Mayor Mike talks about cutting carbon emissions while cutting school budgets

While Bloomberg was playing world leader, speechifying at the UN about global warming, the Daily News reported on the multi-million dollar costs of grading the state standardized tests.

Unmentioned is the cost of all the data-inquiry teams working overtime in every school, and the huge expense of time and money resulting from the periodic assessments, given five times a year -- with bubble sheets picked up to be scored and scanned by private couriers . Not to mention that multi-million dollar boondoggle, ARIS. The DOE accountability initiative, according to its czar Jim Liebman, is costing at least $100 million per year.

This is obscene, especially at a time when more than $100 million is being cut from school budgets in the middle of the year-- with an additional $324 million in cuts planned for next year.

Check out what principals are saying about the effects of these cuts at the InsideSchools blog.

Periodic assessments: a waste of precious time and dollars

Great piece by Jackie Bennett on the UFT blog Edwize about the so-called periodic assessments – which start next week. She says they will produce “junk data” while taking away valuable time for teaching and learning.

If you’ve ever looked at the stuff coming out of the Accountability office, you’d know there’s no one there that understands either teaching or the limits of testing.

She also says that as part of this program, “Multiple choice sheets will be picked up by courier and graded by the DoE’s vendor.”

Can you imagine the cost of this exercise in futility! Couriers picking up millions of bubbled in answer sheets in hundreds of NYC schools, and scanning them to get the results five days later – all happening five to six times per year?

Not to mention all the "Senior Achievement Facilitators" and "data inquiry teams" in each school, working overtime to analyze this junk data in order to squeeze better test scores out of our kids.

It's no wonder they're trying to steal millions of dollars from our kids’ CFE dividend to pay for this ridiculous distraction.