Support the bill to make the Board of Regents the final arbiter of charter school authorizations and renewals

 Below is the memo of support for S7666A and A8801 that we just sent the bill sponsors, Sen. Liu and AM Benedetto.   Organizations should send in their own memos of support for this important bill.

Achieve Inc. seriously misleads the Board of Regents on graduation exit exams

Update 12/11/19: Michael Petrilli responds that Fordham does not oppose the use of exit exams, and claims that the term can be used for exams that either contribute to HS grades or are required to pass to graduate from high school. I pointed out that Wikipedia, Chalkbeat and NCES all clearly say that an exit exam is defined as solely the latter.  I did strike out the statement below that Fordham opposes the use of exit exams. 

Thanks for Stan Karp of the Education Law Center for much of the data here.

Achieve Inc. has been commissioned by the Board of Regents to research what other states are doing with their graduation exit exams, and review the current New York high school graduation requirements which mandate that students have to pass five high-stakes exit exams to graduate from high school. They are now engaged in an "information gathering phase" that is being being funded with an $100,000 grant from the Gates Foundation.

Accordingly, the organization gave a presentation to the Regents today,  entitled "Graduation requirements review," which included the following statements: that "states are making adjustments to their assessments required for high school graduation" followed by this claim: "28 states administer an ELA, mathematics, science and/or social studies exam(s) that factors into students' grades or graduation requirements."

Missing from their presentation are the following facts:


FairTest reports that currently, only 11 states currently have high school graduation exit exams, down from high of 27.

For the year 2018-2019, Education Week wrote this:  "Thirteen states require students to pass a test to get a high school diploma,...Exit exams used to be more popular: In 2002, more than half the states required them.”

Yet their list included Washington which recently approved an end to exit tests for the class of 2020.

The Fordham Institute put out a report over the summer, with the following information:  "just 12 states will require students in the class of 2020 to pass exit exams, falling from a peak of 30 states requiring them for the class of 2003."

When challenged on Twitter about the disparity in their figures compared to other sources, Achieve responded that they "define them [exit exams] as assessments that matter for students - impacting course grades or graduation."  Yet to conflate states that require students to pass a test to graduate from high school with those that assign ordinary end of course exams is extremely misleading.

 What else was missing from the Achieve presentation?

The overwhelming evidence against the use of exit exams, which has caused conservative organizations such as the Fordham Institute, as well as middle-of- the-road organizations like New America, to join with more progressive organizations, like FairTest and the Education Law Center, to oppose them.

See this New America report by Anne Hyslop, entitled "The Case Against Exit Exams."  Excerpt: 

"In short, typical students do not appear to be any better off after the exit exam policy, and those that were already vulnerable, including low-income and minority students, often became more so. In one of the broadest findings, a blue ribbon commission formed by the National Research Council, the Committee on Incentives and Test-Based Accountability, found that high school exit exams nationwide had not increased student achievement, but rather decreased graduation rates by two percentage points, on average.  Along similar lines, a 2010 meta-analysis on the effects of high school exit exams, including minimum competency versions and newer, more rigorous tests, found that, in general, the “evidence indicates that exit tests have produced few of the expected benefits for students overall and nearly all of the expected costs for disadvantaged and at-risk students.”

Since the 2010 meta-analysis, new evidence has reinforced the conclusion that exit exams disproportionately affect a subset of students, without producing positive outcomes for most. A 2013 study from Olesya Baker and Kevin Lang found that more rigorous exit tests, not MCEs [minimum competency exams] , were associated with lower graduation rates, particularly in states that had not previously had a MCE policy in place. Further, the lower graduation rates were not fully offset by increased GED attainment. As with other studies, Baker and Lang found that there was no relationship between exit exam policies and labor market outcomes. They also examined incarceration rates as another long-term cost of exit exam policies. They found that both MCEs and more difficult HSEEs increased the likelihood of incarceration, but the findings were only significant for the more rigorous tests. In fact, these kinds of exit exams were associated with a 12.5 percent increase in incarceration rates.

Perhaps it's not surprising that Achieve, the organization that help bring us the seriously flawed Common Core standards, would provide such an incomplete picture in the research consensus against the use of such exams, as well as the growing trend among states to reject them.

Sadly, Achieve is now produce a formal report which will synthesize the research on graduation exit exams for the Regents, as well as summarize feedback from state stakeholder groups about their views of these exams.  From this presentation, one cannot assume they will fulfill either of these tasks in a reliable fashion.  

