February 1997
Recently, we all got a report card. It wasn't the School Report Card but a report on education in all the states delivered by Education Week. They gave New York an A for our standards. And it was not just an A but a number one ranking among all the states.
Read closely and you will find that we earned the good mark not for the standards by themselves but for what stands behind them: testing in all the core subjects, reporting of results, accountability, and the link to graduation. No one else seems to be attempting what we are: setting high expectations, measuring the accomplishment of those expectations, and reporting results in the belief that all students will actually rise to those high levels.
We are not doing this to look good on anyone's report card. We are doing it because the future that our children face is chaotic and the only safety is in the knowledge and skill and character that they develop during their early years. Education builds the capacity that enables a free society to exist.
There will be anxious days because what we are doing is so difficult. However, we are in motion, and we have a strong base to move from. We have a plan and the details have appeared on the dates we promised. Some difficult questions are still before us. For example, what can we do together to raise the standards for all students immediately and at the same time provide safeguards to insure that all hard working students can attain a diploma based on the standards? From what I have seen and heard in visits to more than a hundred schools, we will find the answers we need.
The English Resource Guide is now on the State Education Department Web page. This is the first time we have published without a hard copy version. We want to get the material in the hands of teachers quickly so that they can use it and then give us more material to strengthen it.
This first resource guide includes details on the topics students will need to study to meet the standards in English. For example, there are guides to various types of literature, several reading lists, and an outline of the concepts in grammar that are essential. The guide also includes examples of teachers' unit plans that are linked to the standards and student work that followed from that instruction. These classroom materials made it through a demanding jury of teachers. We will add more.
As promised last month, basic information on licensing status and professional discipline cases is now available to all citizens on our Web page. This covers the more than 600,000 licensed professionals under the Regents oversight. At the official opening of the Web page, representatives of both the professions and the public spoke about the importance of this advance.
The Department staffing survey appeared last month and, as expected, pointed to some hard facts that we have to change. The overall rating of the work environment was rated poor. (2.9 on a scale where 3 is fair, 2 is poor.) On the more positive side, 77 percent agreed or strongly agreed with the statement that "I am familiar with the goals of the strategic plan." We hit what we aim for apparently, but we have not been attending to some other issues that are important to our colleagues.
We had an all-Department meeting to announce immediate actions to respond to the results. These included, among other items, a top to bottom cleaning of all the buildings this month, more help in the mail room, announcement of the delivery of computers for all who need them by the end of July, action by March on staff recommendations on security, and immediate discussions with all managers about expectations for management. We are posting our results on the wall and have set to work already to earn better ratings in the months ahead.
A superintendent told me recently that the old connection between school and parent is breaking down. He spoke not of an inner city but from a rural perspective. I had moments where I felt the same way as I read many letters written by parents in response to my open letter to parents last month. My letter was a brief statement of what the Regents were doing to raise expectations, boost capacity, and show results, and a short list of things that parents were doing to help their children meet these standards. It's impossible to know how many parents actually received this first letter, and how representative the respondents were, but some of those letters stick in the mind. One parent objected strongly to higher standards on the grounds that children had other things to do and shouldn't be given more homework. Another parent wrote that she couldn't understand the mathematics that the student was doing now and it was absurd for anyone to make the subject more difficult.
We have been missing a major opportunity to reach the parents through the adult literacy community, as the adult literacy advisory committee told me recently. Adult literacy programs go on in every community and they are eager to contribute to school improvement. Parents who are learning to read themselves are surely among the very best teachers and role models for their children and we need their help. I am sending my next parent letter to the adult educators in addition to the more familiar distribution channels.
There are still other routes to the parents. We have now held press briefings with members of the press representing Hispanic, African-American, Haitian-Creole, and Asian communities. The message was always the same: the standards and what it will take at school and home for all children to reach them. It was quite a pleasant surprise to see stacks of the School Report Card and the parents letter translated into Korean and Chinese at the last such meeting, all due to the work of our colleagues in the bilingual center.
We discussed the Regents and Governor's budget proposals on two separate days of committee hearings in the Legislature late last month. We have already begun the discussions of the budget details member by member and with legislative staff.
The Regents meeting this month will include additional information on the proposed assessments. For each of the subjects the State Education Department has briefly described the format, the administration time, the grade level, and the status of the test development. All of this information will be part of the discussion on graduation standards that has already begun and will occupy much of the spring.
Last month saw us pass an important milestone with the release of the request for proposals on the elementary and middle grades tests and a well attended bidders conference. The request for proposal was characterized as "demanding."
The new 655 report shows just how far we have to go to meet the standards:
