Sunday, August 17, 2014

NYC Public School Parents: The evidence accumulates not to trust data from NY State Education Department

NYC Public School Parents: The evidence accumulates not to trust data from NY State Education Department:



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.

The next day, Brown’s article appeared in the Daily News, but the story had now changed:

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: