SchoolBook: How Students, Parents, Teachers Are Feeling About Taking The Current Standardized Tests

How are your children holding up during standardized testing?

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SchoolBook Editors • April 19, 2012, 12:48 PM

Worry, anxiety, fear. With so much now riding on standardized testing, some students are picking up on the emotions of the grownups around them and approaching this year's standardized testing with a variety of emotions.

Parents, teachers: Share your stories here about how your children have reacted to the testing, and what you have done to address their concerns.

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QUESTION

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Kelvin Song • April 21, 2012, 6:15 PM

Why not just ask us directly?

I am 14, and am currently in the Eye of the Storm, between the ELAs and Math tests.

Feeling? "Flying Blind". With the pineapple question, and Pearson sneaking Field Test questions onto the real test(Wow, NY, it only took you several years do realize we don't care about Field Tests). It would also be nice if adults would tell us if state test performance even affected us other than driving down our parents' property values. 
How about "Defensive"? Parents love comparing how well we do this year to last year, forgetting that this year Pearson was contracted(cough*millionsoftaxpayerdollars*cough) to change the tests and recycle junk from other states, er, make them more difficult. C'mon people, remember what you learned in science class(Perhaps why they don't give state science tests each year?). You have to keep all but one variable constant, or your findings are about as valid as what the hobo down the street in the tinfoil hat spouts. Even if you don't mind the terrible job Pearson does, you still have to remember the noise that skews scores. Something as small as opening the curtains means the difference between an A and a C-.(http://architecture.mit.edu/h...) 
Perhaps "Exhausted". The tests this year are the biggest yet. They tagged on two reading passages and fifteen comprehension questions on the LISTENING part of the ELA. Maybe Pearson thinks Albany will pay them more if they make a longer test...

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1 REPLY

Kelvin Song • April 21, 2012, 6:20 PM

I recorded what I put down for ELA Book 1 Form C, comes with a big warning label(Many are probably wrong). Mainly meant as a response to the "SECURE TEST, DO NOT DISCUSS CONTENT UNTIL END OF MAKEUP SCHEDULE"

1 A

2 B

3 A

4 C

5 A

6 B

7 C

8 B

9 B

10 D

11 B

12 D

13 B

14 A

15 A

16 B

17 D

18 D

19 B

20 A

21 A

22 C

23 A

24 A

25 A

26 C

27 B

28 A

29 C

30 B

31 D

32 B

33 C

34 B

35 C

36 C

37 B

38 A

39 D

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Cny Teaching • April 22, 2012, 9:47 PM

Elementary students: 3 days in a row. 90 minutes each day in a silent sanitized room. What does our commissioner robot and his evil overlord controllers want for the future of middle-class and below students (because their wealthy backers and private school dandies will never have to worry about "standards" and state tests)? Are we being mandated to train cubicle monkeys and service sector minimum wage workers? Real critical thinkers would pose a threat to the "reform" movement because so much of it is clearly wrong-morally and educationally.

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Vicki Zunitch • April 23, 2012, 11:01 PM

Yes, you are being mandated to train cubicle monkeys and service sector minimum wage workers. As Charles Amundsen of DOE (he said his salary was paid by Bill Gates, not sure how that works) said at one school about the new Common Core for "literacy" -- used to be English: "After all, you don't write novels every day, you write notes to your boss." Ah-hah! 
Only one error in Cny Teaching's paragraph: not all private school people are dandies. Many, actually most, of us are making great sacrifices to school our children elsewhere because the only thing we detest more than the government forming our children's minds is the government forming our children's minds and completely disenfranchising us from any say in the matter at all at any time or place including during (10-minutes-a-year) teacher conferences.

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William Smith • April 25, 2012, 2:47 PM

The pressure of test taking needs to be removed. Daily quizzes are the best measurements for success or failure (just as in real life). Tests should be designed as learning devices. All questions and solutions should be available to the public. It is a total waste of time if the test is not used as a teaching tool. The education business is supposed to be about teaching and learning, not a contest with winners and losers. The only test that should be secret is the SAT/ACT and it should be sort of like an IQ test with no feasible way to prepare for it other than doing your best day to day in school and through an understanding of the questions and solutions in the public question pool.

