Standardized testing: When a picture is NOT worth 1,000 words.

“Could you take my picture
‘cuz I won’t remember…”

(“Take a Picture,” Filter)

An article by Motoko Rich in the New York Times makes the claim that it is easier to achieve gains in math than in reading, as indicated by test scores.

I repeat, as indicated by test scores.

On the surface, this makes some degree of intuitive sense; math questions are typically about “the right answer,” and it is easier to program students with a repeatable mechanical set of steps to reach a right answer to a math problem than it is to train the mind to perform the feats of abstract thought necessary to satisfy the typical question on most ELA assessments.

Rich illustrates this phenomenon thus:

During a fifth-grade reading class, students read aloud from “Bridge to Terabithia,” by Katherine Paterson. Naomi Frame, the teacher, guided the students in a close reading of a few paragraphs. But when she asked them to select which of two descriptions fit Terabithia, the magic kingdom created by the two main characters, the class stumbled to draw inferences from the text. 

Later, in math class, the same students had less difficulty following Bridget McElduff as she taught a lesson on adding fractions with different denominators. At the beginning of the class, Ms. McElduff rapidly called out equations involving two fractions, and the students eagerly called back the answers.

But I just can’t get over the grotesque leaps of illogic that this article makes.  A few samples:

“[T]eachers are finding it easier to help students hit academic targets in math than in reading, an experience repeated in schools across the country,” which begs the question: Are the “academic targets” actual learning and demonstration of mastery and understanding, or are they simply test scores? Not the same thing.

“[S]tudents … in KIPP middle schools for three years had test scores that indicated they were about 11 months — or the equivalent of more than a full grade level — ahead of the national average in math,”  which makes the implicit assumption, signaled by that word again – indicated – that test scores are a reliable and predictable and robust indicator of actual mathematical achievement.

“Studies have repeatedly found that ‘teachers have bigger impacts on math test scores than on English test scores,’ said Jonah Rockoff, an economist at Columbia Business School,” which at least comes right out and admits that it’s only talking about test scores, and not about the actual educational experience of the child.

“Over time, teachers hope to develop the same results in reading that they have produced in math. Already, students at high school campuses in the Uncommon network in Brooklyn and Newark post average scores on SAT reading tests that exceed some national averages,” which again, emphasizes the primacy of test scores FIRST, students SECOND.

This is not as it should be. For one thing, I categorically reject the notion that a single standardized test score in any way equates to the child’s experience over a year’s worth of math classes. New York State is a sterling example of the pedagogically self-destructive redactio ad absurdum of this line of thinking, as I blogged recently (redacted here, click on this link to read the whole post):

When the focus is “doing what you have to do to get students to pass,” the focus is not on learning, building understanding, or scaffolding for continued study. The focus is instead on a short-term, quick-fix, half-assed solution that benefits NO ONE, and the illusion of the higher pass rate, suggesting a much higher quality of education that what is actually transpiring, is convincing enough for education stakeholders to look the other way. 

With regard to the New York State Algebra Regents [state-standardized final assessment], [what you see] is not [what you get]. On the New York State Algebra Regents exam, students are given a score out of 100, a "scaled score," and it is very easy (and most people, even many teachers and guidance counselors make this mistake) to think of this as a percentage – an 83 on the Regents means you got an 83% on the test. That is SO not the case.

View this chart for the June 2011 administration of the NYS Algebra Regents. A total of 87 points were available to be earned by students on the exam. 65% of 87 is about 56.5, the number of points out of 87 that would need to be earned by a student for the Regents Exam score to actually reflect the percentage correct that the student achieved. But oh, no. A [minimum] passing grade of 65 is granted by a student’s successfully earning a whopping 31 points (the "raw score"). That’s a passing grade for UNDER 36% correct. And what’s worse, standard policy in New York State is that even if a student fails the entire course, all four academic quarters, a passing grade on the Regents Exam is de facto full passing credit earned for the course.