Updated: Gates grant to NYSED for more PR around standards, testing and data collection

Update, December 11: Nick Tampio had an oped in LoHud news which asks:what if a food conglomerate making high fructose corn syrup bankrolled a state campaign on benefits of sugar? Or if tobacco companies subsidized a government campaign to push teen smoking? Same will likely happen if the Regents accept this Gates grant to push flawed standards, testing and expanded data collection.  The Non-profit Quarterly also  covered the controversy: "perhaps the Gates Foundation might consider the time and energy parents and other stakeholders must spend organizing against Gates initiatives instead of for ones they can believe and invest in among the costs of its growing number of failed educational efforts."

There was a lively discussion of this grant and its potential consequences at yesterday's Regents meeting and whether Gates Foundation would "control the narrative."  Commissioner Elia said the reason for the state to expand its data collection from early childhood through higher ed was that  currently students applying to SUNY and CUNY schools can't have their transcripts sent on time, a claim that is hard to believe. Many questions were raised about the data practices and policies and who would obtain the data.  Elia promised "no outside company" will be given access to it.  The Board of Regents voted to approve the grant, with only Regent Cashin and Regent Oudekirk voting no.  In the end, this decision will likely backfire, causing parents from trusting NYSED even less than they do already on standards, testing and data collection, knowing that these communications are part of a PR campaign, financially supported by Gates.

____
December 10, 2018

See how the Board of Regents are discussing tomorrow morning a $225,000 grant from the Gates Foundation to improve NYSED's "consistent and targeted communication " to parents and other stakeholders to help them "understand a variety of critical academic changes" regarding the state's learning standards, accountability initiatives (ie testing) and need for enhanced data collection "to connect early childhood, K-12, and postsecondary student information."   The proposal is posted here and below. 

One wonders if more PR is going to really help persuade parents who are already very distrustful of NYSED's insistence on imposing new standards that are little different from the Common Core.  There is still too much emphasis on flawed high-stakes state exams, and a lack of transparency about their design.  Finally,  NYSED still hasn't released regulations or enforced  § 2-d. regarding the unauthorized release of personally identifiable information , the state student privacy law that was passed in 2014 in the wake of the controversy over inBloom -- though the legal deadline for implementation was more than four years ago. 

Send your email today to NYSED: don't punish schools for high opt out rates!

UPDATE: You can now go here to send your comment to NYSED, but please feel free to personalize the message.

Parents: please send the following comments on the NYSED proposed regs for ESSA by Aug. 17.  For more on this issue, see the Class Size Matters/NYSAPE letter we sent to the Commissioner in June. Feel free to edit and add to the message in any way you like.  And if you're not convinced, check out the video below from NYC Opt Out.

For more on the proposed regs and the public comment period see: http://www.p12.nysed.gov/accountability/essa.html

ESSARegComment@nysed.gov

To the Commissioner:

As you are undoubtedly aware, 20%- 22% of eligible students throughout the state of New York opted out of the 3-8^th grade state exams over the previous three years.  Only 8% of districts met the 95% testing participation rate in 2017, and while the state has not yet released the opt out figures for last spring, several news accounts reveal that the number will remain high.

And yet these draft ESSA regulations could allow the Commissioner to label any schools with opt out rates over 5% as needing Comprehensive or Targeted Support, require them to use Title I funds to lower these rates, and even close these schools and/or convert them to charter schools.

None of these provisions are required by the ESSA law, none of them would improve the learning conditions for NY state children, and all of them contradict earlier statements from the Board of Regents that schools with high opt out rates would not be punished.

I strongly urge you to delete these provisions from the proposed regulations, and allow parents to opt out of the state exams if they so choose, as ESSA allows.

I also urge you to fundamentally revamp the state exams and the way in which they are scored, as well as the Common Core standards on which they are based, to improve their fairness, reliability, validity, and diagnostic utility, and ensure that they are less onerous and stressful for children.

Not only would this help improve learning conditions throughout the state, but it would be the best way to persuade me and other parents to allow our children to take these exams again. 

Yours sincerely,

[name, address and email]

Why does NYSED want to punish schools for Opt Out? from Mr Ed on Vimeo.

Class Size Matters & NYSAPE protest punitive regs allowing the Commissioner to intervene in schools with high opt out rates, withhold funds or even close them

Update: the comment period has been extended through August 17.  For more on this issue see here.