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Chris Moonie • April 21, 2012, 5:54 PM

Get rid of these meaningless tests, close all the government schools, and home school your kids. They will grow up healthy,happy, and successful. A childhood spent in a school is a very sad childhood indeed. I want to cry everytime I see school children in the morning dragged of to school by their parents. I guess people are actully brainwashed into believing that school is good for them. Time to wake up and give these children back their childhoods.Forced schooling is abusive toward children and should be outlawed.

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Britta Sorensen • April 24, 2012, 2:11 PM

I work with third graders. Two stopped and stared in a dead-panic for at least twenty minutes, hearts racing, freaking out over questions they weren't sure about.

One spent 45 minutes trying to read, then stopping, then trying to read again, only to tell me, "I can't do it. I can't do it. I don't deserve to go to 4th grade anyway."

After the test, many kids rushed to ask me what would happen if they got a 2 on this test, but a 4 on the math, or any other combination of scores. They said, again and again, how worried they were, and how they didn't want to fail. They didn't want to have to repeat the grade.

I remember feeling maybe 1/4 of this stress and panic when I had to take the SAT when I was 17. These kids are 7 and feel the weight of the rest of their lives on their shoulders while they take these tests.

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Syed Meer • April 24, 2012, 4:48 PM

I have two kids taking the ELA's: a fifth grader who thinks he is an old hand at it, and a third grader who is very nervous that she will have to redo third grade. while neither of them will confess to any anxiety or discomfort with the testing itself, their personalities have become very brittle and insecure this month and their usual boisterousness very dampened.

The Issue of Social Media And Protected Speech In The Workplace - NLRB and The NY Law Journal

NLRB Acting General Counsel Releases New Memo On Social Media Cases and Protected Speech In The Workplace

Parentadvocates.org

LINK

 
As many employers and employment attorneys are aware, the area of "social media" is a hot topic. Indeed, the latest front in the area of social media has been employer efforts to obtain access to applicants' and employees' Facebook profiles by asking for user names and passwords. This has prompted a wave of proposed legislation banning such practices, the first of which was recently passed in Maryland and with other states likely to follow. The National Labor Relations Board has also taken an active interest in this area. In particular, the board has focused on employer policies and rules which seek to regulate and limit their employees' use of social media.
           

NLRB Acting General Counsel releases new memo on social media cases
LINK

Lafe Solomon, the Acting General Counsel for the NLRB, has issued an operations management memo detailing 14 recent cases in which the Office of the General Counsel dealt with questions arising from social media in the workplace. Half of the cases focused on social media policies, and the other half involved terminations of employees who had recently posted comments on the social media site Facebook.

The Office found five of the seven social media policies to be overbroad and found that two were lawful; one of the two was lawful only after being revised. The Office found that several of the Facebook-related charges were unlawful because they stemmed from unlawful policies, but in one case, the Office recommended upholding the discharge because the employee’s comments were not work-related.

The memo does not reveal the names of the parties out of privacy concerns. Several of the cases are noteworthy, because they represent a departure from the majority of opinions issued by the Office finding no violation of the Act in social media-related cases.

In one case, after an employee at a collections agency was moved to a different call group, the employee blasted her management on her Facebook page. A conversation ensued with several co-workers in her post, with some of the colleagues saying that they were “behind” her. The employee was then fired. The Office found that the social media policy was overbroad because it prohibited “[m]aking disparaging comments about the company through any media, including online blogs, other electronic media or through the media.” That prohibition, found the Office, could be interpreted as restricting Section 7-protected statements, such as complaints of unfair treatment. Further, because the employee had initiated the conversation to complain about being moved to a less-desirable work group and because the conversation involved co-workers and the terms and conditions of employment, the Office found that the Facebook conversation was protected, concerted activity under the Act. Thus, the termination violated the Act.

In another case, the Office found that an employer unlawfully terminated an administrative assistant who posted comments on Facebook complaining about being reprimanded for her involvement in her fellow employees’ work-related problems. The employee had complained on Facebook about the termination of one of her co-workers, saying that she did not like that the employee was fired “for asking for help.” The employer told her not to give her opinion to co-workers who came to her for advice. She complained on Facebook about that order and the employer terminated her, citing the most recent posts and an earlier post in which she suggested that her manager displayed sexist attitudes. The Office found that the termination violated the Act, because the Facebook posts concerned terms and conditions of employment and because the employee’s co-workers had participated in several of the conversations. The Office also found that the employer had terminated the employee because it was concerned about where her conversations about terms and conditions of employment could lead.

