BY STATE EDUCATION COMMISSIONER RICHARD P. MILLS
February 2001
BY STATE EDUCATION COMMISSIONER
RICHARD P. MILLS
Issues:
Actions:
Reports:
All policy decisions are difficult, in part because the act of decision involves weighing so many intangibles and diverse views under conditions of uncertainty. The Regents have a difficult decision ahead of them on Career and Technical Education.
There have been nearly a hundred local or regional meetings in the last 18 months on this topic. The Regents committee on Elementary, Middle, Secondary and Continuing Education discussed the matter many times. Regents have heard from national experts on testing and from District Superintendents and others with alternative proposals. All Regents received many letters and calls. Those comments help but only the Regents can decide.
As I have listened along with you, two things are clear: the Regents are close to consensus on many points and while many are ready to vote some members want additional discussion. Regents appear close to consensus on these elements: program approval that involves local self study and external validation; flexibility in delivery of a program that meets high academic and technical standards; higher education articulation agreements; workforce readiness profiles; technical and Regents exams.
Remaining discussion appears to center on the question of five Regents exams. The discussion is enriched by the necessary mid-course review that we began in the November Forum and pledged to continue with the scheduled consideration of seven resulting policy questions about the implementation of standards.
The discussion is enriched but also complex. Some who commented on the CTE proposal are really addressing the safety net, or the pace of the reform, or the phase-out of the 55 passing score, or some combination of these matters that are scheduled for debate later this spring.
It might be helpful to recall how we got here. It begins with the standards. New York has always had standards. Commissioner Andrew Draper talked about the need for high standards -- and the need to defend them -- in 1912 at the dedication of the State Education Building. Every generation of Regents and every Commissioner must renew this work on their watch. We have.
The current movement for higher standards began not with us but with the public. The public decried low expectations and poor results. The Regents developed higher standards because the public demanded it.
Soon after your decision on standards and Regents exams, you began a long and inclusive debate about graduation requirements. The paper that summarized the resulting decision included a section on career and technical education. As we turned to implementation of the curriculum guides, exams, teacher policy, leadership, teaching policy among many other topics related to standards, there was an urgent demand for a career and technical path to the Regents diploma.
Deputy Commissioner Jim Kadamus commissioned a group of state and national experts to advise us and their work led to the proposal that I recommended to the Regents. The District Superintendents improved on that recommendation and we have embraced their ideas along with those of many others in the modified version before you today.
As the debate has continued, some have urged the Board to require fewer than five Regents exams for the Career and Technical path. That view reminded me of a warning from the earliest days of this work. A leader of the Urban League urged us not to consider a Career and Technical program. Why not? Because, he predicted, such a program would inevitably become a lower path and minority students would be disproportionately represented in that program.
Our design work has always demonstrated a commitment to equal rigor for technical and academic paths. But now we might listen again to the warning. If there were to be fewer Regents exams, would CTE be in fact a lower quality credential?
The Regents have defined the Gap in Student Achievement so forcefully that the term appeared in the press and even moved to the heart of the recent court decision on school finance. If we replace some of the Regents exams in a CTE proposal, might we not codify rather than close the Gap?
Judge DeGrasse in his decision declared that the RCT does not represent a sound basic education. Rather, he said that the only children now receiving a sound basic education in New York City were those graduating with a Regents diploma.
Some people say that some students just don’t need the level of academic knowledge and skill represented by the five Regents exams. Math and English are fine, from this perspective, but why science and history? Regents will recall, however, the science we saw everywhere on the shop floor at Corning Photonics. And everyone remembers the recent history lesson about the Electoral College. Are we sure that we want to say that some children don’t need this education? Whose children?
Again, the debate is particularly rich now because of the follow through on the issues from the Forum. There may in fact come a need to be flexible on the pace of change, but we have agreed to make those decisions on the basis of results. So far, the data show that the majority of students are meeting the Regents standards.
If it turns out that they are not able to do so on subsequent exams, there are several ways for Regents to adjust quickly and we must convince the public that this is so. But again, let’s look at the data first.
New York has always had standards. It’s just that the standards in practice applied to only some students. Only in recent years when Regents coupled standards with Regents exams did the standards have real traction – and real benefit for students. That is a hard won achievement by the Regents and not something to give up easily.
There’s a lot to think about in this decision. More discussion wouldn’t be a bad idea. And if we can resolve the matter in discussion, that wouldn’t be bad either.
It is also useful to weigh the cost of long delay. Career and technical enrollments in programs are dropping in many places around the state. Districts are reluctant to send students to places where they can’t be sure to earn Regents diplomas. We should take the time needed to decide this. But the programs need to know what to expect for the coming fall.
On January 11, the first of three symposia on closing the gaps in student performance met in New York City, as part of the January meeting of the Board of Regents. Dr. Ben Carson of Johns Hopkins University gave the keynote address as part of the morning program and State Comptroller Carl McCall gave the keynote address for the afternoon session. Panel discussions in the afternoon explored gap-closing strategies in higher education, cultural education, community partnerships, mental health and health services and the media. The Regents Task Force on Closing the Performance Gap will discuss the results of the Symposium at the February meeting. The other two symposia will be at Cornell on March 22 and Buffalo in early May.
A favorite season has come and gone: the opportunity to present the Regents budget recommendations to the joint finance committees of the Legislature. In late January, the Deputy Commissioners and I testified for about four hours over two days on every part of the Regents budget recommendation. The heart of the matter was a simple list:
To dramatize the educational opportunities in the State Museum, we created a small traveling exhibit and brought it to the budget hearing. Among other items included were trilobites, the manuscript journal of the New York convention to ratify the U.S. Constitutions – signed by Regent Alexander Hamilton, a bill of sale for a slave sold in New York, a list of children of former slaves under state care, and a Medal of Honor won by an Albany resident at Vicksburg in 1863. He and his men dragged a battery to within 20 feet of the Confederate lines. Every New Yorker needs to see these items, but we need the $60 million.
For the past two months, Regents have considered how to manage the increased demands on students and schools resulting from additional tests in the middle school. You set two objectives:
Deputy Commissioner Kadamus suggested that schools administer the new middle school tests but not report the results to SED for the first year. Only parents, teachers and students would receive the first year results. The middle level tests in science and social studies are new requirements for schools and students. Core curricula and test samplers were sent to schools one year ago. School leaders say they need time to improve curriculum and instruction in those subjects. I support this approach.
Beginning with the 2002 tests, public reporting of student performance in social studies and science will give us a more complete picture of middle school achievement. The technical test results would be for local use only. We need to know how well prepared students are for the Regents requirements they will face in high school.
V. Chapman-Smith, our State Archivist, has been selected as one of the Year 2001 recipients of the Governor’s Tribute to African American Leaders of Excellence in State Service. The award will be presented on the evening of February 6th, as a part of the NYS African American Kick-off Celebration. Her team’s accomplishments have kept the Archives in the forefront nationally in almost every area of archival endeavor. Of particular note is her effort to ensure that documentation of New York’s history is inclusive and accessible.
For example, V. and her colleagues in the Office of Cultural Education have been working to ensure that attention to, and an understanding of, the African American experience in New York, will not happen only for one month a year. Within the next day or two, the State Archives homepage will say: "The New York State Archives Salutes African American Heritage and the Cultural Diversity of our State…every day."
That web page already leads to Rediscovering New York and links to African American and other history resources in repositories throughout the state. It also provides descriptions of the results of our grants (typically from $5-8,000) to African American, Latino, Asian, Native American, Jewish, ethnic European groups and others whose history is not now well documented.
The Regents initiative to provide $7 million a year to this program will greatly accelerate the effort to capture this vanishing past before it is irretrievable and to make it available to everyone. The Museum, meanwhile, is just opening a new exhibit, "Reflections in Black: Smithsonian African American Photography, The First 100 Years." Next December it will present a much anticipated exhibit, A Slave Ship Speaks" featuring artifacts from the "Henrietta Marie," a slave ship that foundered off of Florida.
Each February the Museum publishes and distributes widely a year’s calendar of the programs and exhibits related to the African American experience of museums and other cultural institutions statewide. The Regents initiative to renew the State Museum includes as its centerpiece, a display of the only manuscript copy of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. This second phase of the Museum Master Plan will feature a long term exhibit, "New York and Emancipation." Including the story of the Freedom Trail in New York and providing general access to a history as yet little know by most New Yorkers.
Kevin McGuire joins the State Education Department in March to lead our School Leadership initiative. We already have a draft statement of the essential knowledge and skills expected of new leaders. The many regional forums, the Blue Ribbon Panel, and review of the research on leadership all informed this draft. Now we need to check again with school leaders and others to make sure we have it right. The statement of knowledge and skills will help review the readiness of leadership education programs and will also guide in recruiting leaders.
