By KAREN W. ARENSON
New York Times
July 7, 2003

June was not an easy month for Richard P. Mills, New York State's education commissioner.

There was the furor over the state's Math A Regents exam, which Mr. Mills declared unfair, setting aside the results. Then there was the outcry over the physics Regents exam, a test that Mr. Mills acknowledged was hard but that he staunchly declined to withdraw. There were the attacks on New York's standards-based testing system. And finally, there was the resignation of the department's top testing official after Mr. Mills tried to reassign her.

And yet last week, Mr. Mills, 58, was unbowed and crowing about victories for New York's testing program.

"This is very definitely a high moment now," he said in an interview.

He referred to the ruling by the New York State Court of Appeals that the state owes all its students a solid education, a vindication, he said, of the high standards that he and the Regents are insisting on for all students. Another victory, he said, is rising test scores; he had just gone to Patricia A. DiChiaro elementary school in Yonkers, to celebrate the improvement in elementary school results.

"I really don't have low moments," he said, adding that he did not see the criticism of his department as a setback, but as part of the price of leadership.

"Every superintendent, every college president, will tell you that leadership is challenging," he said. "That is just what it is. If you don't want that in your life, you do other work."

That kind of attitude may be admirable to some, but critics say they are not sure what planet the commissioner is living on. They include students who have devoted hours to math and physics - with Saturday sessions and tutoring - only to fail the tough Regents exams. Teachers who have spent hours coaching their students to reach higher levels only to see them score poorly. Parents upset that their children's graduation will hinge on the outcome of a few exams. Readers offended by what they see as the "butchering" of classic literary texts on the English exams to remove references to race and sex that might be offensive.

Jane Hirschmann, chairwoman of the Parents' Coalition to End High Stakes Testing, which has thousands of members around New York State, is among critics who complained about what they perceive as Mr. Mills's inflexibility. "He has an agenda and is not willing to listen to anyone," she said in an interview. "He is hellbent on seeing that high-stakes testing dominates the school curriculum, and that is not the way to go."

Critics, including Ms. Hirschmann, have called for the commissioner's removal, but the Regents, who appointed him, have stood behind him. His positions are sure to be an issue when the Assembly and Senate education committees conduct hearings on the state's testing policies later this summer.

"We've seen such problems with the tests," said Assemblyman Steven Sanders, a Manhattan Democrat and chairman of the Assembly's Education Committee. "With the compilation of the questions, the censorship of information, the scoring of the exams. To say the test itself is so important relative to the whole body of work the student has done is flawed.

"I know that Commissioner Mills is dedicated to students and I applaud him for that," he said. "I think that Commissioner Mills is entirely sincere. But it's ironic that when he was in Vermont he championed a whole different approach based on portfolios of student work, not just exams."

But people who know the commissioner well, like Carl T. Hayden, the former Regents chancellor, say such criticism is likely to have little effect.

"He won't quit now," Mr. Hayden said. "He is not about to be deterred by what happened. He is very deeply committed to making opportunity more widely available, to advancing the principle of equity."

And Kati Haycock, a Mills supporter who is the director of the Education Trust, an education standards advocacy group based in Washington, says testing problems are to be expected - and must be dealt with quickly and honestly - but are more than compensated for by the results.

"If a state were just heading down this course for the first time, people would be right to ask if they really know what they are doing," she said. "But New York State has had decades of experience with Regents exams, and not that many problems. For me, the question is: Are New York kids learning more than when Rick came? And are the kids who were especially behind catching up? The answer to both is a resounding yes."

Closing the gap between poor and minority students and others is part of what Mr. Mills pledged to do when he arrived in New York in 1995. He is passionate about the need for demanding standards - and for regular tests to see whether they are being met. He is meticulously well organized, a strategic thinker and an almost compulsive communicator - he writes weekly memos to the 16 Regents, meets monthly with regional school district superintendents and periodically talks with key figures like the teachers' union president, legislative leaders and the New York City schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein.

"Certainly with me, he's been enormously hands-on and substantive," said Mr. Klein, who recently persuaded Mr. Mills to extend the city's use of uncertified teachers.

The way Mr. Mills tackled the problems with the Math A Regents exam offers a glimpse into his style.

Students took the exam on June 17, and the complaints started almost immediately: The test was too hard. It covered material the students had not learned. It did not cover material they had studied. It had too many trick problems. Some questions had more than one right answer.

By June 19, the complaints reaching Mr. Mills had begun to balloon, from the Regents, district superintendents, parents, students and teachers whose messages were sent to him. He began to try to gauge how serious the criticisms were.

He tried the test (and passed, though he will not say with what score). He assembled a team of advisers - experts in technical issues, curriculum, testing, finance, communications and politics. He solicited preliminary test results. He asked the Regents, the superintendents and others what they thought. He called Mr. Klein and Randi Weingarten, president of the United Federation of Teachers. He asked testing experts to compare the last three Math A exams. He talked three times with Matthew Goldstein, a mathematical statistician who is chancellor of the City University of New York.

The fact finding continued through that weekend. And as Mr. Mills awaited data, he hammered out six possible options.

According to the preliminary data, 63 percent of students who had taken the exam failed. The experts reviewing the three Math A exams "didn't find any problems," Mr. Mills said. "But when the data began to come in, it seemed clear that the exam was not behaving as it did the year before. That was the key."

And so on June 24, one week after the exam, Mr. Mills announced that that he would set aside the results because the test appeared unfair, and he would ask a panel of outside experts to assess what went wrong.

While some see the attention to standards as a passing fad, Mr. Mills argues otherwise. He reads from a speech by New York's first education commissioner, Andrew Draper, delivered in 1912: "There will have to be standards here, and they will have to be upheld, even though the powerful would break them down."

Mr. Mills could have been speaking about Ann Cook, co-chairwoman of the New York Performance Standards Consortium, a group of 32 schools around the state that favor other means of assessment over the Regents exams. Ms. Cook said the commissioner "has been unwilling to let schools that were working well continue what they were doing."

"One size does not fit all," she said. "What's necessary at the very least is a moratorium on the high-stakes testing."

Although his father spent time as a teacher before entering the insurance business, Mr. Mills said he did not think about becoming an educator until his freshman year at Middlebury College in Vermont, when his English teacher called him to the front of the classroom to speak about a poem. He does not remember the poem, but remembers the experience vividly.

"I suddenly realized how exciting it was to lead the class," he said.

He thought he would become a history professor. But after completing a master's degree in history at Columbia University, he began teaching at the Dalton School, a private school in Manhattan.

He went on to create an alternative school with other Dalton teachers and found he liked administration more than teaching. He returned to Columbia for an M.B.A. from the business school and a doctorate at Teachers College. Then he entered education administration in New Jersey, later moving to Vermont and then to New York.

Some critics say that while standards are good, students at poor schools with unqualified teachers have little chance of meeting them and should not be penalized. But Mr. Mills argues that the education they receive will not change until people see how bad their scores are.

"The Regents, by setting standards and administering tests, have built pressure that has produced change in the right direction," he said. "When people say, `The standards are great, but I don't like this testing regimen,' that's really an attack on the standards.

"None of that is to deny that we have to fix this particular exam," he continued. "But we are not going to allow a problem with one exam to overturn the entire enterprise."

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