This afternoon, Class Size Matters and NYS Allies for Public Education sent the below letter to the Commissioner Elia and the NYS Board of Regents, expressing our strong objections to the draft ESSA regulations that were released last month.  

These regulations violate assurances that were given parents that NYSED would continue to respect their rights to opt their children out of the state exams.  Instead the regs would allow the Commissioner to wrongly identify their children's schools in need of "Comprehensive Support," withhold Title One funds and even close these schools or turn them into charters if the opt out rates were judged too high.  NYSUT, the state teachers union, sent a similar letter of protest on May 29.

The Regents will be discussing these regs at their meeting on Monday, June 11.   Feel free to contact Elia at Commissioner@nysed.gov or your Regents member to make your voices heard.   You can also submit comments through July 9 August 17 to ESSAREGCOMMENT@nysed.gov .

How NY & Other States Should Count Opt-Outs in the New School Accountability System

Cross-posted on NYSAPE's website.

Below is a memo that Class Size Matters and NY State Allies for Public Education sent to Commissioner Elia and the NY Board of Regents last week, on what may seem like an arcane and technical subject but is actually critical to ensure that opt-out students aren't counted as failing in the new State Accountability system for schools under ESSA.

ESSA, or Every Student Succeeds Act , passed last year by Congress, was an attempt to move away from the overly-prescriptive No Child Left Behind law and the even more prescriptive NCLB waivers imposed by Arne Duncan.  Not only does ESSA authorize states to allow parents to opt their children out of exams with no fear of consequences, but it also specifically bars the Secretary of Education from telling a state how school participation rates must be factored into its accountability system, as the memo points out.

And yet then-Secretary John B. King and the accountability hawks managed to slip a poison pill into the law: that for the academic component of the system, at least 95% of all students in the testing grades must be included in the denominator -- whether they took the state exams or not.

This provision appears to be written with the goal of forcing schools to try to force parents to make their children take the tests - lest the schools be counted as failing.  Since many NY schools had opt-out rates of 20 percent or more, this would incorrectly identify many otherwise successful schools as low performing and thus in need of comprehensive improvement and support.

What we point out below is that though the denominator may be specified in the law, there is nothing that specifies the numerator.  Thus, we propose that instead of counting opt-out students as having failed the state exams for the purpose of rating the school, the state should insert into the numerator test scores that are average for other students at the school or for their subgroup.

If and when we receive a response from the Commissioner or the Board of Regents we will let you know.  Meanwhile, this memo could be useful for advocates and parents in other states who don't want their children's schools unfairly penalized on the basis of high opt-rates.

Some highlights from the interviews for Regents applicants, including a former NYC principal -- and a correction

Update: please note the correction below re my misinterpretation of Ben Shuldiner's view of the DOE teacher data reports.

The  interviews of the Regents candidates are now posted online.  Two seats are open due to retirements, in Queens and the Lower Hudson valley; and five Regents are re-applying as their terms are up.  The Board of Regents is very powerful, sets educational policies for the state, and soon will be selecting a new Commissioner of Education as our  embattled former Commissioner John King resigned in December to take a job with Sec. of Education Arne Duncan.  

The Regent members are voted upon by the NY Assembly and the Senate, joined together as one body.  Because the Assemblymembers outnumber the Senators and the Democrats in the Assembly hold the majority, that means the Democratic Assemblymembers have the decision-making power. Traditionally, Board members have been automatically re-appointed unless they choose to retire; but  last year, Regent Jackson from the Albany area was replaced because of dissatisfaction of the Assemblymembers in his region. Here are highlights I gleaned from some of the interviews on hot-button issues:

• Long time Regent Robert Bennett who has served on the Regents for 20 years, and is reapplying for a seat in the Buffalo area, claimed that former Commissioner King was a "good listener" & said his view of King was "very positive."

• Judy Chin, former NYC superintendent, nominated for the open Queens seat, was critical of the whole idea of national standards, said she was against hi-stakes testing, calling them a “gotcha game” that had taken all the joy out of learning, and pointed out that charter schools operate under vastly different rules. 

• Judith Johnson, former Superintendent of Peekskill and Mount Vernon, for the vacant Lower Hudson seat as long-time Reent Hary Phillips is retiring , has a strong resume and made a convincing critique of high-stakes testing and teacher bashing.  Judith spoke of standards needing to be evidence- based and the importance of midway corrections when policies are not working. She was particularly eloquent on the importance of arts education.  

• Lisa Litvin, attorney and PTA leader, a candidate for the same seat, spoke about funding cuts, testing, and Common Core.  As to Common Core, she said, any other organization that took a brand new unpiloted system as the Common Core would be derelict in its duties if they refused to review it. She said the Regents should put a panel together with educators and lawmakers and experts and see if the Common Core standards are actually working.

• Ben Shuldiner, former principal at High School for Public Service: Heroes of Tomorrow in Brooklyn who now teaches at Hunter College, is applying for the same Lower Hudson seat as Johnson and Litvin.  He said that the school that he founded in 2003 had attained a graduation rate of 98% compared to the 23% of Wingate HS, the large school it was replacing, despite having the “same students”.  Yet for at least the first several years, these small schools were allowed to openly exclude ELLs and special needs students.  See this report on the exclusion of ELLs  and this article about the legal complaint filed in 2006 with the Civil rights office of the US Department of Education by Prof. David Bloomfield, at the time the president of the Citywide Council on HS.

Even now, according to Inside Schools: “Although the school accepts students who score a Level 2 or higher on state exams, many students arrive performing at grade level and there are fewer students who require special education services than at most schools…Admissions: Students must score at least a Level 2 on state math and ELA exams and have a 75 average in core middle school subjects. Priority goes to Brooklyn students.”

Asked about how his school achieved such high graduation rates, Shuldiner said “it all boils down to one thing and one thing only, the belief that all children can learn.  All children are going to graduate and go to college.  You change the conversation.”   He implied the problem with Wingate was that the faculty there had “given up.”   He added that even with the higher standards of the Common Core, they could have achieved the same graduate rate; only they would have to work harder. 

His goal would be to leave the high-performing districts in Lower Hudson off the hook in terms of the statewide accountability system:  “If things are going well, we don’t want to be so punitive for you.” Only if “schools are failing” should the state come in to regulate.  [Yet as Assemblymember Pat Fahey from Albany pointed out, the only reason there was widespread protests against these damaging policies is that every school in the state was in the same boat.]

He said as a Regent, he would work to counter the attack on teachers, and “show love and respect for teaching profession.”   He added that he didn’t support the Governor’s proposals to revamp the teacher evaluation system to take decisions out of hands of superintendents and use a metric that relied too much on test results: “We shouldn’t just rely on exams or outside vantage points.” 

Yet when the teacher data reports were produced under Klein in NYC– based 100% on value-added test scores rather than the 50% now proposed by Cuomo– Shuldiner said the ratings should be released to the public.  As quoted in City Limits at the time:  “Principal Ben Shuldiner of the High School for Public Service: Heroes of Tomorrow School in Crown Heights says the public should know how teachers are graded.”

CORRECTION: I just heard from Helen Zelon , the author of the City Limits article quoted above.  Apparently, Shuldiner meant that the formula behind the teacher evaluation grading system should have been fully transparent, not that the individual ratings of teachers should have ever been made public.  My apologies to Mr. Shuldiner.  Here is what Helen now writes about his attitude at the time:

"He was never in favor of publicly rating (or berating) teachers in any shape or form -- only committed to transparency and, as we all felt from time to time, flummoxed by the double-talk and lack of candor.  I think that you understood a somewhat opposite meaning, which is ironic, given his staunch and strident opposition."

All the interviews can be seen at this link – they should be livestreamed by the Legislature; but instead they are being made available to the public thanks to Mert Melfa, videographer extraordinaire.

Sign our petition to Commissioner King and the Board of Regents on the need to protect student privacy!

UPDATE:  Parent leaders from throughout the state sent Commissioner King and the Board of Regents a letter April 29, 2014 with the same message;  the letter is posted here. 

Though NY State was finally forced to sever its contract with inBloom, and inBloom has announced it is closing its doors, there are still many threats to student privacy that the new state law did not address, as well as the huge number of vendors eager to get their hands on our children's  personal data.  The new law requires that the Commissioner appoint a privacy officer who will write a parent bill of rights.  We must ensure that this privacy officer creates a bill of rights that respects parents and provides them with the ability to protect their children's privacy and safety. Please read the petition to Commissioner King and the Regents posted below and sign it here.

---------

To Commissioner King and the Board of Regents:

For more than two years, since the state entered into a data-sharing agreement with inBloom, you have refused to notify the public, hold hearings, or even answer parents’ questions about your plans to disclose the personal information of their children to this corporation.  Your lack of respect for student privacy and parental concerns was also made clear by the fact New York was the last state among nine to sever its relationship to inBloom and the ONLY one in which a law had to be passed to do this.

