The New York Assistant Education Commissioner, Roseanne DeFabio, has stepped down, amid a tornado of negative testing publicity surrounding the Math portion of the NY Regents Exam. She's actually taking an "early retirement," but there doesn't seem to be any controversy as to the precipitating factor:
Assistant Education Commissioner Roseanne DeFabio, 59, opted to take early retirement...Education Department spokesman Tom Dunn said Tuesday. Dunn said state Education Commissioner Richard Mills [who recently voided the June 2003 Math portion of the Regents exam] wanted the Office of Assessment, which develops the standardized tests, to directly report to Deputy Education Commissioner James Kadamus instead of DeFabio, but she refused to accept reassignment. Her resignation took effect immediately...
The shuffling was made so that the Office of Assessment "receives the resources and attention to ensure that the assessment system remains the cornerstone of the Regents' strategy...[in other words, so that blunders this big don't happen again...]
During DeFabio's tenure, the Education Department came under fire several times over allegations of faulty Regents tests, including the sanitizing of literary passages on the English Regents test last June...Last week, Mills gave schools the option of tossing out scores from the Math A Regents exam that is normally a prerequisite for high school graduation, admitting that the test was flawed...
To the dismay of students and parents, the Education Department refused to change the scoring of its June 2002 physics Regents test despite lower passing grades and complaints from some teachers that the new format of the test was too hard. The department did schedule a makeup test that gave students another chance...
I'm betting this will not be the only shakeup within the Education Department.
Posted by kswygert at July 1, 2003 06:09 PM