Some recommendations issued on Tuesday by the panel, which was convened by the state’s Department of Education in July, will take effect immediately; others require approval of the Board of Regents, the state education policy board.
Among those that take effect right away: All state tests must now begin on the same day in districts throughout the state, to heighten test security. Also, all educators who proctor or grade state exams will be required to certify that they were trained and followed security procedures.
In outlining the recommendations, John B. King Jr., the state education commissioner, and Valerie Grey, the executive deputy commissioner, wrote in a memorandum to the Board of Regents that not enough was being done to detect and deter cheating by teachers and principals, given the rising stakes of tests.
“Here in New York, as standardized test scores are increasingly utilized for school and district accountability” and in teacher and principal evaluations, they wrote, “it is imperative that those tests are not compromised.”
Some of the deeper changes recommended by the panel would need approval from the Board of Regents. One option is to bar teachers from grading or proctoring their own students’ exams, which has been an accepted practice across the state for decades. The group also recommended that the Board of Regents authorize the state to begin searching for an independent investigator to examine how it currently handles cheating complaints.
The panel said it appeared that New York was the only state that graded its standardized tests locally, a practice that is against federal recommendations. As a result, it directed officials to investigate switching to a statewide system for scoring multiple-choice questions that would include a computer analysis of erasure marks to detect cheating.
For essay questions, the panel recommended that state officials consider a rotation system that would permit all questions to be scored outside the schools in which they are given. To aid in investigations, it recommended that the state consider keeping test answer sheets for longer than a year before destroying them.
Shael Polakow-Suransky, New York City’s chief academic officer, said on Thursday that he agreed with the recommendations. “Their proposals make a lot of sense,” he said, “provided the costs are not passed on to districts like New York City, where we now spend more than $20 million a year to score state exams."