Expect to see lots of new faces at your child's school in the coming weeks!

In a disingenuous attempt to reduce the budget deficit at DoE Central, the Chancellor has mandated that each elementary and middle school in the city to send two teachers over fourteen days to score English Language Arts standardized tests. While the multiple choice part of the standardized tests is scored by computers, other parts need humans for scoring [fill in the blanks, short answers and essays]. DoE Central has touted this change as having reduced spending within the central office. However, it is a bogus claim because the costs of scoring tests are now shifted from central administration to individual schools.

In the past, the ELA tests were scored by teachers over winter recess (and spring recess for math tests). Teachers were paid "per session¨ (as in over time pay) for the hours they spent scoring. Per session money for test scoring came out of the central administration budget. With this new initiative, each individual school is responsible for paying for the substitute teachers needed to cover the teachers who are pulled away to score the tests. In a grand scheme of things, DoE does save money because paying for a substitute teacher is cheaper than paying a teacher per session fees. However, this change will shift the financial responsibilities from DoE Central to individual schools, whose budget has already been cut this year.

To make matters even more absurd, in middle schools only teachers licensed in ELA and Social Studies are allowed to score while in elementary schools all grade level teachers are eligible to score. This creates a particular hardship to small middle schools with small faculty. However, this license requirement does not seem to make sense since it appears that an elementary school teacher may be assigned to score an 8th grade test while a middle school teacher may be grading a 3rd grade test.

It is bad enough we divert so much of our teaching and learning to test prep, now adding insult to injury our children will have a musical chair of teachers for three weeks (at least it needs not be the same two teachers for three weeks). So, if your child comes home and tells you about various substitute teachers in her classroom for the next three weeks, most likely it is not because your child¡¦s teacher quit (although who can blame the teacher if she did!).

Many principals are up in arms about this new requirement - which comes on top of weeks in which they have been forced to take teachers out of their classrooms for many hours, to test students for DoE's expanded Gifted and Talented Program. More testing, less learning, indeed.