Censorship: The ELA Exposed
The Paper Trail: Press Release

Wednesday January 8, 2003

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

From: New York State Parents' Coalition To End High Stakes Testing

State-Wide Coalition Calls for Resignation of State Education Commissioner Richard Mills and a Moratorium on the Use of Regents Exams as High Stakes Tests

With the January Regents test just days away, parent watchdogs monitoring the State Education Department's response to a documented pattern of censorship charged today that State Education Commissioner Mills had flagrantly ignored demands to stop the use of flawed exams. The high stakes English Language Regent exams are, they say, still riddled with censored text.

"The use of these corrupted tests undermine all claims of standards," said Jane Hirschmann, chair of the New York State Parents' Coalition to End High Stakes Testing.. "It's a classic example of 'I'll tell them I fixed it, but do what I want.' The Commissioner promised the public and the politicians to end a policy which drastically altered literary and nonfiction work. He has not. Clearly Mr. Mills has a problem with accountability. It's time for him to go and for the Board of Regents to order a moratorium on the use of these exams as high stakes tests."

Last June, a ground-breaking investigation by a public school parent provided over-whelming evidence that New York State's Education Department had engaged in a consistent pattern of censorship. The study demonstrated how all references to race, religion, sexuality and ethnicity had been "cleansed" from English Language Arts Regents exams. 21 of the 26 passages used on the tests over the past three years had been fundamentally altered.

This past week a letter signed by more than a dozen organizations was sent to the Commissioner, the Chancellor of the Board of Regents, and the co-chairs of the State Legislative Education Committees, documenting the Commissioner's failure to change the censorship policy. The organizations included, among others, The National Coalition Against Censorship, PEN American Center, the Association of American Publishers, the New York Civil Liberties Union, and the National Council of Teachers of English.

"It's obvious that the Commissioner's assurances last June were completely false," said Jeanne Heifetz, the parent who researched the passages. "Not only were passages on the June test altered, without citations, but so were passages on the August exam." As before, many of the deletions significantly distorted the meaning of the passages and made it difficult to answer the questions posed. In some cases, questions had more than one correct answer. "These are high stakes tests," continued Heifetz, " one question could result in a student failing the test and not graduating. That's deplorable."

Some critics of high stakes tests, most recently a national study conducted by researchers at Arizona State University, cite growing evidence that high stakes tests actually lower standards while others, such as the National Research Council, argue that high stakes tests should never be used as the sole determinant for promotion or graduation as they are in New York State.

"It appears that the only thing this test is good for is to see if students can pass this test," commented Dr. Robert O'Meally, Columbia University's Zora Neal Hurston Professor of Literature. "My colleagues and I have examined these tests closely; in fact, we actually took one, something I would recommend to anyone who thinks these tests are a proxy for high standards. Requiring New York State students to perform on tests which rely on censored literature is both cynical and dishonest."

"We believe that the Commissioner's action constitutes a flagrant violation of the public trust," said Marcia Weinert, parent leader in Rochester. "Commissioner Mills clearly assumes that we either don't care how our children are tested or that we are too uninformed to understand the content of the tests. It is time for the Board of Regents to ask for his resignation."

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