Testimony of Aminda Gentile before NYC Council Education Committee
Oct 30, 2009 12:35 PM
Good morning, Chairman Jackson and distinguished members of the Education Committee. My name is Aminda Gentile, and I am the United Federation of Teachers’ Vice President for Education Issues. On behalf of the UFT, I’d like to thank you for the opportunity to testify today about the Department of Education’s (DOE) School Progress Reports.
Since the DOE first proposed using progress reports, we at the UFT have cautioned that using such a high stakes and limited measure system to rate schools could be misleading and risky. Any system rating schools so heavily based on a single measure such as standardized test scores is inherently flawed. That’s why the UFT has pressed for multiple measures in evaluating schools. As we saw two weeks ago with the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) math scores, even standardized test results can give contradictory information about how well a school is educating its students.
As a result, administrators feel pressured to have educators teach to the test, which our members tell us results in endless test preparation instead of real learning.
The reports assign a letter grade to every school. That cannot help but be simplistic. What’s even more troubling to us as educators is the fact that there is nothing in the Progress Reports to show the way to improvement.
Teachers rarely describe what students know and are able to do with a single letter grade. And they do not use grades to show how students can improve. They engage with their students in multiple ways using many different indicators of deficiency and progress. The Progress Reports are really at odds with how educators do assessment.
Like other DOE data initiatives, the Progress Reports are a sincere attempt to gather information about the schools and evaluate their strengths and weaknesses. But they are skewed toward certain data at the expense of other richer data. And although this may not have been the intent, they have too often become a blunt instrument in the hands of administrators. They are at best, if you’ll forgive the term, a work in progress.
These reports evaluate four different areas, but when all is said and done, 85% of the final grade for elementary and middle schools is based on state standardized test scores in math and English Language Arts (ELA). In elementary schools that means the work schools do for kindergartners, first graders and second graders is not included in the reports. Third graders are only partially included, and so the reports rely almost exclusively on the work of fourth and fifth graders in exactly two subjects. But the only underlying numbers for this 85% are two state test scores. Untested subjects are not part of the grade. Portfolios and student class work have no place in the reports.
It’s true that 10 percent of that Progress Report grade is based on school surveys, which measure school climate, parent satisfaction, staff communication and other areas. But the survey data are too small a percentage. The remaining 5% is based on student attendance.
In the high schools the metrics are different. Progress Report grades are based on graduation rates, accumulated credits and Regents passing rates. The data here are more comprehensive, but there are two big problems.
First, the process of comparing high schools based on Progress Report grades leads to very unfair comparisons. Although peer schools take into consideration the numbers of special education and over-age students as well as entering 8th-grade scores, high schools serving high percentages of full-time special education students or schools with high numbers of new immigrants are compared to schools with students with lower levels of special needs, and schools that have hard-to-educate populations are unfairly penalized.
Second, the metrics sometimes lead to bad education practice.
The emphasis on credit accumulation in the reports has led to expanded “credit recovery” schemes by which students are allowed – even encouraged – to make up work in classes they rarely attended, turning in a single essay or project, often to a different teacher. A high school English teacher explained how the push to accumulate credits for the Progress Reports is corrupting the education mission:
“Credit recovery … wreaks havoc from within by overturning teachers’ grades once failing students complete a make-up project outside the teacher’s own control. This cheapens education for everyone. . . . And what is the value of a passing grade when the student who earns it discovers it could have been shoplifted with much less effort and with the shopkeeper’s consent?”
Also keep in mind that the Progress Reports are high-stakes instruments. A school can be closed based largely on its failure to boost two failing grades. Parents and the public are presented with the grade as an assessment of whether this is a “good” or “bad” school. The grades carry huge consequences, and the result is that schools focus on bumping the short-term annual scores rather than on addressing the underlying causes of failure. It is a system built in ways akin to the recent failures we have seen on Wall Street where investors ran after the short term money gains – never mind whether the fundamental system was sound. The nation suffered as a result. Similar behavior is encouraged in the schools by high stakes, short term accountability measures such as these progress reports. Principals and schools do everything they can to get the grade up. The way to get the grade up is to improve the scores. And so this creates an unhealthy drive to get scores up and accumulate credits by any means.
The “snapshot” look that the Progress Reports produce tells you very little about a school’s environment and history, the nature of its instruction and pedagogy, the characteristics of its students or the challenges the school faces. The “progress” that the reports measure is, for the most part, a one-year gain or loss in the students’ average standardized score. Maybe the school did get its average score up a little, but at what cost? Giving up arts and science instruction? Getting rid of special programs or events—the annual school play, the traveling chorus, the science fair? Are the students and staff disrespectful toward each other and sick of school by January?
Our members have done an extraordinary job over the last few years. We all have concerns about the reliability of the state tests and their ability to reflect the real work of our schools. And, like others, we too are surprised that entire districts suddenly eradicated the difficulties of all struggling students (some districts had virtually no Level 1 students). Nonetheless, in spite of those concerns, scores have been rising for our students for the past 10 years because of the work of our teachers, regardless of the systems under which they work. We would be happier with progress reports that reflected the true work of our teachers, which cannot even come close to being measured simply by manipulating test scores into high stakes documents like these.
As I said, the reports are a work in progress. We at the UFT hope that you will consider the concerns we’ve raised as the Department of Education decides how best to proceed with their continued use in our school system. Thank you.
