Who We Are
BrownieTheCow.org is a loose group of parents and educators appalled at how bad this year’s New York State fourth-grade English Language Arts test was – in particular, the writing sections. We’re also appalled, the more we learn, at the process the state uses to develop these pseudo-scientific tests, and at how the New York City schools keep using them as all-purpose diagnostic tools.
None of us believe this is the most important issue in the world, or even in the NYC schools. We’ve watched, over the last few years, as test-taking and test-prep have crept ever closer to the center of our children’s school experience (and even into the curriculum itself) – and we’ve done nothing. Most of us had decided that the excesses and occasional absurdities of this new educational world are, on the whole, tolerable.
But this year’s excesses were, well, excessive. And this moment seems like a good time to start asking some hard questions about where we’re going with this. If we’re going to replace the old structure at 110 Livingston Street with a new edifice we call “standards and accountability”, hadn’t we better make sure the cornerstone of that whole effort – the state’s testing program – is sound? Before we let test scores drive everything from student promotions to curricular adjustments to personnel decisions, shouldn’t we make sure the tests make sense and the test-makers are competent?
And in the case of writing tests, now that we’ve seen the 2006 model, shouldn’t we be asking the most basic questions: Can a state bureaucracy and a profit-seeking corporation really be trusted to competently tell us how well every child in the state of New York is writing? Why should we believe that could ever work?
BrownieTheCow.org wants to start a spirited debate about these questions. We want to laugh at a test that is laughably bad, and then get policy-makers to do better.