This year's drop in NYC state test scores: sound and fury, signifying nothing

 

When the state test scores were released a couple of weeks ago, they showed sharp drops in proficiency for NYC students, particularly in reading.  This led to commentators to speculate what this drop in scores may or may not mean.  Critics of the mandated curriculums like the organization Racially Just Public Schools used the results to question the value of the pre-packaged NYC Reads program, and insist on the need for more culturally responsive programs. 

The NYC Reads intitiative required NYC schools and districts to choose between three scripted curriculums for elementary schools, EL Learning, Wit & Wisdom, or HMH Into Reading.  Many teachers, parents and students have found these programs to be overly rigid and formulaic and lack sufficient time alloted for students to be able to read and enjoy wholel books.  The administration nevertheless plans  to be expand these programs at 102 middle schools  this fall.

With the drop in the state scores, Michael Mulgrew the  President  of the NYC teachers union, , who up to now has been mostly supportive of these mandates,  came out swinging: “The Department of Education is completely incompetent and irresponsible in its implementation, and we are not going to stand by." he was quoted as saying.  Without reforms, he said, “we’re going to just have to pull our support for it.”

Indeed, there is little or no evidentiary support for these three particular curriculums, except for the fact that they were cited as “high quality” by Ed Reports, an organization  funded mainly by the Gates Foundation which bases  their evaluations not on actual studies showing they result in student learning gains, but only whether they are aligned with the Common Core standards. 

At the same time,  when the drop in test scores was announced, Gates-funded groups like Educators for Excellence refused to moderate their support for NYC Reads,  even though last year the group celebrated an increase in state test scores  by  saying that “today’s state test results deliver another resounding proof point of the impact of NYC Reads."

Chancellor Samuels and Mayor Mamdani insisted that the expansion of NYC Reads will continue, and Mamdani was quoted as saying, “NYC Reads marked a turning point in our commitment to ensuring every child gets the evidence-based instruction they deserve. Across the nation, we’ve seen transformative literacy rates using the pedagogy we know works, and we will continue to pursue that same approach,” without citing any evidence for these specific programs. 

At the same time, the Department of Education press release put forward the contrary results of the i-Ready and MAP assessments that students are required to take several times a year, supposedly for diagnoistic purposes, claiming they showed continued improvement in reading, though screeners were never designed for that purpose.

The release linked to a powerpoint depicting the upward trend of NYC student results in reading on these screeners compared to national norms.  Yet  in very small print beneath the charts, one can glimpse a disclaimer: ”Recent updates to MAP and iReady norms may have contributed to an increase in the percentage of students above the national median in 2026.”

To make any claims based on the results of these screeners is even more questionable given how the MAP tests are owned by HMH, the most commonly employed and most criticized program used by the schools. The i-Ready screeners have also been widely criticized as having no  independent studies that attest to their validity, and the company was recently sued iin DC on consumer protection grounds, alleging that the company engages in false advertising about the value and effectiveness of its product. 

Amidst the hullabaloo on both sides,  little attention was paid to the fact that the ups and downs in  NY state exams have rarely if ever been replicated in the results of the far more reliable national exams called the NAEPs, which are given by the federal government to a sample of students in NYC every two years, in 4th and 8th grade reading and math.  They show no significant change in the city’s 4th grade reading scores since 2003.  

Here is a chart produced by analysts Fred Smith and Robin Jacobowitz for a forthcoming study.  It illustrates the stark contrast between the rollercoaster results of the state tests in 4th grade reading, as contrasted with the flat line NAEP scores over the last  23 years. 

As I was quoted in the Queens Chronicle,  “Unfortunately the state has been unable to develop and administer properly scaled tests with reliable results for many years that would allow anyone to gain insights about what is working or not in our schools.”  

We will have to wait for the NAEP results  to see if whether there has been any real change in reading or math achievement in the last two years. These exams were given last spring with the results expected in early 2027.

Even after the NAEPs are released, if the scores have significantly changed it will be difficult to ascribe this to any one factor such as a particular set of curriculums, when so many demographic changes and other developments have occurred  over the last two years, including a  decline in average class sizes in many schools.

Letter to the members on the Panel on Educational Policy on how they could exercise more rigorous oversight on contracts, privacy and class size

Here is a copy of the letter I sent on August 19 to the members of the Panel for Educational Policy, including the new members recently appointed by Mayor Mamdani, in hope that they will improve their oversight to prevent waste, fraud and abuse, as well urge the DOE to improve their lax
policies on privacy and class size. 