A student could do nothing from September through May, cram for the Regents exam in June, do a 40% job, and PASS THE WHOLE YEAR based on that 40% on that one end-of-year assessment. And the Algebra teacher gets to brag about how high her passing rate is. And she will, no doubt.

As I have blogged, and re-posted, many times before:

Popular myth and the standardized-test culture of American public education would have one think that education is about the massive and rapid accumulation of content, the purpose of which is to succeed on a state test; the error of this thinking is that it relegates the education process itself to a secondary status, making the test score the “prize” of education. Nothing could be more removed from the truth. We have become a nation of pure data, of test scores and dropout rates, ciphers which are at best simplified abstractions of critically important ideas – but raw numbers do not tell the whole story. Any educational process or notion that has at its heart the notion that it is the data that needs to be treated, and not the students, is fundamentally flawed.

Motoko Rich doesn’t realize this, but she accidentally stumbles on these points early in her article in the words of David Javiscas, a seventh-grade reading teacher at Troy Prep Middle School, near Albany (emphasis mine):

Helping students to puzzle through different narrative perspectives or subtext or character motivation, though, can be much more challenging. “It could take months to see if what I’m teaching is effective,” he said.

You get that, Ms. Rich? It could take months. Teaching is a process; learning is a process. A test is at best a snapshot (not a movie), and sadly, most of this nation’s "cameramen" are not themselves educators, and are not fit to wield the cameras.

Have you ever taken a bad photograph of a normally photogenic person? When my family goes to Sears or JC Penney to get family portraits done, the photographer typically takes multiple shots of the same pose. Why? Because not every snapshot reflects the right image. How is a test any different?

And this article’s insistence, both explicit and implicit, that test scores are the de facto equivalent of achievement is a sad sign of the times; thanks to all this Race to the Top fueled testing, the way students are taught nowadays, we have to take their picture, ‘cuz they won’t remember…

Hey, Dad, what do you think about your schools now?


I'm just A.S.K.ing...

Race to the Top and the 10th Amendment -- a look back at 2009

Did you ever wish you could go back in time?  Here, let me help you. 

Reprinted below is a discussion of an editorial from August 25, 2009, written by Paul Riede, who often writes on educational matters for Syracuse's Post Standard newspaper.  (Link to the article here, although most of it is reproduced in segments in this post.)

Prophetically, he titled his piece "State education law misguided, but so are Obama requirements." I have already blogged about Obama's bizarre flip-flop on the relationship between testing and accountability, as well as the eerie stranglehold, the near-total dominion, that the wicked trinity of NCLB, Race to the Top and Common Core have on our beloved profession.

But I have to admit, when I was teaching in Syracuse in 2009, and there were whispers of, "Hey, there's a ton of money available for schools that increase student performance," my ears perked up a bit.  I think everyone was a bit suspicious, but I'm not sure anyone really saw what was coming.

Well, except apparently Paul Riede.

Riede’s 2009 approach to RttT was grounded firmly in that age-old GOP rallying cry: “States’ Rights!” In making his claim, he presents a middle ground that I want to discuss for a moment, that many anti-RttT, anti-Common Core, anti-NCLB people, including myself, often ignore:  that it’s important not to conflate the lambasting of current methods of implementation of Common Core and rubrics of Race to the Top funds dissemination (which is thoroughly justified) with the rejection of all notion of content-area standards (which is foolish).

Riede dodged this false dilemma, this either-fallacy, by saying (emphasis mine):

Clearly, student test scores should not be the only thing used to evaluate teachers. School officials who give too much weight to such tests to the exclusion of the many other means of evaluation would be doing a disservice to teachers and their students. In important ways, an overemphasis on test scores limits teacher creativity and encourages a "teaching to the test" syndrome that can stultify a learning environment. But to ban administrators from even considering how students do on such tests -- the most important of which measure basic math and literacy skills -- is ludicrous.

