Testing Companies Want Your Money!

And they're looking to get it in New York!

New York state is weighing whether to prohibit high-school teachers from grading their own students' Regents exams. The Board of Regents, which sets education policy for the state, is set to vote next week on the ban.

The proposed rule is tucked into regulations governing an overhaul of teacher and principal evaluations. Last year, the Legislature passed a law requiring the state to revamp the evaluations and tie them, in part, to student standardized test scores.

In New York, teachers have been grading their own students' Regents tests for decades. Students need to pass five Regents tests to obtain a high-school diploma. The proposed rule also applies to elementary and intermediate grade-school tests, but schools typically send those tests outside for scoring. [emphasis mine]

Yes, let's shovel even more money away from the classroom to have non-teachers grade tests that weren't designed to evaluate teachers so they can be used to... evaluate teachers.

Mr. Dunn said the proposal was made because an independent advisory group of "nationally known experts," which advises the state on assessment issues, recommended that "educators not have a vested interest in the exams they score."

Well, if the teachers are going to be evaluated on the scores, they really shouldn't proctor the exams, either; better contract with someone to fix that. And we don't want them skewing results by doing test prep exercises in class...

Maybe someone else should teach the courses; the tests scores will then determine the career of the teacher who isn't teaching the kids.

It makes as much sense as anything else being proposed by the corporate reformers...