This year's NYS/Pearson ELA exams: an Epic Fail

UPDATE from 3rd day: Pearson Always Learning But Never Getting it Right; turns out they made big errors on scoring Gifted and Talented exams which were only found because parents were allowed to examine the tests and identified the mistakes themselves.  See the Pearson press release, and DOE's here.  Of course, the state is refusing to let parents examine the Pearson ELA or math exams -- so there's no way we will know just how many errors are embedded in them as well.

As for the third day of the ELA:
Even some of those kids who had managed the first two days, decomposed and fell apart the 3rd day of testing. Some vomited, cried, and got asthma all because of unfair, overly long and highly flawed exams that are being used for invalid purposes.  There are reports of even more product placements, added to the long list below, including Nike shoes and iPods.  I am quoted in the Daily News and the NY Post about how passages  pulled straight from Pearson textbooks used elsewhere in the state disadvantaged NYC children, and s the Commissioner to invalidate those items, as he did with the Pineapple section last year.  Let's see what he does. His email is jking@mail.nysed.gov.

UPDATE: The reviews are in, and the consensus among parents, students and teachers is that this year's NYS/Pearson ELA exams were even worse than expected.  

The tests were too long, the questions confusing even for teachers, and many students ended up in tears.  See just a sample of observations below.  Is this what Chancellor Walcott meant when he said, "It's time to rip the Band-Aid off" , or Regents head Merryl Tisch, when she explained, “We have to just jump into the deep end"?

In addition, the fact that passages in some of the forms given some children at multiple grade levels most likely disadvantaged those 3rd or 4th graders who had to struggle with inappropriately difficult material -- and these passages apparently appeared at the beginning of the exam (see comment below) .

According to the NY Post, the tests were also replete with corporate logos and commercial product names, like Mug Root Beer, the LEGO game Mindstorms, IBM, the soccer league FIFA, and the comic book and TV show “Teen Titans” – though the state insists that these companies did not pay for that privilege. The NYSED spokesperson explained instead that this occurred because the passages were drawn from "authentic texts." Not to mention that they fell under the category of "informational text" as prescribed by David Coleman, the primary author of the Common Core standards -- or should we call this infomercial text instead?


To make things worse, it appears that passages in both the 6th and 8th grade exams were taken straight from Pearson textbooks in the same grades. Perhaps this is a clever move of Pearson's to persuade districts to buy their products,  but it represents an unfair advantage to those students who had already been assigned these passages.  (See also the comment from a  teacher that a reading passage on the 5th grade exam was taken from a Ready New York CCLS review book published by Curriculum Associates.)

One cannot escape that perhaps conservative Rick Hess is right; that the Common Core is really a political strategy, not an educational one, designed to "shine a harsh light on the quality of suburban schools, shocking those families and voters into action,"  and "scare" them into embracing the "reform" agenda, including more charter schools and the outsourcing of education into corporate hands. Please post your comments below.

     If you have children or students in grades 3-8 they are now in the midst of three days of state ELA standardized testing.  Last year, the ELA exams were full of errors and confusing and ambiguous questions, including the infamous Pineapple passage, which we first reported on our blog. This year, we have heard from teachers and principals that the reading passages were difficult and the questions extremely tricky.  Some  said they could not figure out the answers themselves.

In addition, several passages and questions were repeated at several different grade levels.  Reportedly, one of the four forms of the test had the same passage in grades 3,4, and 5.  So many principals and teachers thought this was a mistake that the state posted a memo, calling this "vertical linking" and claiming that repeating the same items in adjacent grades is one of the"typical testing processes." Yet a principal told me that in her twenty years as a NY educator, she’s never seen this before on a state standardized exam.

As a parent, student, or educator, if you have comments or observations about the exams this year, please email me directly at leonie@classsizematters.org or post them on our blog below.  Your name and/or school will be held in strict confidence if that's what you prefer.  thanks!