Here is a great interview of the New York State Commissioner of Education by the Poughkeepsie Journal on April 14th.
It's long but well-worth the time to watch and listen.
The questions are direct and cover many concerns that have been raised about receivership, testing, teacher evaluations, and more. The answers are often evasive but there is satisfaction in hearing the questions at least being asked.
Among some important highlights: Ms. Elia seems to firmly believe a teacher evaluation system has to produce positive outcomes, be created in conjunction with teachers, be done at a local level, and be for the benefit of students. She agrees there's more work to be done. She says there's a plan to give parents more useful information on their child's tests results, and she thinks there needs to be a partnership with universities to ensure students graduating from high school are in fact "college ready."
Things not asked or not answered clearly - what about the missing pages in the ELA test booklets this year? What impact does the missing page have on test validity? Was she aware some teachers knew and were able to alert their students to the missing page, and other teachers didn't know until the test booklets were collected? What impact does students sitting for vastly different amounts of time have on the scores they get? (Is a "3" from a student who took 70 minutes to take a test equivalent to the "3" another students took 3 hours to get?) How can she keep saying teachers reviewed and approved all the test questions on all the tests, thereby implying all the test questions are now developmentally appropriate and well-written (a major concern of all stakeholders) when in fact the teacher reviewers could only replace bad questions from a list of Pearson created questions that could also be bad but maybe not AS bad... This strikes me as a tad disingenuous...
Watch the video and then add your own comments to the PJ page. Maybe the paper will start covering the story of missing test pages and the travesty of un-timed tests.
The public MUST know.
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