Feel free to send your own message or speak out at the PEP meeting next week on Wed. August 26 at 6 PM at MS 131 at 100 Street.  More info here.

'abogad@schools.nyc.gov'; 'aalicea6@schools.nyc.gov'; 'aong3@schools.nyc.gov'; 'afair3@schools.nyc.gov'; 'ccasaretti@schools.nyc.gov'; 'courtney.rajwani@gmail.com'; 'crystal.montalvo@csi.cuny.edu'; 'madelinefox@brooklyn.cuny.edu'; 'fhannahjones@schools.nyc.gov'; 'gregfaulkner1@gmail.com'; 'JCollins37@schools.nyc.gov'; 'karla.cordero@weact.org'; 'kjefferson@teachingmatters.org'; 'mdienstag@schools.nyc.gov'; 'naveed@cs.columbia.edu'; 'rsrodriguez@cccnewyork.org'; 'smorales@comptroller.nyc.gov'; 'constanc31@gmail.com'; 'kcarbo18@yahoo.com'; 'parentlthompson@gmail.com'; 'primoasher@gmail.com'; 'costa.constantinides@qc.cuny.edu'

Dear members of the Panel for Educational Policy:

Welcome to a new school year and a special welcome for those of you who are new to the Panel, or according to the legal name, the Board of Education of the City of New York.. My name is Leonie Haimson, I am Executive Director of Class Size Matters and the co-chair of the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy.  I wanted to share more information and concerns with you that I was able to express in the two minutes we were allotted at the last PEP meeting.

DOE email addresses

First, apologies in using your personal or work email addresses, but your official DOE ones have not yet been posted.  A word of caution: Several long-time PEP members have told me that the DOE emails are difficult to access, tend to bounce you out, and are impossible to forward to your personal or work emails. This is probably why the DOE uses your work or personal emails to communicate with you, and why long time members like Greg and Naveed have their personal email addressed posted on the PEP website for the public to use.  You might consider doing so as well or creating a new gmail address for the public to use that you can more easily check online and/or forward to your other address.

Fiscal training required by state law

As I’m sure you’re aware, one of your most important roles as school board members is financial oversight.  Because of a Long Island school board contracting scandal decades ago, a state law was passed in 2005 requiring all new school board members  to complete mandatory training at least six hours long within their first year of service and focused on fiscal oversight, accountability, fiduciary responsibilities, and school board governance. The law also requires that an internal audit committee be formed, which must hold regular meetings to address “any indications of suspected fraud, waste or abuse,” and that an independent accountant present the results of the annual district’s financial audit to the full board.    

According to this law, NYC was held exempt as long as the district provided board members with training that met or exceeded these requirements,  and this must be certified annually by the Chancellor to the State Education Commissioner. Yet according to current and past Panel members, whatever training has been provided on the board’s fiscal and legal accountability in the past has not met these requirements,.  In 2022,  I submitted a Freedom of Information request to the State Education Department asking for a copy of any annual certifications sent by the Chancellor concerning this matter between 2019 and 2021, and SED responded that there were none.

I strongly urge you to ask for this required training  and that an audit committee be established.  The DOE has the largest budget by far of any city agency and rigorous financial oversight should be exercised.  There is a list of approved organizations that provide this training here. 

Problems uncovered by recent audits

In April, the State Comptroller released a scathing audit of DOE’s privacy practices that they determined in several ways were inadequate and non-compliant with the requirements of Ed Law 2D, the student privacy law that passed in 2014, leading to more than 100 breaches and thousands of families informed past the legal deadline that their children’s data was exposed .  My comments about the audit’s findings are here, that include additional information about problem areas that the audit did not touch on.

 Then last month, the City Comptroller released another troubling audit, showing how DOE had left over four hundred million dollars in reimbursable Medicaid funds on the table.  In both cases, the audits also reported  DOE had delayed for many months and in some cases over a year in supplying the data and records that had been requested, and rejected many of the recommendations to improve their performance, for unclear or unconvincing reasons.  I urge you to ask  both offices to brief you on the results.

We would also be happy to provide a briefing to anyone interested in regarding the DOE’s ongoing failure to safeguard student data privacy, even as these risks are greatly multiplied by the expanded use of AI in our schools.  I have delivered similar briefings to advocates, parents, and the NYC Bar Association.

