The evidence accumulates not to trust data from NY State Education Department
On Friday afternoon I got a call from the Daily News reporter Stephen Rex Brown, who told me that the NY State Education Department had provided him with data purporting to show that this spring, more than 22,000 NYC kids opted out of the NY state ELA exams and more than 26,000 the math exams – out of a total of 66,000 statewide. Here is the data straight from NYSED:
ELA | 2013 | 2014 | ||
Region | Count | Count | % State Non-Participation | |
State Wide | 13120 | 55564 | ||
Nassau | 1605 | 6493 | 11.7% | |
Suffolk | 1316 | 8866 | 16.0% | |
Westchester | 399 | 8827 | 15.9% | |
NYC | 6003 | 22656 | 40.8% | |
Rest of State | 5505 | 8722 | 15.7% | |
Math | 2013 | 2014 | ||
Region | Count | Count | % State Non-Participation | |
State Wide | 15164 | 65617 | ||
Nassau | 1978 | 12876 | 19.6% | |
Suffolk | 1806 | 18888 | 28.8% | |
Westchester | 456 | 1645 | 2.5% | |
NYC | 4358 | 26949 | 41.1% | |
Rest of State | 10924 | 5259 | 8.0% |
As you can see, the number of “non-participating” NYC students appears to have ballooned four times or more since 2013, so it was unlikely to be explained away by truancy or simple absence.
As much as I would have liked to believe the opt out figures were this high, I expressed skepticism to Stephen– and explained that I thought the numbers of students opting out had been far higher on Long Island and Westchester than in NYC. In the suburbs, in general, parents are more organized, enjoy well-funded public schools with high college-going and graduation rates, and have erupted in justified incredulity when the state tried to convince them their schools were failing and their kids were not “college and career ready.”
Stephen also told me that the state was holding firm, despite the fact that the city was arguing that less than 2,000 students had opted out, according to their data.
State Education officials were scrambling to determine Friday why test data appeared to show more than 20,000 city students did not take math and English exams…. The figures were more than triple the previous year’s numbers. State officials suspect there was an error in the way a large group of city students were coded in the state database of third- through eighth-graders who took the tests.
My response to all this: with such erratic and unreliable information, how can anyone trust any of the test score data from NYSED?
I admit to being discouraged by the sadly ritualistic appearance of Mayor de Blasio and the Chancellor Farina, celebrating the small increase in scores in the city based on these highly faulty and unreliable exams as evidence of progress. The Mayor was even moved to give credit to Bloomberg for his support of Common Core and his supposed “investment in our schools”, though school budgets have been cut to the NYC Public School Parents: The evidence accumulates not to trust data from NY State Education Department: