GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

An effort to root out possible cheating that the State Education Department billed as stopgap actually included every single test that elementary and middle school students in New York took last year.

But the state is not yet saying how many red flags turned up when three million students’ answer sheets were scrutinized using a test security procedure known as “erasure analysis.”

For the last two years, under increasing pressure to show that the state’s test scores are meaningful, state education officials have asked the legislature for funding to carry out erasure analysis on students’ answer sheets. The process detects how often answers have been switched from wrong to right, a key barometer of cheating. Erasure analysis helped uncover cheating in other districts, including Atlanta, where 35 educators were recently indicted for their roles in a sweeping cheating scandal.

But in both years, legislators turned down the education officials’ requests. Last year, after legislators rejected a $1 million request to perform erasure analysis on 10 percent of tests, the officials said they would free up funds from their budget for limited testing. (more…)

Gov. Andrew Cuomo's proposed budget, set out earlier this week, would distribute significant school aid in unorthodox ways, rather than through the state's regular funding formula

In some ways, Gov. Andrew Cuomo fulfilled state education officials’ wishes this week when he allocated even more money to cash-strapped school districts than they asked him to.

But Cuomo’s state aid proposal was, in another way, the worst-case scenario that the Board of Regents sketched out last week at their monthly meeting. The Regents wanted new funds to be distributed according to the state’s regular school aid formula, but Cuomo said he would dole out the increased funding according to his own rules.

Knowing that Cuomo already had allocated $75 million in grant funding for this year’s schools budget, state education officials asked him to use the entire amount to help districts expand pre-kindergarten offerings and to distribute the funds mostly to low-income districts. They asked that he put the rest of his education dollars into the foundation aid formula, which doesn’t require districts to apply and compete for funding.

Cuomo’s budget proposal did not fulfill those requests. (more…)