bonuses to entire schools – wouldn’t find a way to do test prep.

On our blog, we reproduced the News’ chart showing the changing “p scores” on the field tests, which showed that the questions were getting easier, and closely predicted the rise in the test scores. For those who’d like to see it, the posting is dated Wednesday, September 5, 2007, in a column by Steve Koss, called “Here are the numbers. Everything is improving. Trust us.” The original Daily News article seems to be off the web now, but thankfully we kept the chart.

Susan Ohanian’s blog at the time also reprinted Erin’s article which has the following quote: “There’s less than a 5% chance that [the results] are due to chance,” said James Corter, a professor of education and statistics at Columbia University’s Teachers College. “The fact that it’s a small sample is not at all important. I think you’ve got really good evidence here … that the 2005 test was easier.”

and: “In 2005, the happy news that city fourth-graders had dusted their predecessors and showed record gains on the state exam helped buoy Mayor Bloomberg’s reelection drive just weeks before Election Day. ”

“Did Bloomberg’s leadership boost the scores? Not if you ask 9-year-old Kirwin Seger. When he participated in The News’experiment, he was among several students who said he finished the 2005 test faster than the 2002 version. “The 2002 questions were more complicated than in 2005,” he said. “In 2005, they kept it short, simple and sweet.”

And here we are, three years later, and we’re supposed to believe that the state made an honest mistake because they believed the field tests were actually harder than they were? The revisionist history on this is rather startling, to put it mildly.

Moreover, I have heard that it’s common practice for test contractors to put experimental, unscored sample questions into exams, which they do not release to the public, in order to make it easier to equate the exams over time. Did CTB/McGraw and/or NY state ever do this? And if not, why not?

When it comes to spurious test scores in recent years, qui bono?