“Grade Generously”—How the DOE Subverts Distributed Grading of Regents exams

CORRECTED and Updated: June 18, 2013

The section in red below was sent in by Philip Nobile, who given his own personal experience as a whistle-blower over a cheating incident, I guess I can't blame him for being obsessed with the issue. I suspected there was always cheating and would never whistle blow -- figure it's like baseball players on steroids -- if everyone does it everything balances out. But nowadays why let WalBloomKleinBlack get away with claiming they raised scores?

Well, I guess I don't have problems with grading generously and would think that if a kid was close to a 65 I would think about what I am doing to that kid by giving say a 64. Sorry, but I always think to give the kid the benefit of a doubt. Now if it was a 45 or 55 that is another story.

HERE IS NOBILE's UPDATE OF JUNE 18:

Suransky Reacts to Regents Grading Complaint

SCI Now Involved in the Case

DOE Trainer Mis-Identified

By Philip Nobile

At the close of my June 12 post [insert link] I urged the Chancellor to investigate a suspect training session at Jefferson High School for Assistant Principals who oversee the grading of Social Studies Regents tests at multiple locations across the city. I made the same recommendation in an e-mail to the Chancellor on the previous day.

Three days later, Senior Deputy Chancellor Polakow-Suransky replied economically: “Thank you for your email. We have referred it to the Special Commissioner of Investigation.” Signed-- “Best, Shael.”  We had spoken about Regents cheating on two occasions, once at Tweed for a couple of hours.  

Does this mean that Polakow-Suransky thinks that the APs were advised to inflate essay grades, as I argued? Or was it a pro forma referral, signifying nothing? Without an opinion from the DOE, how could cops decide whether “grade holistically and generously,” etc. was dog whistle for inflating scores, which is against the law.

There is some guidance on this point from the state: NYSED Assessment Bureau Chief Steven Katz recognized the “implication” standard in a letter to Region 8 Superintendent Marcia Lyles. (April 6, 2004) Katz gave strict instructions on how to re-investigate my cheating allegations at Cobble Hill that had been covered up by an illicit intramural inquiry run by Principal Lennel George and approved by LIS Kathy Pelles. Recognizing that cheaters might speak in code, Katz put the following question to city investigators: 

·       Were teachers doing the rescoring told directly or by implication to deliberately depart from or disregard the scoring rubrics and exemplar papers in arriving at new scores?

By this standard, what happened at Jefferson was, as I wrote, “a seminar on how to cheat.” There is nothing in the rubrics about holistics, generosity, kindness, benefits of the doubt, and getting kids 65s, etc.,

as urged by the DOE’s Social Studies Trainer.

Nora Fox, an Art Education Liaison, was mistakenly identified as the Trainer in Jefferson’s library. Ms. Fox was at the school for the May 30  session. But she did not say the words attributed to her in my post. My source was wrong. “Her name is in my notes right above the quotes I gave you,” said the source. “Maybe the Trainer mentioned Fox’s name and in the noise and confusion in the library I assumed she was naming herself.  I’m very sorry about that and I apologize to Ms. Fox.” I am sorry, too, and her name is now deleted from the corrected post. This notice has been sent to all recipients of my June 11 letter to Tweed.

The actual Trainer is known to the DOE. If a serious investigation proceeds, she needs to be asked how her instructions matched up with the rubrics for rating Social Studies essays and who prepared her to say what she said to the APs. Is there a DOE policy memo behind such extra-rubric rating considerations? Who is in charge of the whole process, etc?  

NYSED’s implication standard is enough to get the ball rolling. But Tweed should give investigators more: a clear statement that what was said at Jefferson about generous Regents grading, if it was said, is akin to tampering and requires immediate correction. I have requested such a statement from Suransky.

HERE IS NOBILE'S ORIGINAL POST:

Generously”—How the DOE Subverts Distributed Grading of Regents exams

“Grade Generously”—How the DOE Subverts Distributed Grading of Regents exams

by Philip Nobile

The DOE is ostensibly on board with the state’s new test security rules for Regents exams. Deputy Chancellor Polakow-Suransky is on record saying, “We have to remove any opportunity for any kind of misconduct. We need to make sure this is airtight the way the 3-8 system is.”

Despite appearances, distributed grading is no guarantee of fairness and honesty. The culture of Regents tampering starts at the top and gun-to-the-head accountability keeps it pulsing. What else can explain the travesty that occurred on May 30 at a training session for about 150 ELA and Social Studies APs at Brooklyn’s Jefferson High School? More than an orientation in the new computer set-up—essay booklets with zero identifiers will be scanned for on-screen rating—the session allegedly turned into a seminar on how to cheat.

My source, who prefers anonymity, was with the Social Studies APs in Jefferson’s library. (I will refer to the source as AP X.) “It was a clusterf***, we didn’t learn anything ,” said AP X. “Although we were supposedly being trained to train the scorers who report next week, we never even got a chance to look at the scoring manuals. The students outside the library were so loud we could barely hear what was being said.  Several times the testing company reps closed the door to stifle the noise, only to realize the glass paneled walls of the library facing the hallway were missing the glass.”

But AP X heard enough to conclude that presenter Nora Fox, an Arts Education Liaison, was instructing the APs how to train the teachers to cheat. Otherwise Fox, “a nice enough woman, flustered and maybe a little out of her depth,” would not have made these alleged statements:

Grade holistically and generously … we want the kids to get their sixty-fives, be kind to them … kids deserve a benefit of the doubt, give the students credit for analysis as “outside information,” students don’t have to cite documents as long as they cite the information in the documents,  remember there's no scrubbing.

I wondered about the apparent contradiction in Fox’s remark about scrubbing. Was she pulling back on holistics and generosity? Not according to AP X. “It was clear to me that she meant that we couldn’t change our scores like before, so we should settle on the highest grade right off the bat.”  

Fox’s alleged directives echoed what Theresa Capra, my AP at the Cobble Hill School of American Studies, wrote to me before scoring our Social Studies Regents in June 2002:

Let's try to focus on getting these kids a 65. Teach them to do the essays first before the multiple choice. In a pinch they can get points from writing any old garbage down. You are going to love grading time. (OSI # 04-2907, SCI Case #2005-2066)

 

Plus ca change … .

“I’m not as incensed as I probably should be,” said AP X. “It’s crazy, but when you’ve been in the system a while, you get used to this kind of stuff.”

If Chancellor Walcott, unlike Chancellor Klein, is serious about protecting the integrity of Regents, and safely assuming that Ms. Fox did not go rogue but represented the DOE’s surreptitious Regents grading policy, he will quickly order an investigation and issue strict fresh guidelines to eliminate the sleazy advice allegedly disseminated to the Social Studies APs at Jefferson.