That is particularly true as schools gain the ability to use the tests to track students' progress from year to year. If one teacher manages to get most of his or her students to make a year's worth of academic gains while the teacher next door gets only half those results with similar students, that's something administrators should be able to consider.

In this, he made a valid point. He is rejecting the extremist knee-jerk reaction position, which is, in general, a rhetorically sensible thing to do.  The rabid sentiments expressed by educators (again, including myself) often do not allow for such nuance. Political activism typically pushes one to the most extreme version of one’s own position, as combatants strive to distance themselves as much as possible from their ideological opponents. Of course test scores should be looked at – somehow – and of course they should not be the sole basis for decision-making, nor should they be disproportionately, or even heavily, weighted (as they so often seem to be).  I’m not sure that even the most venomous test-haters out there would call for the elimination of all testing, so Riede’s criticism seems at least partially valid.

Riede was consistent in his moderate stance in criticizing the state of New York for its attempted response to RttT:

The Obama administration is taking aim at New York and other states that ban public school officials from considering student test scores when they evaluate teachers. The administration is right to question states about such counterproductive laws, passed at the insistence of teachers' unions. But it is dead wrong to punish them over what should remain state policy decisions.

Obama Education Secretary Arne Duncan has proposed a "Race to the Top Fund" that would divvy up some $4.3 billion in federal stimulus funds to states that are pursuing school reform and have innovative plans for further improvement. But under Duncan's plan, not a cent of the money would go to states that ban the use of test scores in teacher evaluations. Placing restrictions on charter schools could also hurt a state's chances. That would appear to leave New York out of the running for any of the money, along
with California and a few other states.

Last year, the New York State Legislature and Gov. David Paterson succumbed to pressures from teachers' unions and approved a two-year ban on the use of student test scores in teacher-tenure decisions. The unions argued that the tests were not designed as teacher evaluation tools and should not be used as such.

Riede called the state’s argument “silly” and its ban on considering testing in teacher evaluation a “counterproductive law,” and expressed a wish that New York would lift their ban, for pedagogical reasons.  I call Riede's snap judgment into question here; there is nothing silly about arguing that "the tests were not designed as teacher evaluation tools and should not be used as such." And I think most, if not all, teachers would line up behind that statement quite happily.

By his comment, Riede seems to want to say that test scores are, or ought to be, one of many rubrics to be used in concert to assess students and teacher performance, and it’s hard to argue with that stance, although I think the more important factor is growth, as opposed to a single, decontextualized raw test score, as I try to illustrate here: 

Recently, I had a girl recently in an English 10 course who, at the start of the year, could not write a coherent paragraph, much less a coherent sentence.  It was an Inclusion class, and she was a special-needs student, with major written/expressive language difficulties.  But I and my aide, as well as the support systems the school provided, worked with her all year. She passed the course, albeit just barely, with some modifications for her needs - allotted time, occasional alternative assessments, etc...  -- but no modification in the rigor and standards I required for passing the course.  In other words, the content standards remained fixed, but we adapted our pedagogy to help her rise to meet them, we did not lower our standards for her convenience and the school's passing rate numbers.  At the end of the year, she took the New York State English Language Arts Regents Exam, which at the time was a 6-hour test given over two days (and because of her special needs, she would have had double the time, so imagine being forced to take a 12-hour test in two marathon 6-hour sessions).  This test had not one but FOUR full-length essays on it.  Click here, and look at June 2010, to see what I mean.

Passing was a 65.  She got a 59 on the exam.  I was ecstatic.  This was a girl whose level of writing started off only slightly better than my 7-year-old daughter's (maybe not even that) who came literally within one or two rubric points out of 24 of passing a major composition test with four essays -- not only were her skills improved, but also her stamina and attention and focus, to be able to have even finished the test.  Even she was happy -- "Well, I almost passed it!" she told me, smiling.

In the eyes of the State of New York, in the eyes of the Board of Regents, and in the eyes of the administration of the Syracuse City School District, however, she (and by extension, her teacher and the aides that attended to her tutelage) was a failure.

