UFT protests Regents grading issues; UFT downplays concerns

A top Department of Education official said Friday that effects from delays caused by city’s new electronic grading system were “overblown” and estimated that only a small percentage of students would participate in graduation ceremonies without knowing their final grades.

“Every kid will have their diploma before the end of [the school year], no one’s being kept from walking,” Chief Academic Officer Shael Polakow-Suransky said at International High School at Lafayette in Brooklyn, shortly before taking stage to speak at the school’s graduation ceremony.

“I know that it’s stressful and I feel bad for the kids that it’s stressful,” he said, then added, “I do feel like it’s a little bit overblown.”

Polakow-Suransky’s comments came following days of complaints from teachers about the grading process of four of the most-taken Regents tests — Living Environment, Global Studies, U.S. History, and English. The exams are being scored electronically this year through a “distributed scoring system” to improve the efficiency and accuracy of the process used in previous years, which involved teachers grading their own students’ exams.

McGraw-Hill, the vendor administering the process, was tasked with collecting the exams at schools, transporting them to a scanning site in Connecticut, and then distributing answers one by one to teachers stationed at computers in city grading centers.

But the process was significantly delayed by scanning glitches and teachers said this week that often they’ve only been able to grade just a few dozen tests for an entire day. As a result, tens of thousands of Regents exams have not been graded and many students who are preparing for their graduation ceremonies still aren’t sure if they scored high enough to receive their diploma. The city is rushing to hire teachers to grade over the weekend in order to complete the scoring.

Polakow-Suransky downplayed the concerns, saying he expected the grading to be done by Monday and he estimated that less than 4 percent of students will have walked in graduation ceremonies without knowing what their final grades are.

He also criticized the United Federation of Teachers, which held a press conference early this morning at Stuyvesant High School, one of the city’s grading sites. UFT President Michael Mulgrew railed against the Department of Education for its handling of the process.

“Who was the genius who decided that it was a good idea to take all the tests that the children take and put them in trucks and send them to Connecticut to get scanned into systems so they can send them back here?” Mulgrew asked.

Mulgrew said he supported electronic scoring, but that the department made mistakes in its oversight of the contract with McGraw-Hill. When the education department awarded the $9.7 million contract to the publishing giant last year, officials said that part of the discounted deal included a promise from McGraw-Hill to develop a new web application that it didn’t previously have.

“Open up the books and be transparent and just say, listen we messed up, we shouldn’t have done this,” Mulgrew said.

In response, Polakow-Suransky said he believed the union was unnecessarily politicizing the issue.

“It’s ugly to be using this for political gain,” he added.

The shift to online distributed scoring is part of a roll out that began last year. It comes as the city prepares the need to administer and grade tests that include more open-answer questions to reflect Common Core standards. Officials have said that the system makes its easier to more accurately grade essays and other written responses.

Bruce Matthews, a teacher at Bard High School Early College who joined Mulgrew for the press conference, agreed that the concept behind the grading system was promising.

“If they can work out the kinks in this program, I think it’s great,” Matthews said. “But there’s been no input from people in the trenches who do this.”