GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

For some students, final exams administered on Monday posed an extra challenge.

Months after a spate of errors on the state’s elementary and middle school exams caused parents and educators to charge that test-makers are held to lower standards than its teachers or students, more mistakes have come to light. This time the errors are on high school foreign language exams developed by the city Department of Education.

This year, local districts were required for the first time to create the foreign language exams that students can take to fulfill graduation requirements. The state had produced Regents exams in several languages in the past but eliminated them in a cost-cutting move last year.

Department of Education officials said the new requirement would be easy to meet because the city already created tests for less commonly studied languages such as Hebrew and Chinese. But when students sat down to take French and Spanish exams on Monday, errors quickly became apparent.

Students who took the French exam were asked a multiple-choice question with more than one correct answer.  In one part of the Spanish exam, students were asked to choose two out of three questions to answer, but only given two options. And a printing error meant that the rubric students were supposed to use when structuring their essay on the Spanish language exam was missing. (more…)

Feminist movement icon Gloria Steinem has weighed in on Hearst Magazines executive Cathie Black’s appointment as the new schools chancellor, backing up her former colleague from Ms. Magazine.

But if the bulk of the criticism being directed at Black centers on her scant background in education, Steinem’s statement of support might not do any good. After describing Black’s accomplishments and suggesting that critics are holding Black to a higher standard than they did Joel Klein, Steinem bungles the name of the school advisory board Black sits on.

“Now, her abilities as a publisher are being held to a different standard than Joel Klein as a prosecutor, even though she is on the board of a Harlem magnet school,” Steinem writes.

Black does sit on the national leadership advisory board for a group of schools in Harlem, but they aren’t magnet schools. Harlem Village Academies schools are charter schools, meaning they are privately run, but publicly funded. (more…)

Teachers at a high school under investigation for grade-changing were surprised to receive the school’s yearly progress report this week. The report was supposed to be under wraps until an investigation into the school’s grading process ended.

But a bureaucratic mistake at the Department of Education led to the letter grade being released and folded into a report that was given to the school and posted online.

Last year, when the DOE published schools’ grades, Herbert Lehman High School was left off the list. Allegations that the school’s executive principal, Janet Saraceno, was changing dozens of grades to boost the school’s graduation rate, were serious enough that the progress report data couldn’t be published, officials decided. The report, which is based on Regents passage, credit accumulation, and graduation rates, heavily relies on data that could be compromised by Saraceno’s alleged actions. (more…)