I would rather have a class full of 25 of this girl than a class full of students who could receive easy grades of A and B, but coast comfortably to grades of C.  But of course, a teacher who had the latter would be lauded for his 100% pass rate, and a teacher with the former would be fired.

I ask you: Which one is doing the real teaching?

I support the existence of standards – national content-area standards, even, and even of tests to assess performance within those standards – but the NYS Board of Regents has gone from being a board that primarily monitors course content and testing to a Sauron-esque Master of Puppets (Lord of the Rings and Metallica in the same noun phrase – top that!) with its slimy tendrils (Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn) reaching into all areas of pedagogical practice.  Now magnify that by a factor of 50, and you have what is happening at the federal level.

Clearly, a set of standards is an essential component of any functional educational system.  I absolutely reject the Libertarian and Objectivist (yes, I know that they are philosophically divergent views, but their political positions overlap largely) notions of full school privatization and total local/parental control over all content and standards, as expressed here last year by C. Bradley Thompson: 

Just as antebellum Americans in the North had to be roused, educated, and radicalized on the evils of government-sanctioned involuntary servitude and on the need to abolish slavery, so too 21st-century Americans need to be shown the horrors of government-run, involuntary schools and persuaded to abolish them. Americans must come to see not only that the public school system is failing, but also that it cannot be reformed—because, like slavery, it is fundamentally immoral.

It might not be such a terrible thing if the Common Core standards were allowed to continue to exist, and just kind of “sat there” as guideposts, instead of being forced down teachers’ throats at the point of a gun, with financial inducements, punitive measures, implied threats and consequences, and an inordinate crush of weighty bureaucracy designed to do nothing more than fatten Pearson’s coffers and increase the extent of government control into an area where, even if you successfully made the argument that it belongs, it certainly has no expertise.

Even Riede, who (in 2009) seemed somewhat sympathetic to RttT’s mission, made this argument back in 2009, not based on the absolute evil of RttT (this was before Common Core was birthed, ravenous and already snarling, from RttT’s festering womb and began suckling on its wretched mother's wrinkled teat), but on the idea that the Federal Government is just too involved:

The New York Legislature should repeal the legislation, or at least let it expire next year. But that decision should be a state one, not a federal one. Duncan's proposal to deny millions of dollars in potential grants to states that don't comply with his policy preferences is an example of the kind of federal overreach on education that many hoped had ended with the Bush administration.

How very Tenth Amendment of him.  It is an interesting exercise in political philosophy.  The federal government created a disastrous policy and signed it into law.  A state drafted a policy defense and signed it into law, but the state’s law itself was an over-response.  The federal government responded by threatening financially devastating punitive measures against the state for blocking the will of the federal government.  Riede argued that, even though the federal policy was a bad one, the state’s defensive position was just as bad, and should be repealed.  However, he argued, it was not the federal government’s job to force or coerce that repeal, since it was a states’ rights issue.

Riede’s solution?  For Duncan to grow the hell up and not be so petty:

Duncan should reconsider the conditions on his "Race to the Top Fund" and direct the money to wherever schools and teachers are working diligently and creatively to help students succeed.

And we all know how that worked out….

Can schools be trusted to keep to rigorous content-area standards without the government heaving its weight behind them?  Should government have any say in what schools teach?  How about how schools teach? (Not the same thing – one is content, the other is pedagogy.)  And if so, how to titrate it to an acceptable level? And who decides what is an “acceptable” level? Will government ever trust schools and schoolteachers again?  Was the failure really mine that that English 10 student only pulled a 59 on her final, and is there anything government can do to make sure that such a tragedy never happens again?

If you taught in New York State in the 70s and 80s; Is my perception of the shift in the NYS Board of Regents' shift in priorities on the money, or am I misremembering a non-existent glorious past because the present has become so exaggeratedly bleak?

