The New York State education department is considering sweeping changes to the way it evaluates student progress. In particular, state education leaders are considering doing away with Regents Exams.
Kathleen Moore covers education for the Albany Times-Union. She wrote about the proposed changes, and I talked about them with her.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
Sam Dingman: So you wrote this story about the Education Department's push towards what's called a competency-based education model.
Kathleen Moore: Yes.
Sam Dingman: Tell us what they mean by that.
Kathleen Moore: Oh, if only we all knew! So two years ago, they suggested getting rid of mandatory regents exams. They said, you know what, we have better ways of figuring out if people have mastered algebra than by having them take a multiple choice test.
Sam Dingman: So, to be clear, this isn't a question of whether students should learn algebra, it's more a question of how and why. In your piece, you actually spoke to a representative from the Education Department about what they mean by this idea of algebra as an applied skill, rather than just a concept.
Kathleen Moore: Yeah, so this was actually really fascinating. So, there are essentially 11 chapters of what you would consider to be an algebra textbook, although they don't actually exist as textbooks anymore. But there's 11 chapters, and I actually had that open, and as she was talking, I was actually looking through it. And the projects that she proposed do actually, to my great surprise, hit all of the things you're required to do in algebra. So, for example, among her ideas, you could pretend that you were running a business. You've got to put together a business plan, track growth over time in terms of sales, track how much things cost, and therefore how much you will sell them for, what your margins are, linear growth, those sorts of things. Classic algebra questions - covered everything. Another idea is you could invent a roller coaster. Now that covers a lot of those cool things, like the curves, so that the train doesn't fall off the tracks. And speed, so that it doesn't, so that it gets up the hill.
Sam Dingman: So let's take this a step outside of algebra now, because as I understand it, again from your piece, there's actually a group in Ulster County that was about 500 students and teachers, right, and they did...was it a pilot program for this?
Kathleen Moore: So this is done by the Ulster BOCES...
Sam Dingman: Can you just tell people, what does BOCES stand for?
Kathleen Moore: It's the Board of Cooperational Educational Services. It's formed by several counties, or a bunch of school districts. The idea is that they can work together. So BOCES put together this huge group effort - 500 people, community members, teachers, students. They actually pulled out two skills, one is being a an innovator, and one was about being a member of the of the global world. And they put together for each grade, K through 12, for each skill, three must do activities. So for example, in high school, you would do like a Model UN. Whereas, being a global citizen in kindergarten, the kindergartners would create a kindness crew. And so you have like sort of a building up of skill over time.
Sam Dingman: This is really interesting, and I can see where this is a huge step away from the idea of building towards a Regents Exam. This has real-world, very practical implications. I could, however, see supporters of something like a Regents Exam saying, "That's quantifiable." And it seems like with something like this...it's more individualized.
Kathleen Moore: One of the big criticisms is - let's take that roller coaster project, as an example. So suppose I'm an algebra teacher, and my students spend, I don't know, the last quarter of the year working on their projects, and then they give them to me. Am I grading them out of 100? Is it a pass/fail? And is it just a "hey, you did this work, good, done?" How much time is spent on it? Am I, as a teacher, specifically teaching the whole algebra course over the course of three quarters, and then we're going to spend a lot of time in a real world using it, which I've talked to algebra teachers, and they're excited about that idea. Or is this something that you throw together in one week at the very end?
Usually at the end of one of these courses that ends in a Regents Exam, there's a week or two of prep time, where in class you're doing like preparatory tests and all that kind of thing. So, are you just going to take that time that would have been spent on the Regents Exam and using just that on the project, on the theory that the kids have learned this all year, and they should be able to just put it together quickly? Or is it something you're building to through the whole year, and every every week for 15 minutes at the end of, I don't know, on Fridays, you'll be working toward your project, right?
Sam Dingman: Well, this gets to one of the other big things that you're writing about in this piece, right? And you use the phrase "sea change" to talk about this...we would be doing away with the idea of education being measured over a set course of linear time, right?
Kathleen Moore: Yes. Right now we have these things called Carnegie units. There's actually a Carnegie group that developed the idea of how many hours you had to spend sitting in a class to earn the credit for that class, and then you need 18 and a half credits to finish high school.
They're saying: let's get rid of that. You can prove your competency, which again is supposed to be like this project, like the roller coaster project. You can prove your competency. You don't have to spend the whole year in the class. Maybe you could do a self-study or a seminar.
Sam Dingman: So far we have been talking about this plan that is sort of hypothetical, and seems interesting and intriguing from the standpoint of somebody who is fascinated by education policy. But I'm really curious to know what the people who have to implement the policy - the teachers - are thinking about this.
Kathleen Moore: Yeah, so I've been talking with them, and what I've been hearing from teachers is that they love the idea. I have not yet, although I'm still interviewing, but I've not yet found any teacher who was like, 'No, just give me a test, that's so much better." The test is easier to grade. It's a clear thing that you can, you know, teach your kids every year, right. But they love the idea of doing a project instead. They think that that would lead to more connected, more, you know, more actual learning.
But they also are very worried about whether it's realistic. Things like having a class that's not a full year course. What does that look like? Does that mean that halfway through the year a student can put together their roller coaster plan in algebra and just not be in math anymore? And what does that look like? Do they just stop learning math?
Sam Dingman: Well, there is this idea in education, right, that part of what you're doing is educating kids, but the other thing you're doing is creating a space for them to reliably be for a certain amount of time, and a certain amount of the year. And this seems like it would really disrupt that.
Kathleen Moore: Yeah, so one thing that teachers told me they're very concerned about is that they feel that there are certain skills that you have to do all the time. You hear about "summer slide," about how it's important for kids to read and write and do math in the summer, and how a lot of kids don't do, maybe, for example, math in the summer. And so then when they come back, they've forgotten part of the previous year's learning. So teachers think it would be a disaster if a student were to, let's say, test out, so to speak, of algebra halfway through with their cool roller coaster design. And now maybe it's, I don't know, January, and they're done with math, and then they don't take another math class again until September. How much would they forget?
