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Test Chief Resigns After Wide Math-Exam Failures
By KAREN W. ARENSON The director of the New York State Education Department's testing division was reassigned last week after widespread failures on the state's Math A Regents exam and has chosen to resign, according to members of the Board of Regents. The Regents said the state education commissioner, Richard P. Mills, reassigned the testing director, Roseanne DeFabio, after some of the Regents pressured him to make changes in the department's testing operations. But some of the Regents said they did not necessarily see Ms. DeFabio as the problem. Mr. Mills declined to comment yesterday, saying that he never discussed personnel matters. Ms. DeFabio, 59, whose formal title was assistant commissioner of curriculum, instruction and assessment, took early retirement rather than accepting reassignment, the Regents said. She would have kept her title but picked up other responsibilities, subject to mutual agreement, but she chose not to, said Robert M. Bennett, the chancellor of the Board of Regents. Tom Dunn, a spokesman for the department, said yesterday evening that Ms. DeFabio was on vacation and not available for comment. A man who answered the phone at her home also said she was not available. Nearly two out of three students who took the Math A exam on June 17 failed it, according to a preliminary survey of high schools by the Education Department. Addressing concerns by the Regents, Mr. Mills decided last week to set aside the results of the test for many of the students who took it. Schools grade their own Regents exams, and usually, the department does not collect data about results until August. But the department sought an earlier reading after widespread complaints from high schools that many students had failed and that many good students did less well than expected. The widespread failures, on 63 percent of the tests taken, were the latest problem for a department that has championed exams as the best way to ensure that students in the state are taught to high standards. Last year, a third of the students who took the physics Regents exam failed it, but the commissioner rejected requests to adjust the results. He also won a lawsuit challenging the test. Other problems have surfaced involving some of the state's fourth- and eighth-grade tests. But Mr. Mills said yesterday that the problems were small in light of the enormous number of tests given each year and in relation to their value. The department administers about 70 different exams, most of them three times a year. "There has long been opposition to the Regents' fundamental policy on testing and standards," Mr. Mills said. "But I don't see any reason to step back from that. The policy has been extraordinarily helpful to children." Others, however, said the testing problems were evidence of a system in need of serious re-examination. "For me, this ought to be a wake-up call," said Assemblyman Steven Sanders, Democrat of Manhattan, who is chairman of the Assembly's Education Committee. "This is not the first time that New York State has had a problem with an exam, and it is certainly not going to be the last. This is yet another example of the fact that any standardized exam is going to be subject to imperfections." He said the State Assembly and Senate education committees would hold hearings on the state's testing at the end of the summer. Although the hearings were discussed before the Math A test was given, Mr. Sanders said the Education Department should hear the views of students, parents, teachers and others about the math exam and the state's testing in general. Saul Cohen, a Regent and former president of Queens College, said he has proposed that the Education Department's whole testing process be reviewed, separate from the review of Math A that the department has said it will do. He has also asked that the physics Regents exam given last month be scrutinized because of widespread complaints from physics teachers about what they said was its poor quality. One member of the Board of Regents said she still backed the commissioner and favored testing as a way to help students achieve, although she believed some change was necessary. "My greatest hope is that people don't lose their confidence in the standards and in our ability to align the exams with the standards," said the board member, Merryl H. Tisch, a Regent from New York City. "We are going to do everything we have to do in order to ensure the public that the exams are valid." "There are people in the public who will use this to attack the standards," she added. "But before you do that, you should examine the number of kids in this state who have met the requirements and getting diplomas that really mean something." Many critics of the Math A exam have questioned whether the Education Department has enough staff to do its job adequately. Like many state agencies, it has suffered budget cuts and been subject to a hiring freeze. This year, state support for the agency fell 6.4 percent to $43.8 million. (It also draws revenue from other sources, including the federal government and fees.) Education Department officials say they look for outside help to supplement their own testing department, which has 23 professionals. "What we've had to do is hire math experts from outside our department - many of them past and current teachers - to work on exams," said James A. Kadamus, a deputy commissioner for the department. "We buy services rather than having people on our staff." The testing department will now report directly to him. But teachers say the cutbacks have left the department out of touch with them - and contributed to the poor design of the math exam. "There used to be a math bureau with specialists for different grade-level groupings - elementary, middle school, high school and college," said Bob Hazen, president of the New York State Association of Mathematics Teachers. "Now there is one math person. That's an enormous task for one person." |