Need for more transparency in contracting

A major DOE contracting scandal occurred during the de Blasio administration, involving a computer wiring contract initially  proposed for $1.1 billion expendable to $2 billion proposed to be awarded to a company called Custom Computer Specialists that had been involved in kickback scheme just a few years before. Despite much news coverage and public outcry, the PEP rubberstamped  the contract anyway, but thankfully City Hall later cancelled it  and pushed it back for rebidding, ultimately saving as much as $600 million.  In response to demands from the Public Advocate and City Council at that time, the administration  promised to post the  RAs or Request for Authorization documents at least 30 days before the PEP vote to allow for more public scrutiny. See Dec. 2015 Daily News and March 2016 Gotham Gazette for more on this. Yet for the last four years or so, the DOE has allowed that promise to lapse.  I hope that you ask DOE to once again adhere to that promise.

In addition, the actual proposed DOE contracts should be made available to PEP members on request before their scheduled vote --- not just the RAs, to allow for more scrutiny, and all sections in the contract related to data privacy and security should be publicly posted along with the RAs at least 30 days before the vote.   

While one specific portion of contracts for vendors with access to personal student information related to privacy called the Parent Bill of Rights is legally required to be posted on the DOE website here, many are not posted,  and those that are provided too often include language non-compliant with the privacy law.  When I pointed that out to DOE officials, including the Chief Privacy Officer, they responded that stronger privacy language was included in another part of the contract but refused to make that portion of the contract available. 

Proposed contracts for products and services, especially those related to professional development and consulting, the RA should detail the hourly rate, and whether any evidence exists for its effectiveness. Optimally, that should include independent peer-reviewed research. If such evidence exists, it should link to that research. If no such evidence exists, the DOE should explain why they are proposing that this product or service should be purchased anyway. For consulting contracts, the RA should explain why DOE employees are unable to carry out these services themselves, and a plan exists to train employees to carry out these services in the future. 

Issues regarding this month’s contracts 

Millions of dollars  on professional development contracts are due to be voted upon in next week’s contract agenda.  In many cases, the RAs claims that the vendors were chosen in part on the basis of “Demonstrated Effectiveness” but none of those assessments are provided. They should be. 

Contracts of two of the proposed vendors were tabled at last month’s PEP meeting:  Public Consulting Group, which has been cited by various legal agencies for bid-rigging, violating the Fair Labor Standards, Medicaid fraud, and barred from soliciting any contracts with the state of Illinois from December 31, 2022, through August 1, 2025.

The other vendor, Encore Support Services, was found to have exposed the personal records of hundreds if not thousands of NYC special needs students. I was personally contacted in in 2023 by independent security researcher Jeremiah Fowler, who discovered 50,000 Encore records online, involving invoices for special education services they had submitted to the Special Education Impartial Office, without any password protection or encryption, including students’ names and addresses, parent’s names, the students’ OSIS number, the service provider’s name, and codes related to various diagnoses and disabilities. 

While the RA asserts that the DOE said this breach “did not present any major security concerns,” the families of these students surely disagree.  I would be happy to share the correspondence I received from Jeremiah Fowler about this matter, if that would be of interest. 

Inadequate class size planning   

Our primary issue remains class size, and the fact that hundreds of thousands of the highest need students remain in overly large classes despite a state law passed in June 2022 requiring that classes be reduced over five years in all NYC schools.  Though the Governor gave the DOE an extra planning year to comply, and more recently the Legislature has given the city an extension of another two years for full phase-in by 2029–2030, the city has still not indicated that they have any real plan that would provide smaller classes to all the students who need them, particularly when it comes to the more than 600 schools that do not have the space at their current enrollment.

The latest iteration of their draft class size plan released in June is posted here; they have still not yet released the final revised version that is supposed to take public comment into account before submitting it to the state,  even though this was required by August 17, which was yesterday.  In any case, our letter expressing our concerns as to the lack of any actual plan in the June document  that we and the Education Law Center sent to DOE is attached.  Last year, the DOE exempted about 10,500 classes at more than 120 schools to reach the 60% goal; we believe  that they will be unable to make even the extended deadlines in the law without exempting hundreds more schools in the future.

We would also be happy to provide you with a briefing,  pinpointing some of  the significant flaws and gaps in the DOE’s current planning for class size reduction, and what steps they could take that would be more equitable, practical and cost-effective.  Please let me know if that would be helpful.

Leonie Haimson 

leonie@classsizematters.org