Icebergs ahead! NY adopts no-test 'portrait' diploma

"The #1 class for college freshmen is remedial reading," says Rahm Emanuel, the former Chicago mayor who's thinking of running for president. "That’s an indictment of what’s happening in this country on education. We need to wake up to it, own it, and fix it."

Actually, Freshman Comp, also known as English 101, is the #1 class. And remedial math is the most common class for the unprepared, followed by remedial writing and then remedial reading. However, Emanuel is right to say our education system is graduating a lot of young people who aren't prepared for higher education or job training.

By one estimate, 40 percent of four-year college students and two-thirds of community college students are unprepared for college-level reading, writing and/or math.

New York schools are heading for disaster like the Titanic going full speed ahead for an iceberg, writes Fordham's Meredith Coffey. Instead of passing Regents exams, students will be asked to meet fuzzy standards that teachers won't be prepared to teach or evaluate or explain to parents.

A high school diploma won't be based on objective measures of academic competence. The new Portrait of a Graduate framework calls for a high school diploma to be based upon “interconnected attributes," writes Coffey. Students must demonstrate they are "academically prepared, creative innovator, critical thinker, effective communicator, global citizen, and reflective and future focused." Nobody knows what that means.

As an English teacher in New York City, Coffey valued the high bar set by Regents exams. Students who couldn't pass could get a "local" diploma. Top students could go for an "advanced" Regents diploma. And the tests showed how well or poorly schools were educating disadvantaged students.

When teachers evaluate their own students, they're tempted to lower expectations, declare everyone a success and pass them along, she writes. Everybody's happy until they fail Freshman Comp.

Similarly flexible statewide systems flopped in Kentucky and Vermont in the ’90s, writes Coffey. External reviews of portfolio-based assessments "found administrative burdens, drains on instructional time, rampant cheating, uneven rigor, and scoring that managed to be both inconsistent and inflated."

"Given that New York’s current plan is even fuzzier than what Kentucky and Vermont attempted, its prospects look pretty awful," writes Coffey.

New York's effort could fail, but doesn't have to, write Curtis Palmore and Robert Hiller of United Charter High Schools in New York City.

Their seven-school network narrowed the portrait's focus to "critical thinking, effective communication, collaboration, civic engagement, and reflective, future-focused learning," they write. "For each competency, a team of educators developed four to five smaller skills . . . so teachers and students had a clear picture of what growth looked like."

One student presented a community photography project from the Bronx Documentary Center as evidence for communication. In AP U.S. History, she worked with classmates to teach a lesson on the Dust Bowl to demonstrate collaboration.

Portraits have to be backed by assessments that are "consistent, credible and tied to real expectations," Palmore and Hiller write. "How will mastery be defined? How will teachers be prepared?"

Too often, schools don't do that work and the Portrait ends up as a poster on the wall, they warn. Nothing changes.