Recently there have been some scandels about administrators fixing grades in their school to make the school look better and have more kids graduate. There have and always will be corrupt administrators but the DOE is only giving them motives to cheat the system now.
The new DOE school reports created a lot of contoversey and heated debates over the results. But one thing is for sure, the DOE relied heavily on cold hard academic grades. Of course this opens the old can of worms about if this is the best way to evaluate schools.
Standardized tests aren't going to tell the whole picture. Too many students are not good test takers and this isn't a skill we are taught well in school. We all know tests don't show the true capabilities of a student and definatly not a fair pciture. Some students are just good test takers but lack the creative intellects behind many courses while others get bad grades but make it up with good essays, projects, creative assignments, etc.
Relying on the standardized tests and numbers of a school isn't the best way to evaluate it. And of course some administrators, in an attempt to draw in talented students and more funding, will do what it takes. So these scandels are only the beginning and under it lies the real problem, the evaluation of public schools by the DOE.
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You are so on target with your assessment of these assessment exams. My son was always a terrible test taker but a very bright kid. Luckily he managed to improve enough to go on to a good college and graduate as a computer engineer. You would never have known this from his elementary school scores.
On the other hand, I have taught kids who know no math how to pass the math regents so they can graduate. I should not be rewarded for pulling the wool over people's eyes by making them think these kids learned some math. I told them all semester that they would need to retake the course to actually learn it. All I did was get them one step closer to graduation.
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