NYTimes.com Article: Test Chief Resigns After Wide Math-Exam Failures

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Test Chief Resigns After Wide Math-Exam Failures

July 1, 2003
 By KAREN W. ARENSON 




 

The director of the New York State Education Department's
testing division was reassigned last week after widespread
failures on the state's Math A Regents exam and has chosen
to resign, according to members of the Board of Regents. 

The Regents said the state education commissioner, Richard
P. Mills, reassigned the testing director, Roseanne
DeFabio, after some of the Regents pressured him to make
changes in the department's testing operations. But some of
the Regents said they did not necessarily see Ms. DeFabio
as the problem. 

Mr. Mills declined to comment yesterday, saying that he
never discussed personnel matters. 

Ms. DeFabio, 59, whose formal title was assistant
commissioner of curriculum, instruction and assessment,
took early retirement rather than accepting reassignment,
the Regents said. She would have kept her title but picked
up other responsibilities, subject to mutual agreement, but
she chose not to, said Robert M. Bennett, the chancellor of
the Board of Regents. 

Tom Dunn, a spokesman for the department, said yesterday
evening that Ms. DeFabio was on vacation and not available
for comment. A man who answered the phone at her home also
said she was not available. 

Nearly two out of three students who took the Math A exam
on June 17 failed it, according to a preliminary survey of
high schools by the Education Department. Addressing
concerns by the Regents, Mr. Mills decided last week to set
aside the results of the test for many of the students who
took it. 

Schools grade their own Regents exams, and usually, the
department does not collect data about results until
August. But the department sought an earlier reading after
widespread complaints from high schools that many students
had failed and that many good students did less well than
expected. 

The widespread failures, on 63 percent of the tests taken,
were the latest problem for a department that has
championed exams as the best way to ensure that students in
the state are taught to high standards. 

Last year, a third of the students who took the physics
Regents exam failed it, but the commissioner rejected
requests to adjust the results. He also won a lawsuit
challenging the test. 

Other problems have surfaced involving some of the state's
fourth- and eighth-grade tests. 

But Mr. Mills said yesterday that the problems were small
in light of the enormous number of tests given each year
and in relation to their value. The department administers
about 70 different exams, most of them three times a year. 

"There has long been opposition to the Regents'
fundamental policy on testing and standards," Mr. Mills
said. "But I don't see any reason to step back from that.
The policy has been extraordinarily helpful to children." 

Others, however, said the testing problems were evidence of
a system in need of serious re-examination. 

"For me, this ought to be a wake-up call," said Assemblyman
Steven Sanders, Democrat of Manhattan, who is chairman of
the Assembly's Education Committee. "This is not the first
time that New York State has had a problem with an exam,
and it is certainly not going to be the last. This is yet
another example of the fact that any standardized exam is
going to be subject to imperfections." 

He said the State Assembly and Senate education committees
would hold hearings on the state's testing at the end of
the summer. Although the hearings were discussed before the
Math A test was given, Mr. Sanders said the Education
Department should hear the views of students, parents,
teachers and others about the math exam and the state's
testing in general. 

Saul Cohen, a Regent and former president of Queens
College, said he has proposed that the Education
Department's whole testing process be reviewed, separate
from the review of Math A that the department has said it
will do. He has also asked that the physics Regents exam
given last month be scrutinized because of widespread
complaints from physics teachers about what they said was
its poor quality. 

One member of the Board of Regents said she still backed
the commissioner and favored testing as a way to help
students achieve, although she believed some change was
necessary. 

"My greatest hope is that people don't lose their
confidence in the standards and in our ability to align the
exams with the standards," said the board member, Merryl H.
Tisch, a Regent from New York City. "We are going to do
everything we have to do in order to ensure the public that
the exams are valid." 

"There are people in the public who will use this to attack
the standards," she added. "But before you do that, you
should examine the number of kids in this state who have
met the requirements and getting diplomas that really mean
something." 

Many critics of the Math A exam have questioned whether the
Education Department has enough staff to do its job
adequately. Like many state agencies, it has suffered
budget cuts and been subject to a hiring freeze. This year,
state support for the agency fell 6.4 percent to $43.8
million. (It also draws revenue from other sources,
including the federal government and fees.) 

Education Department officials say they look for outside
help to supplement their own testing department, which has
23 professionals. 

"What we've had to do is hire math experts from outside our
department - many of them past and current teachers - to
work on exams," said James A. Kadamus, a deputy
commissioner for the department. "We buy services rather
than having people on our staff." The testing department
will now report directly to him. 

But teachers say the cutbacks have left the department out
of touch with them - and contributed to the poor design of
the math exam. 

"There used to be a math bureau with specialists for
different grade-level groupings - elementary, middle
school, high school and college," said Bob Hazen, president
of the New York State Association of Mathematics Teachers.
"Now there is one math person. That's an enormous task for
one person." 

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/01/nyregion/01REGE.html?ex=1058070507&ei=1&en=e64c61b9f6442a68


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