In a third case, the Office found that a termination resulting from Facebook complaints about a mutual supervisor violated the Act. The employee initiated a Facebook conversation with co-workers after she was angered by the promotion of another co-worker. That conversation involved accusations of mismanagement and failures to provide raises or reviews. The employer terminated two of the employees and disciplined two others over the posts, and the Office found that the employees were engaged in protected concerted activity when they posted comments on Facebook because multiple employees were involved in a discussion that focused on terms and conditions of employment. The Office found that the terminations violated the Act, even though the employees had not made any plans for future concerted action, saying that the conversation was an “indispensable” step towards possible self-organizing.

In a fourth case, the Office found that an employer violated the Act when it terminated an employee who had participated in a co-worker’s Facebook conversation. The conversation focused on the allegedly negative attitude of a mutual supervisor, which they blamed for poor workplace morale. The employee blamed the supervisor and said she “hated the place,” and the employer terminated her. The Office found that it was “well established that employee complaints and criticism about a supervisor’s attitude and performance may be protected” and that, in the instant case, the employee’s post was part of employees’ concerted activity for mutual aid and protection, both because it was a continuation of earlier employee complaints to management about the supervisor, and because it was part of a discussion of shared concerns about terms and conditions of employment. Even though the employee’s comments focused on her own dissatisfaction, the Office found that the comment arose in the context of an ongoing discussion of terms and conditions of employment.

The Office also found that the comment had not lost the protections of the Act under the Board’s Atlantic Steel decision. Although the comment could have undermined morale, it was made during a discussion of terms and conditions of employment. The Office found that the “nature of the outburst” and “location” inquiries of Atlantic Steel combined to require consideration of the impact of the fact that the Facebook discussion could be viewed by third parties. The employer had argued that the employee had publicly disparaged the employer, thus justifying her termination, but the Office found that although the comments were critical, they were not defamatory and were not critical of the employer’s business policies or product. Thus, the Office found that the statement was protected language under the Act.

An employer’s social media policy was at the heart of another case in which the Office found that the policy, seen in the proper context, would not be seen as inhibiting protected actions. The policy allowed the employer to ask employees to confine their social networking to matters unrelated to the company, if securities regulations so required. The employer then barred employees from discussing in any form of social media “embargoed information,” such as pending reorganizations. The Office found that the rules were not unlawful, because even though the requirement could be construed to restrict employees from communicating regarding their terms and conditions of employment, in the overall context, employees reasonably would interpret the rule to address only those communications that could implicate security regulations. The Office also noted that employees do not have a protected right to disclose embargoes on corporate information and, thus, could not reasonably interpret the rule to prohibit communications about their working conditions.

Similarly, in a fifth case, an employee’s criticism of his employer following a deadly workplace shooting did not lose the Act’s protections. After the shooting, the employee had asserted that the employer’s conduct led to the shooting and frequently criticized the employee’s management style in published letters to a newspaper and in online comments on the paper’s website. Eventually, the employee posted a presentation online that he had made to his local council, charging the employer with Charging Party made a presentation multiple unfair labor practices filed, forced policy changes, unfair firings, harassment, and workplace bullying. The employer fired the employee, and the Office found that the comments were protected conduct, because they dealt with an ongoing labor dispute and because they were “the logical outgrowth” of conversations the employee had with co-workers about the terms and conditions of employment.

Moreover, the postings were not sufficiently defamatory to lose the Act’s protections. The Office noted that Allied Aviation Service protects public comments that air “highly sensitive issues.” In the instant case, the Office found that many of the online comments related to the employer’s alleged role in the shooting and that, however inflammatory, the comments also related to ongoing labor disputes. Thus, the comments were protected.

Source: CCH Editorial Staff.

NLRB on Social Media
By M. Michael ColeContact, The Recorder, April 19, 2012
LINK

As many employers and employment attorneys are aware, the area of "social media" is a hot topic. Indeed, the latest front in the area of social media has been employer efforts to obtain access to applicants' and employees' Facebook profiles by asking for user names and passwords. This has prompted a wave of proposed legislation banning such practices, the first of which was recently passed in Maryland and with other states likely to follow. The National Labor Relations Board has also taken an active interest in this area. In particular, the board has focused on employer policies and rules which seek to regulate and limit their employees' use of social media.

