Teaching, Tests And Paperwork… And Tests and Paperwork… And Tests And Paperwork

On the New York Times‘ weekly education page, Samuel Freedman tells the compelling story of one English as a Second Language [ESL] teacher in the New York City public schools, Allison Rabenau. Aptly entitled “So Much Paperwork, So Little Time to Teach,” Freedman’s essay explains how during the first and last six weeks of the school year, Rabenau’s time was totally consumed by tests and paperwork.

Essentially, her teaching year, and her students’ learning year, had run only from mid-October to mid-April, with numerous interruptions even then. During the time when the students were entitled to instruction in English, they were sitting in other courses that they may or may not have understood.

A second career teacher, Rabenau first assumed that her inexperience was the source of the problem. She learned otherwise. When she surveyed other ESL teachers for a CUNY graduate course, they had had similar experiences.

The same findings appeared in an October 2006 report produced by the non-partisan public advocacy organization Common Good, All in a Day’s Work. Katie Kurjakovic, a veteran elementary school ESL teacher who participated in the Common Good Study, told a public meeting that she had spent six weeks at the beginning and end of school assessing each of her students. “If you add it up, there are 12 weeks during the year when I won’t be instructing students,” she said.

Fed up with a school system that forces her to spend so much time on tests and paperwork, Rabenau has resigned and will teach next year at an international school in Thailand.

Andrés Alonso, until recently Deputy Chancellor for Teaching and Learning and spokesperson for NYC Department of Education, provided what Freedman called “a long, detailed and aggressive defense of the city’s track record with immigrant students” in an interview on this subject. “The bottom line is outcomes for us,” Dr. Alonso said. The DOE, Freedman reports,

delineated those outcomes in a 23-page PowerPoint presentation chart it supplied subsequently. The data indeed showed that English language learners were performing better on basic skills tests and Regents exams, as well as in promotion and graduation rates, during Joel I. Klein’s tenure as chancellor.

One wonders how Alonso and the 23-page Power Point presentation spun the following little fact, discussed here at Edwize a few months ago. According to the DOE’s own calculations, only 26.2% of Englsh Language Learners [ELL] in the class of 2006 graduated on time, compared to 61.1% for English Proficient Students. Worse, this represented a decrease of 9% from the 2005 four-year ELL graduation rate of 35.3%: in a year when the general graduation rate increased, the graduation rate for ELLs declined. The state set the four year graduation rate at 22%, reflecting its more parsimonious method of counting graduates. [The city's calculations are here: see Figure 5, p. 20.]

Freedman correctly points out that there are a lot of factors that go into the performance of ELL students, and the DOE has no control — for better or worse — over a number of them. But one factor that the DOE most certainly does control is the exemption it gives to new small high schools, allowing them to refuse admission to ELL and Special Education students for their first two years of existence. The New York Immigrant Coalition and Advocates for Children have produced a scathing report on that practice, So Many Schools, So Few Options.

The DOE is quick to take credit for higher graduation rates in the new small schools. Is it any less responsible for other consequences of this policy and of its obsession with testing and paperwork, such as the decline in ELL graduation rates?

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