This is perhaps not a simple black-and-white issue, as many pundits might make it seem (even, I fear, myself at times).  Any ideas?

I’m just A.S.K.ing...

Honey, I shrunk the promise of education! (Or, “How is public education like a box of cereal?”)

First of all, let me get this out of the way: I know the difference between a simple preterit and a past participle. No comments, therefore, about why the verb in the title should be “shrank” and not “shrunk.”  If you missed the pop culture reference, I forgive you.

That bit of housekeeping aside, I want to discuss something that I have noticed lately while grocery shopping, let’s say over the last 5 years or so.  As is increasingly the pattern in my posts, I will use that to segue, rather hamfistedly perhaps, to an actual point about education or pedagogy.  It might take a thousand words, but I’ll get there.  It will be worth it, though, I promise.

I love grocery shopping.  It is almost a zen-like experience for me.  There is something calming about walking down lengthy supermarket aisles stacked 2+ meters high in colorfully packaged merchandise that just makes me smile.  I have always been this way – as a child, I used to help my mother clip coupons, and my special joy was finding great deals, even as a child, at stores that offered double, and even sometimes triple, coupons.  As such, I have always been aware of what groceries cost. Also, because I have always been a bit of a math geek, I have always comparison-shopped by “unit price.” In other words, I don’t look at the price tag on the package, I figure out the price per ounce, or liter, or serving.  This is, of course, the smart way to shop, usually.

When I see people at the grocery store filling their shopping carts full of boxes of cereal – “They’re on sale 4 for $8, that’s only two dollars a box!” – they often do not notice, and I do not tell them, because nobody appreciates a smartass, that the cereal boxes they are buying are in the 8.9 to 11.5 ounce range, much lower than the 12 to 18 ounce range they would normally purchase, so they’re actually getting significantly less food for their “great price,” making the unit cost (cost per ounce, in this case) just about the same, or in many cases, even a little worse.  Cereal companies design their boxes in such a way as the area of the front-facing panel of the box looks large, suggesting a box of cereal that contains much more product than it actually does, but the box’s front-to-back depth is reduced, or the inner bag full of cereal is not sufficiently large to use up the box’s inner volume.  In many cases, they’d be better off buying the larger box, even at the higher price. 

In fact, this is a trend on grocery store shelves.  Perhaps you have noticed it in the States as I have?
 
Do you remember about five or six years ago when a carton of ice cream was one half-gallon (two quarts)?  Try finding a half-gallon carton of ice cream nowadays. The major brands all started using 1.75-quart cartons, and now they are mostly using 1.5-quart cartons.  The prices have stayed relatively the same over the years, however; people just don’t notice often that for the same output, they’re getting less.

My favorite pasta sauce just switched from a 28-ounce package to a 24-ounce package, but the price at most stores stayed the exact same 99 cents.  For the same output, I’m getting less.

And has anyone noticed that Coca-Cola and Pepsi have started selling 1.5-liter and 1.25-liter bottles? How long do you think it will be before the 2-liter bottle is a thing of the past?

I think candy bars have gotten incrementally smaller as well – I’m pretty sure that most major American candy bar brands were around or just slightly over 2 ounces in weight; now they hover around 1.5 to 1.8 ounces.  For the same output, my sweet tooth is less satisfied, an observation only perhaps Michael Bloomberg could celebrate.

Nickels and dimes?  Hell, no.  These are very real percentages being shaved off here:

•    2 quarts ice cream to 1.75 quarts (- 12.5%)
•    2 quarts ice cream to 1.5 quarts (- 25%)
•    28 oz. pasta sauce to 24 oz. (- 14.3%)
•    2 liters soda to 1.5 liters (- 25%)
•    2.2 oz. candy bar to 1.8 oz. (- 18.2%)
•    12 oz. Cheerios to 8.9 oz. (- 25.8%)

By comparison, the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for food has gone up only 9.6% in the last 5 years.  The rate of clandestine product-shaving greatly exceeds what the rise in CPI would call for.  Consumers think they’re getting the same product for the same amount of capital outlay, but in fact, for their money, they’re getting less, even after taking into consideration the steadily rising CPI.  This deception is achieved by a process that alarmist political pundits refer to as “creeping gradualism,” the inexorable crawl towards an undesirable end, achieved in such barely detectable incremental stages as to go wholly unnoticed, even by the victims.

