Nat Hentoff
Testing to Create Dropouts?
Playing the Numbers Game for Kids' Futures
September 12th, 2003 3:00 PM
Village Voice

Anthony Alvarado was a New York City schools chancellor who knew a lot about 
how to motivate a student to learn how to learn so that it becomes a 
lifelong adventure. During his tenure, I visited Alvarado's office at the 
old Board of Education Livingston Street building in Brooklyn. The citywide 
reading scores had just come in, and there had been a significant rise.

But Tony seemed down, and I asked him why. "When," he said, "do you teach 
them how to think?" He knew the false positives of collective high test 
scores in a school or district or in the system. As Andrew Wolf wrote in The 
New York Sun (October 4-6, 2002): "The best schools are not necessarily 
those that score highest, but rather those that achieve the greatest 
improvement of their individual students."

Wolf continued: "Only if we look at the schools by this measure can we 
evaluate the efficacy of the curriculum and teaching methods they employ."

In the October 25, 2002, Voice, I wrote about disturbing early signs of 
educational dysfunction in the new chancellor, Joel Klein. In a September 25 
front-page story in The New York Times, Klein had been quoted as saying 
briskly: "Raising test scores should be the paramount goal of city 
educators." That alone was an ominous augury for the future, but then Klein 
actually said that he had no objections to teachers "teaching to the test. . 
. . It is the way our system is measured. This is a system of accountability 
and we need to conform our efforts."

It was then that Mayor Bloomberg, had he known anything about education, 
would have realized that his choice for chancellor could well deny him 
re-election because of the even worse state the city schools would be in by 
that time.

In The New York Times' invaluable series (July 31 and August 1) on the many 
thousands of public school students being pushed out of school because their 
test scores would reflect poorly on principals and superintendents, Tamar 
Lewin and Jennifer Medina omitted Klein's specific contribution to the 
growing number of push-outs.

Writing in the October 25 Voice ("The High-Stakes Testing Trap"), I noted 
that Klein was "already making a significant mistake by deciding to give 
superintendents bonuses of up to $40,000 based on improved test scores in 
their districts. Before that [with Klein's support] principals have been 
getting $15,000 bonuses for higher test scores in their schools. But what of 
the many kids who will still fail the tests? The only bonuses should be for 
individual teachers who actually make a difference. The United Federation of 
Teachers opposes this." (Rudy Giuliani had started the bonuses.)

Of course, the high-stakes-tests pressures on principals and superintendents 
began before Joel Klein joined the clueless cheerleaders of that obsession. 
New York State's commissioner of education, Richard Mills, is a leading 
perpetrator of dropouts by this method, as is George W. Bush, whose "No 
Child Left Behind" legislation, based on repeated collective testing, will 
in fact leave behind many children for whom college will be merely a mirage.

In the series on New York City push-outs in the Times, Don Freeman, who 
retired last year as principal of Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School in 
the Bronx, said something Joel Klein should have heard before he assumed he 
was knowledgeable enough to run the city's school system:

"Ten years ago you could focus on the kids. The pressures were not the same, 
and you could take some risks. Now you're supposed to focus on the numbers."

Now, finally acknowledging how many students have been told that, in 
essence, they're too dumb to stay in school, Klein has told principals:

"It is a disservice to students and ourselves . . . to rely on shortcuts or 
play numbers games in order to make things look better than they really 
are." He says he is now monitoring that "disservice." With what punishment 
for the perpetrators?

But Klein has shown no indication that he is recovering from his addiction 
to high-stakes tests. At least he owes the parents of the disappeared 
students an honest report on how many youngsters, by name, were pushed out 
and by whom. As the Times series showed, it's difficult to know the exact 
numbers because there are so many different codes in the lost students' 
records to disguise which were pushed out of their schools rather than 
having moved away or transferred to parochial or other private schools.

And there's probably no way to find out how many were told by their teachers 
and principals that they were "too old" to keep on keeping on^×and were not 
informed that state law gives them the legal right to stay in school until 
they are 21.

The Times revealed that when the Advocates for Children class-action suit on 
push-out began in January, Federal District Court Judge Jack Weinstein^×who 
should have been on the United States Supreme Court years ago^×"ordered the 
Department of Education to send out hundreds of letters to students who had 
been discharged from [Franklin K.] Lane [High School] since January 2000." 
The letter told them their rights to stay in school, asked how and why they 
stopped attending Lane, and what they've been doing since.

More than 100 students answered, and some joined the lawsuit, but not all 
the responses to the judge's letter have yet been tallied. Has Klein seen 
Weinstein's letter and the responses so far?

New York City high schools discharged more than 55,000 students from high 
schools during the 2000-01 school year. Is Klein going to send out letters 
to those students and ask how many were pushed out, by whom, and where they 
are now? Are any of the teachers and principals going to be made accountable 
for not telling these "undesirables" their legal right to not be thrown out 
of school?

And specifically, what kind of system is Klein putting in place to check on 
whether the push-outs are continuing, and where?

In the August 7 Daily News, Elisa Hyman, deputy director of Advocates for 
Children of New York and the lawyer in charge of the class-action suit, 
advocates "better funding for instruction, remedial help, truancy-prevention 
services and facilities such as science labs." Also attention to kids with 
disabilities, including, I would add, hearing and vision problems.

But how about bringing back Tony Alvarado as chancellor? And will the state 
board of regents replace Richard Mills with a commissioner to whom 
high-stakes testing is not a fundamental religion? And what's happening to 
the Franklin K. Lane students abandoned by the school system?