Joyce and Megan's story with a (somewhat) happy ending for this holiday season
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Megan Marrera credit: NY Post |
Here is the story of a Queens parent, Joyce Caba, who refused to allow her honor-roll daughter, Megan, to be denied her chance to graduate from middle school after the DOE claimed she had flunked her 8th grade English Language Arts exam.
We first found out about Megan’s plight from a comment Joyce left on our NYC Public School Parents blog after the state ELA exams were held last spring, an exam which many parents, students, and teachers found to be flawed and confusing --and which included the now-infamousPineapple question, on the very same 8thgrade exam which Megan supposedly failed.
Everything that follows is just as Joyce wrote it, with a few typos corrected and edited for length, along with the NY Post articles which resulted from her emails to me. Megan's story, as well as the thousands of other students who were unjustly prevented from graduating with their class, underscores how the fate of no child should ever be decided on a single exam--and the city’s policy to hold back students on the basis of unreliable test scores is not unfair but contrary to research. In a holiday spirit, I thought I would recount Megan's story, as her mom told it to me, because there is a partially happy ending, as