In one early case, American Medical Response of Connecticut, 34-CA-12576 (NLRB Region 34), the NLRB issued a complaint against a Connecticut ambulance service company that terminated an employee for posting negative comments about her employer and supervisor on Facebook. The NLRB alleged that AMR violated §7 of the National Labor Relations Act because the employee's comments constituted "protected activity" under the act. Of note, the complaint also took issue with aspects of the employer's social media policy, including restrictions on employees' ability to post pictures of themselves depicting the company in any way and restrictions on employee comments about the company, supervisors, co-workers or competitors. Although the case settled, as part of the settlement, the employer agreed to revise what the NLRB termed its "overly broad rules" so as to "ensure that they do not improperly restrict employees from discussing their wages, hours and working conditions."

Since the American Medical Response case, the NLRB has continued to take an active role in policing employer social media policies. Back in August 2011, the NLRB's general counsel issued a report summarizing recent NLRB decisions on the application of the NLRA to employee social media activity on such sites as Facebook and Twitter. The report reviewed and summarized recent decisions on whether employees who were disciplined for social media activity were engaged in "protected activity" under the NLRA. The report also examined decisions that considered whether certain employer-promulgated social media policies were overbroad and violated the NLRA.

The NLRB's general counsel issued an updated report on Jan. 24. The new report summarized decisions addressing a variety of social media policies and provisions. For example, the NLRB took issue with a no-defamation policy that broadly prohibited employees from making disparaging comments about the company. Likewise, the NLRB found unlawful a policy that broadly prohibited discriminatory, defamatory or harassing web entries about the work environment or work-related issues. Where, however, an employer prohibits defamatory or disparaging comments as part of a rule which also prohibits other conduct such as making vulgar, obscene, threatening or intimidating posts, the board is more likely to view that policy as lawful given that it more clearly delineates for employees what is prohibited conduct and would not reasonably be understood to restrict an employees' rights under the NLRA.

In another case, the NLRB took issue with a broad confidentiality clause that prohibited employees from disclosing or communicating about confidential, sensitive, nonpublic information concerning the company without prior approval. The board took the view that a provision like this could reasonably be interpreted to prohibit an employee from discussing their terms and conditions at work, such as wages, which would be a violation of NLRA rights. In contrast, an employer's policy that prohibited the disclosure of confidential or proprietary information such as personal health information about the employer's customers or patients was deemed lawful because, in context, employees would understand that the rule was intended to protect the employer's customers and was not a restriction on NLRA rights.

The NLRB is also policing how employers may restrict employees from the use of the employer's logos and trademarks. Yet again, the NLRB took issue with a broad policy that prohibited the use of the company's name or service marks outside the course of business without prior approval. The NLRB's view is that employees have the right under the NLRA to use a company's name and logo while engaged in protected activity, i.e., paper-leafleting or picketing. While paying lip service to a company's interest in protecting its service marks and reputation, the board took the position that an employee's noncommercial use of a company name, logo or other trademark did not implicate these interests.

More generally, the NLRB also has taken issue with policy terms that are undefined and vague. Prohibitions on "disrespectful conduct," "inappropriate conversation" and "unprofessional communication" are all problematic in the board's view because they could be construed by employees as restricting rights under the NLRA.

In the wake of increased NLRB activity in this area, many employers have taken to relying on disclaimers in their handbooks which state that their policies are not intended to interfere with their employees' NLRA rights. As summarized in its most recent report, however, the NLRB has taken a harsh stance with regard to disclaimers. In the case at issue, the employer's disclaimer stated that its policies would not be interpreted or applied so as to interfere with employee rights to self-organize, form, join or assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively through representatives of their choosing, or to engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or protection, or to refrain from engaging in such activities. The NLRB's stance was that this disclaimer was not sufficient to save a policy which otherwise prohibited an employee from discussing matters in an "inappropriate" manner because employees could not be expected to discern what is "inappropriate" or what is otherwise allowed.

Continuing the trend of the agency's activism in the social media arena, an NLRB administrative law judge, in G4S Secure Solutions (USA), 28-CA-23380 (March 29, 2012), recently held that a security company's social media policy, which prohibited employees from discussing "work-related legal matters," violated the NLRA. Once again, the NLRB took a dim view of employer disclaimers. In this case, the disclaimer stated that the employer's policies were not to be construed or applied in a way that interfered with employees' rights under federal law. Echoing earlier cases, the ALJ decided that the disclaimer did not save the provision because lay employees would not understand what is permissible under "federal law" and what would be a prohibited discussion of a "legal matter." The ALJ also found that the company's confidentiality provision violated the NLRA because it did not define what constituted "confidential information" and prohibited employees from giving interviews or making public statements about the company's "activities or policies," without providing a definition of those terms.

Continued developments from the NLRB over the past year highlight the need for employers to take a close look at their own social media policies and other employment policies. The ALJ's recent decision, consistent with prior decisions and the general counsel's reports, highlights the importance of having a carefully defined and crafted policy and handbook, as well as the risk of relying on disclaimers to save otherwise overbroad provisions.

M. Michael Cole is an associate with Miller Law Group, a women-owned employment law firm in San Francisco. He represents employers in complex litigation, including the litigation of wage-and-hour class and/or collective actions in the retail, financial services, insurance and food services industries.

In Practice articles inform readers on developments in substantive law, practice issues or law firm management. Contact Vitaly Gashpar with submissions or questions at vgashpar@alm.com.

Valarie Strauss: Education reform protests pick up steam

By Valerie Strauss

 

 

 

In Texas, New York, Illinois and other states, protests by parents and educators are getting louder against school reform that insists on using standardized test scores as the basis for evaluating students, educators and schools.
It is too early to call it a full-fledged revolt; Washington D.C. has yet to see tens of thousands of people marching through the streets against high-stakes standardized testing, which has been prominent in American education for a decade and is at the core of the Obama administration’s school accountability efforts.
But opposition is clearly growing, most prominently over “value-added” teacher evaluation models that purport to measure how much “value” a teacher adds to a student’s academic progress by using a complicated formula involving a student’s standardized test score. 
Researchers have repeatedly warned that this evaluation method is not reliable — and doesn’t take into account all of the out-of-school reasons that could affect how a student does on a test — but the Obama administration has pushed it and states have been adopting new teacher accountability systems that are heavily weighted to test scores.
In New York, hundreds of professors at colleges and universities have banded together and signed a letter to political and education officials protesting the state’s new educator evaluation system, Annual Professional Performance Review, or APPR, which rests largely on test scores, and asking them to reconsider the reliance on high-stakes tests.
This effort follows one by school principals in New York to protest APPR with a petitionthat describes APPR is “an unproven, expensive and potentially harmful evaluation system” that “is not the path to lasting school improvement.” At this point, more than 1,432 New York State principals and more than 4,860 friends have signed the petition.
Meanwhile, in Texas, some 345 school districts — out of about 1,030 districts — have adopted a resolution that says that standardized tests are “strangling” public schools and asking the state Board of Education to rethink the testing regime. Those school districts represent more than 1.6 million students.
It was in Texas where the era of high-stakes testing was born. George W. Bush started a test-based accountability program when he was governor and then blew it out into a national education initiative known as No Child Left Behind during his presidency.
Thus it is somewhat ironic that this year Robert Scott, the Republican commissioner of education in Texas, caused a public stir when he told the Texas State Board of Education that the mentality that standardized testing is the “end-all, be-all” is a “perversion” of what a quality education should be. California Gov. Jerry Brown had said essentially the same thing last year. Scott also agreed to postpone by a year a requirement that the results of each end-of-course exam account for 15 percent of a student’s final grade in that course.
It’s impossible to know if Scott’s comments had an effect on any other officials, but The New York Times reported last month that the chief academic officer of New York City’s public schools, Shael Polakow-Suransky, said publicly that he, too, has concerns about APPR because of the value-added formulas that carry so much weight.
“A principal should not ever be in a situation where ultimately their judgment gets trumped by a mechanistic formula,” he was quoted as saying.
Meanwhile, in Illinois, scores of professors and researchers from at least 16 universities throughout the Chicago metropolitan area recently signed an open letter to the city’s mayor, Rahm Emanuel, and Chicago school officials warning against implementing a teacher evaluation system that is based on standardized test scores. 
The letter says, among other things, that “students will be adversely affected by the implementation of this new teacher-evaluation system” for a number of reasons. They include: 
*A narrowing of curriculum as teachers focus more on test prep;
*Teachers whose jobs depend on their students doing well on standardized tests will “surely be incentivized to avoid students” with any kind of problem that could lead them to do poorly on the test
* Teachers will stop collaborating and become competitive, creating a bad environment for a school.
In addition to these protests, local groups of parents and educators in a number of states have started to seek ways to coordinate their efforts to protest standardized testing and help parents “opt” their children out of these tests.
Where this fledging revolt is going is unclear, but it is real, and for the moment, it is growing.

Elementary School Principal Writes NYS Commissioner John King About The Shockingly Flawed ELA Exams

P.S. 321                                                                             lphilli@schools.nyc.gov

180 Seventh Avenue • Brooklyn, New York 11215                     • 718-499-2412 • FAX: 718-965-9605 

• Elizabeth Phillips, Principal                                           • Beth Handman, Assistant Principal

• Elizabeth Garraway, Assistant Principal                        • Ryan Bourke, Assistant Principal

April 19, 2012

Dr. John B. King Jr.

New York State Education Commissioner

New York State Education Department

89 Washington Avenue

Albany, New York 12234

Dear Commissioner King:

I urge you to carefully review this year’s state ELA exams.  I have been principal for 13 years and have read the tests each year.  Although there are always issues with selected questions, generally it is only one or two per test that the assistant principals and I can’t quite agree on.  I am genuinely shocked that with the increased importance of state testing,  there are so many more flawed questions than ever before.  I wish I could go into detail here, but it violates test security for me to discuss the content of the tests or the questions, which is why I feel so strongly that it is important that you see these tests for yourselves. 

In particular, I would recommend that you carefully read through day one of the fifth grade ELA.   The reading passages themselves are not too challenging—surprising since the passages in the 4^th grade test were not particularly easy and the Common Core Standards call for more rigor.  However, the questions were nothing short of ridiculous.  Several of them were ambiguous and seemed designed only to trick children (and adults….the answers were not clear to many of us).  Overall, the questions did not serve to determine whether or not children had good reading comprehension skills.   You could have excellent comprehension skills and miss many questions.  Although to me the fifth grade was the most outrageous of the elementary school exams, there were problems with the other exams too.  It is puzzling to me that in 2012 in New York State, a testing company that won the lucrative contract to develop these exams did not think it was important, on day one (the most heavily weighted day) of the 4^th grade exam, to include any selections that were in urban settings.  Children who spend a lot of time outdoors and in rural or suburban settings definitely will find “friendlier” texts, both fiction and nonfiction.   Take a look so you can see what I mean.  Fortunately, day two is better in this regard.

I would also urge you to actually do the listening section of grade 3 (first part of day 2).  Have someone read aloud this incredibly thin, brief passage two times as required and then see if you can answer the questions, including the short and extended responses, without looking at the text (since kids are not permitted to look at this text).  The questions are not really ones that you can answer well from the text, even if it is sitting in front of you and you can refer back. 

Because I am an elementary school principal, I do not see the middle school exams.  However, a middle school principal from outside of New York City wrote this to me after day one:  “As I reviewed the exams for the sixth through eighth grade yesterday, I was appalled. I felt that sixth grade was the most difficult of the three exams, followed by eighth, with the most fair exam being the seventh grade. There were so many questions that contained answer choices where the ELA teachers could not decide which answer would be 'best'. I felt terrible for my children, especially for my English Language Learners and my special education students.”  And 8^th graders, who really can’t be controlled in terms of not talking about the test, are having a field day on the internet mocking what appears to be one of the most ridiculous selections ever included on a test! 

These exams are so deeply flawed, and now so incredibly high stakes.  The idea that teachers may lose their jobs and schools (at least in New York City) may be closed based on how children do on these problematic exams is incredibly upsetting and demoralizing to educators.  The fact that the state has decided that these exams can never be made public just exacerbates the problem, as the general public will never know how silly the exams are.   And, to use an “added value” measure on tests that are not consistently more difficult from year to year is another serious problem. 

I understand that you are very busy, but given the importance of the state tests at this time, it is absolutely critical that you analyze them carefully.  If you agree with my assessment, I hope that you will consider recommending to the State Legislature that given the flaws in the tests, we are not yet ready to use them for high stakes decision making.  I also hope you will consider making these exams public after the test scoring is completed.  It is ironic that teachers’ individual ratings are made public while the actual test that determines those ratings is not.  I know that the state already has a long-term contract with Pearson, but there is something seriously wrong with a testing company that has such inappropriate questions and passages on such a high stakes test. 

Thank you for considering all this.  Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

Sincerely,

Elizabeth Phillips

Principal