Now that inBloom is closing its doors and the new state law contains a range of new privacy protections, including a privacy officer who will develop a parent bill of rights, we urge you to demonstrate a new transparency and accountability by taking the following steps:

1-    Minimize the state’s collection and sharing of personal student data and maximize the opportunities for parental notification and consent;

2-    Appoint an independent privacy advocate as your privacy officer, rather than someone from  inside the NYS Education Department or from the corporate world;

3-    Hold public hearings and elicit comments and suggestions from parents and other stakeholders as to the parent bill of rights and the regulations that will enact the new law, while also encouraging the public to submit their comments online and posting them;

4-    Appoint an advisory board of parents, advocates, educators, administrators and privacy experts to guide your work going forward and to provide independent oversight for the state’s P20 “cradle to the grave” student tracking system, that is designed to collect and link personal data on children from many state agencies;

5-  Immediately post any and all contracts in which the State is providing personal student data  to vendors and other third parties– including your agreement with the PARCC consortium that is developing the new tests that will replace the state exams.

These agreements should delineate exactly which data elements are being disclosed to third parties, what restrictions have been placed on their use,  whether the third parties are barred from redisclosing the data without parental consent, what security and encryption protections are being used, and when the data will be destroyed.

If you take the steps outlined above,  it will help demonstrate a new acknowledgement on your part that parents have a legitimate interest in the privacy and security of their children, which must be respected rather than ignored.

Sincerely yours,
Sign here

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - NYSAPE Urges Legislators to Cast No Vote for Incumbents at Board of Regents Election if Nominated

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:  February 25, 2014

More information contact:

Eric Mihelbergel (716) 553-1123; nys.allies@gmail.com

Lisa Rudley (917) 414-9190; nys.allies@gmail.com

NYS Allies for Public Education (NYSAPE) www.nysape.org

NYSAPE Urges Legislators to Cast No Vote for Incumbents at Board of Regents Election if Nominated

New York State Allies for Public Education (NYSAPE), a coalition of 45 organizations from around the state, is urging New Yorkers to contact their Legislators to attend the joint Legislative session on Tuesday, March 11 during which four Regent board members will be selected.  Although the four Regent incumbents, Cea, Cottrell, Jackson, and Norwood have applied to retain their seats, parents, educators, and community members are asking their Legislators to vote “No” to any incumbent who is re-nominated.  NYSAPE will be keeping score of how each Legislator votes at www.nysape.org

Parents across New York State have expressed outrage at the Board of Regents’ failure to respond to the concerns of both parents and educators. The incumbent Regent candidates have failed to take action to amend current policies or speak out against them.  The recent recommendations of the Regents’ Taskforce Report did little to address the critical problems associated with the Common Core standards, the flawed modules, high stakes testing, or student data sharing. According to South Side High School principal Carol Burris, “The so-called delay in full implementation of high school graduation Common Core standards was a political ploy. First, the Common Core Regents exams were not delayed—students will begin taking them this spring.  Second, the new “passing scores” had never been established—and with good reason. If those two scores (75 on the English Regents and 80 on a Math Regents) were put in place, our graduation rate would plummet to 35%.”

Last week, the State Education Department also announced that they plan to upload sensitive, personal student data to inBloom, starting in July.  New York is the only state of the nine original inBloom participants not to pull out completely or put their data sharing plans on indefinite hold.

In recent weeks, Legislators had the opportunity to interview both new applicants and the incumbent candidates for the four open positions on the Board of Regents. “It is inconceivable to think that Legislators would vote for an incumbent simply out of deference to his or her previous service. I watched the interviews, I read the Regents Taskforce Report. I know that the Regents Cea, Cottrell, Jackson, and Norwood are not the best candidates for the job and do not deserve to be re-appointed. The future of public education in this state hangs in the balance and this vote will help influence how thousands of parents in turn cast their votes come November,” said Bianca Tanis, parent and co-founding member of NYSAPE.

"I would urge our Legislators to show up and vote,” said Eric Mihelbergel, Ken-Ton public school parent and founding member of NYSAPE. “They are more than aware of parent concerns and as elected officials, I am hopeful that members of the Senate and Assembly will carry out the wishes of their constituents to use this election as an opportunity to exert their influence to bring change to current policies and safeguard our children’s education.”

###