At the winter meeting of NYSCOSS, I spoke to the assembled superintendents about the "Unbroken Line" of leadership. Every leader builds on what came before and every leader has an obligation to grow leaders for the future. I asked them to tap future leaders and help prepare them. The District Superintendents have scheduled regional meetings through the spring and fall to assemble potential future leaders. I will meet each of these groups, along with the currently serving leaders who selected them.
Meanwhile, we must be certain that high quality professional development opportunities are available for leader candidates. To that end, I will also visit each of the new Leadership Academies. Regents will be included in all of these events.
There has been considerable discussion of the availability of potential teacher candidates in the New York City area. New York City Board of Education representatives (BOE) have indicated the pool is approximately 10,000. We believe the number of potential candidates is greater than that, closer to 22,000.
Potential candidates were obtained from a list of 1998-1999 program completers at New York State colleges with registered teacher education programs, provisional level only. An additional group of potential candidates, for the same time period, was obtained from individuals applying for provisional certification via transcript evaluation. These two groups yielded a total of 29,024 individuals.
Some adjustments in the potential number of 29,024 individuals were necessary. An adjustment was needed for potential candidates who could not be effectively tracked to the New York City metropolitan area because of methods used to keep individuals' social security numbers secure. An additional adjustment was done to remove administrative and pupil personnel titles. This resulted in a remaining "pool" of 22,446 potential teacher candidates. Of this pool, the great majority were prepared for or applied, via transcript evaluation, in New York City shortage areas. All but 2,149 were actually certified.
The Board of Regents and the State Education Department launched a reform in the Office of the Professions in 1997. This included intense focus on both enforcement and prevention of professional misconduct by widely sharing information with professionals and extensive outreach to the public. Consumer outreach resulted in more than 2,700 additional professional misconduct complaints in the last four years (see chart below). These numbers reflect the increased public awareness of their rights to competent professional services. People now recognize that a system is in place to address complaints of professional misconduct.
At the same time, the Education Department is serving six times as many customers as it did at the beginning of the reform initiative (over 100,000 in 1997 to nearly 600,000 in 2000). Our ability to do this is a result of improved technology and a focus on reaching as many New Yorkers as possible. We concentrate on expeditious resolution of professional misconduct cases, and expanded consumer outreach to promote the delivery of the highest quality services in New York State.
Regents will be meeting with selected members of the Commissioner’s Advisory Panel for Special Education Services, State Rehabilitation Council, State Independent Living Council and other key stakeholders regarding transition from school to post-school life for students with disabilities.
More than 70 percent of special education students now transition to post-school outcomes of employment, postsecondary education or day program alternatives. This is 21 percent less often than general education students transition to postsecondary education or employment.
Vocational rehabilitation and other service systems must partner with schools to ensure continuity in transition services and supports for students with disabilities.
The current safety net for students with disabilities applies to students who entered 9th grade from September 1996 through September 2000. During a joint VESID/EMSC Committee meeting, you will be discussing our recommendation that four additional freshman classes of students with disabilities be added to the safety net. An extension of the safety net will allow more time to gather data on how students with disabilities are performing on Regents exams, increase the participation of students with disabilities in the general education curriculum, and study the impact of academic intervention services.
President Bush continues to press forward on his education plan. He has been meeting with Members of Congress from both sides of the aisle to elicit their support. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-MS) is proposing that full legislation be brought to the floor in March. The President is hoping to implement his plan by the start of the new school year. We will continue to monitor the situation and offer recommendations.
Update on priority legislation.
Priority Legislative Proposals for 2001
| Legislative Proposal | Status |
| Omnibus Teaching Initiative
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| Leadership Initiative DS Salary Cap |
Salary Cap – A-1885 introduced in the Assembly on 1/16 by Assemblyman Parment. |
| Apprenticeship Training | Meeting set for 2/5 to present proposal to AFL-CIO. They are interested in sponsoring this proposal. NYS Building & Construction Trades are interested in promoting this proposal to its union members. |
| New Century Libraries: Libraries 2002 | Testified at Legislative Joint Fiscal Committee’s Budget hearings 1/30. |
| Postsecondary Disability Services | Three sectors have signed on, awaiting sign-on from one more. |
| Equal Access to Educational Materials | Draft language, including Chapter amendment agreed to last session, forwarded to the Governor’s office. |
| State Aid |
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