Okay, we have reached the segue. See, it only took 800 words! Not even a thousand.

I believe the same thing is happening in public education, courtesy of two cardinal sins educators routinely commit.

The first cardinal sin is the lowering of overall standards, resulting in the same “grade” for less effort, less work, less quality, less objective mastery of content. This is well documented, but a couple of ways this has manifested itself in my personal observation is in the substitution of so-called “alternative assessments,” typically high on creativity, but low on content and rigor.  They “look” impressive, but that parts that look impressive are often the parts that have less to do with the actual purpose of the assignment, and are more typically the “window dressing” aspects of the completed work.

Todd Oppenheimer wrote about this in his book The Flickering Mind, in a stand-alone excerpt published online that he aptly titled “Point, Click, Duh.” (I also blogged about it here.)  In it, he describes the scene in a New England classroom a decade or so ago when students in a history class were given the option to create a Power Point presentation in lieu of writing a standard research essay.  The predictable result is a perfect example of the phenomenon illustrated by my earlier cereal box comment – our willingness, eagerness, even, to be duped by appearances:

“The reports were nearly finished, and the teacher was feeling pleased with the results. When I asked to see one, she steered me to a young man whose report she felt was in particularly good shape. Sure enough, as the student clicked through the presentation, I was immediately struck by the clean graphics, the strong colors, and the digestible writing. Then, suddenly, he was done. This was the extent of his report. But its content was no deeper or more complex than what one commonly sees in civics papers done elsewhere, with pencil and paper, by seventh and eighth graders. Mystified, I asked the student how he'd used his time. He estimated having spent approximately 17 hours on the project, only seven of which had been devoted to research and writing. The rest went to refining the presentation's graphics.”

If this first sin of pedagogical “clandestine product-shaving” is the diminishing of required rigor and lowering of acceptable standards to promote the awarding of higher grades, then the second cardinal sin is its inverse. (Converse?  Contrapositive?  Crap, I should have paid more attention in Mr. Zalewski’s Geometry class back in 9th grade.  Little help?)  Namely, if a student doesn’t get the grade the teacher would like to have given him or her, since the teacher cannot go back in time to modify the standards upon which a student was graded, the teacher will simply contrive a means to modify the grade itself, to achieve the superficial illusion of having, retroactively, earned a passing grade. 

This focus on a single, final, summative datum alone is devastating to public education.  I have blogged about this before as well, here (I know, here I go again, quoting myself):

“We have become a nation of pure data, of test scores and dropout rates, ciphers which are at best simplified abstractions of critically important ideas – but raw numbers do not tell the whole story.  Any educational process or notion that has at its heart the notion that it is the data that needs to be treated, and not the students, is fundamentally flawed.”

 This second cardinal sin manifests itself in many ugly ways.

One is very simple: The teacher just gives a student an unearned passing grade in the class by fiat.  This happens all the time.  In New York, a 65 is considered passing. But if you look at the transcripts of high school students, you will see a curious and highly disproportionate number of students who managed to score exactly a 65 as their final grade in their courses.  In my experience, fully 50% or more of all grades of exactly 65 are round-ups, i.e. the student actually failed, but it was close enough to a 65 where the teacher vetoed the student's actual performance and progress and awarded a passing grade anyway. One student I had my first year teaching in New York State had seven such 65s in three years. What are the odds?

