The portfolio option arises again, this time as an alternative to the Regents exam ($ubscrip required):
One of the items still on the table in this final week of the legislative session in Albany is a bill that would direct the state education commissioner to come up with an alternative to the Regents exams required for a high school diploma in New York...The bill has already passed the state Senate and is now before the assembly, where the speaker, Sheldon Silver, can either pass it or kill it. Our friends in the education policy community...are hoping the speaker will kill the bill, seeing it as a departure from the measurement, accountability, and standards that are essential to quality education. The New York Times and the Daily News are in agreement on the point.
I can't find this story anywhere else (the blurb from Google quoted a line about portfolios), and, unfortunately, that's all I can get without subscribing. Anyone out there got a subcription?
Update: A sharp-eyed reader found a more informative article from back when the bill had just passed the Senate:
Supporters say it's better than the state's current one-size-fits-all system of testing. Opponents, including state Education Commissioner Richard Mills, fear the measure could cripple their decade-long effort to use the Regents exams as a way of raising academic standards across the state...One of the bill's sponsors, Stephen Saland, R-Poughkeepsie, who heads the senate's Education Committee, said the measure stems from what he views as an unwillingness by Mills and the board to compromise on having all students take the exams. "It's their way or the highway," said Saland.
But Mills says setting up a system of portfolios would be too costly and difficult to police. "The bill would create an unworkable system," predicted an Education Department memo to lawmakers. "It would be virtually impossible to monitor all schools closely enough to ensure that schools followed the curriculum and assigned all projects, and that an A in one school equaled an A, not a C, in another school."
When it comes to school accountability, what exactly is wrong with "their way or the highway?" And Mills hits the nail on the head with his concern about the un-standardized nature of portfolio projects.
Update #2: The Instructivist has more, and links to a NYT editorial which is, astonishingly, crictical of the bill:
Before they jeopardize education reform, legislators should revisit a disturbing report issued a few years ago by a panel of education experts that evaluated the portfolio assessments used by the schools in the New York Performance Standard Consortium, a politically influential education group. The panel could find no evidence to support the claim that the consortium's schools were conforming to the state's learning standards or measuring student progress in any meaningful way.Posted by kswygert at June 21, 2005 09:50 AM