A Test Seemingly Intended to Keep Students Behind

[Harold F. Schiffman]

>>From the NYTimes,  October 13, 2004
ON EDUCATION

A Test Seemingly Intended to Keep Students Behind
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN

TWO weeks into the new school year, Melanie Fordin paid an anxious visit
to a colleague's office at Richmond Hill High School in Queens. She had
heard that the results were in from the state test for those immigrant
students officially known as English Language Learners, dozens of them in
Ms.  Fordin's classes. The scores would dictate who got to move into the
school's English-speaking mainstream and who stayed in a separate, slower
track, putatively to become more fluent.

The previous year had been a horror story. Only 4 pupils of nearly 600
from Richmond Hill who took the New York State English as a Second
Language Achievement Test passed it. Incredibly, more than 60 of those
failures already had passed the state Regents exam in English, the
traditional benchmark for college-bound students.

Now, checking the 2004 scores, Ms. Fordin realized one thing right away.
No matter what the calendar said, this September morning was Groundhog
Day, in the Bill Murray sense of the term. Once again, exactly 4 students
from Richmond Hill had passed the E.S.L. test, even as 83 had satisfied
the English Regents. "How does the state expect us to have a better
education?" one of Ms. Fordin's pupils wrote shortly afterward in an
assignment to evaluate the condition of education in America. "I'm
experiencing this problem along with many others who are stuck in E.S.L.
even though they want to get out of this. I know that even if we have
better skills we are expected to stay in separated classes. I know
students from the mainstream classes who don't even know how to
communicate with the others; they use words like ain't, nothin', yo, etc.
And here we have this horrifying test to take in order to get into the
mainstream classes. What kind of state of education is this?"

That high school senior posed exactly the right question. And the answer
is that it is a state that, not to put too fine a point on it, is using
thousands of immigrant students as guinea pigs for an unproven test that
requires a score close to perfect as the standard for passing.

The current E.S.L. exam, which replaced an earlier and less stringent one
called the Language Assessment Battery, was developed collaboratively by
the State Department of Education and the Educational Testing Service, the
company best known for its SAT. Because the E.S.L. test had never been
tried anywhere else, state education officials said, New York got it for
free. Meanwhile, New York's immigrant students are stuck with it until at
least next year, when the state reopens the testing contract for bidding.

"It's a more precise measure, a better measure, than we've ever had
before," said James A. Kadamus, the state's deputy commissioner of
education. By which he means the test more accurately measures achievement
and identifies students' weak spots better than did its precursor, the
Language Assessment Battery. And, unlike the Regents English exam, the new
E.S.L. test evaluates pupils on speaking and listening as well as reading
comprehension and writing. "The goal of the Nyseslat," Mr. Kadamus added,
using the test's acronym, "is not how many students get out of E.L.L.
status, but how many get the additional instruction they need."

If indeed the goal is not to move students into the mainstream, then the
test certainly is succeeding. While 20 percent of eligible pupils in New
York City passed the Language Assessment Battery two years ago, only 7.5
percent passed the new exam, Mr. Kadamus said. Yet, during the 2002-2003
academic year, more than half the city's English Language Learners passed
the English Regents.

The disparity has less to do with the content of the tests, however, than
the way they are graded. To pass the new test, a high-school junior must
score 71 of a possible 74 points - the equivalent of 96 percent. That same
student needs to score 55 of 100 possible points on the Regents to meet
city graduation requirements and 65 of 100 to receive a Regents-endorsed
diploma.

To put the disconnect between tests in human terms, consider Shoeb Mahbub,
an immigrant from Bangladesh who graduated from Richmond Hill last year in
the top 20 of more than 400 seniors. In high school, he read Steinbeck,
Shakespeare and Machiavelli. He scored 89 on the English Regents. He
earned admission to City College's pre-med program. Yet he failed the
E.S.L. test and was barred from taking a mainstream English class.

THE same fate befell Kamil Losiewicz, an immigrant from Poland who is now
a pre-med student at Queens College. "It's really frustrating," he said.
"The amount of education I received wasn't as high at it could have been.
The reading assignments, the writing assignments in E.S.L. were really
easy. I wanted writing at a high level, something that would help me in
college. And by being with people in E.S.L. who don't speak English well,
it definitely kept me from speaking at a high level."

If anything, New York City's public schools have historically proven much
too slow in moving children out of bilingual classes. Parents in
neighborhoods like Bushwick have complained for years that children are
wrongly assigned to bilingual classes and remain mired in them for years.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, like his predecessor, Rudolph W. Giuliani, has
singled out the bilingual program as a major problem in need of reform.
Yet the state's test guarantees that only a minuscule number of bilingual
pupils will ever move entirely into regular classes.

By way of concession, the State Education Department allows any student
who passes the English Regents and also scores 37 points on the listening
and speaking parts of the E.S.L. test to exit special classes. Hardly
anyone seems to have asked, though, what the number 37 really means. It
turns out there are only 39 points possible in the listening and speaking
sections; so the supposed compromise is that a pupil get 95 percent on two
parts of the E.S.L. test rather than 96 percent on all four parts.

"What did these kids come to America for?" asked Ms. Fordin. "Not to be in
sheltered classrooms. Not to be in cocoons. They need some kind of step
between E.S.L. and college, and this test is working against them. I don't
understand why. I don't get it. Why keep a kid down?"


Email: sgfreedman at nytimes.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/13/education/13education.html