A second is more insidious – teachers teach to the borderline kids only, trusting the “smart kids” to pull through on their own grit, to boost their personal “passing rates.” As a teacher, I had many administrators and even some fellow teachers tell me that they were “not worried" about the smarter, more hardworking students in their classes – "they'll be fine” – so they spent all their time trying to get the kids with 40s and 50s (many, though not all, of whom have those grades by choice because they just don't give a hoot, or try, or care) up to a "passing" 65 so their (the teachers') pass rates could look better, because there were consequences for teachers whose pass rates seemed out of whack.

The end result of this can be seen in a single snapshot. At one high school in which I taught, in a single administration of the Algebra Regents Examination (the State Standardized Algebra final exam), NOT A SINGLE STUDENT in the whole school scored in the 90s. Contrast that with the year that I took algebra as a student: In three classes in our district that took the exam that year, perhaps total 75 students or so, not a single student scored BELOW the 90s. When the focus is “doing what you have to do to get students to pass,” the focus is not on learning, building understanding, or scaffolding for continued study. The focus is instead on a short-term, quick-fix, half-assed solution that benefits NO ONE, and the illusion of the higher pass rate, suggesting a much higher quality of education that what is actually transpiring, is convincing enough for education stakeholders to look the other way, ignorantly happy with their smaller box of cereal.

And by the way, with regard to the New York State Algebra Regents, WYS is not WYG.  This leads me to a third example of our data-cravenness and how we use it to dupe ourselves into thinking we’re getting more than we actually are: the phenomenon of the “raw” score and the “scaled” score, which exists for one purpose and one purpose only: to create a curve to mask actual performance data. 

For example, on the New York State Algebra Regents exam again, students are given a score out of 100, a "scaled score," and it is very easy (and most people, even many teachers and guidance counselors make this mistake) to think of this as a percentage – an 83 on the Regents means you got an 83% on the test, a low B, right?

That is SOOOOOO not the case.

View this chart – this is a conversion chart for the June 2011 administration of the NYS Algebra Regents.  A total of 87 points were available to be earned by students on the exam.  65% of 87 is about 56.5, the number of points out of 87 that would need to be earned by a student for the Regents Exam score to actually reflect the percentage correct that the student achieved.  But oh, no.  A passing grade of 65 is granted by a student’s successfully earning a whopping 31 points (the "raw score").  That’s a passing grade for UNDER 36% correct.

And what’s worse, standard policy in New York State is that even if a student fails the entire course, all four academic quarters, a passing grade on the Regents Exam is de facto full passing credit earned for the course.

So in other words, a student could do absolutely-feckin’-nothing  from September through May, cram for the Regents exam in June, do a 40% job, and PASS THE WHOLE YEAR based on that 40% on that one end-of-year assessment.  Guess what grade the school must put onto their transcript for the final course grade?  You got it – 65.  And the Algebra teacher gets to brag about how high her passing rate is.  And she will, no doubt.

How’s that cereal tasting, shoppers?

The high-stakes, do-or-die importance we place on that final binary – pass or no pass – sometimes makes us do things we normally might not do.  By this, I refer to my final observation (for this post) on the negative effects of wanton gradelust: outright fraud.

Empirically, grade fraud is no different than the rampant grade inflation that goes on on a regular basis in our schools, it's just more tangible and identifiable, as it is a discrete, single act, as opposed to a modus operandi. Really, how is "Teacher x erased and changed two multiple choice answers so Johnny could get a 65 instead of a 61" any different or worse than "Teacher y gave Jenny a 65 in the course even though she only earned a 61 because s/he felt bad for her?" Doomsday fiction?  Not so much:  Read and weep.

If you have children in public schools (or private schools, or charter schools, it makes no difference), then please, if you value their education, as opposed to their grades, be wary of "creeping gradualism," and don’t walk away smiling with the 8.9 ounce box of Cheerios in your cart, thinking you got a great deal.

It will only leave you, later, when it’s too late, wanting for more. 

Or am I just an alarmist?  I dunno (actually, yes, I do, but this seems to have become my regular sign-off, so I guess I’m stuck with it), I’m just A.S.K.ing…