New York State Math Exams Baffle Teachers and Students Facing the Tradeoff Between Breadth and Depth

Ambushed by the Exam
original artwork by Tavet Rubel, created for Dewey to Delpit

Last week, New York City public school students sat for the state math exams. The scores won’t be announced until the summer, but there is reason to expect a dip. State exams are not typically available for public viewing until a month or two after the exam is administered, but the board of ed took special precautions this year to ensure that every copy of the test-booklets were returned to their offices and that no information about the exam leaked. What I hear from teachers who administered the exam, however, is that the 5^th and 8^th grade tests were completely unprecedented, both in their content and in their difficulty.

The transition to the national Common Core Standards is not slated to begin until 2014, so educators I’ve spoken to are struggling to understand why this year's 5^th grade exam abandoned topics like decimals and percents that have traditionally been the meat and potatoes of that exam, and focused instead on difficult pattern and area problems, some of which lie outside the stated 5^th grade curriculum altogether.

The New Age of Testing

My brother forwarded me this Times article about Shael Polakow-Suransky, the soon-to-be second in command of the NYC public school system. The focus of the article is Mr. Polakow-Suransky's approach to assessment: despite a progressive pedigree—he attended an extremely progressive highschool and studied under Ted Sizer at Brown—he's for more testing and better testing. Strange as it sounds, that may be the only viable position for a contemporary progressive educator, working at the policy level; and though some will probably call it a softening of ideals, Mr. P-S's position represents not so much a compromise as an adaptation of old principles to new circumstances.