Parent Coalition
Taking Action - Sample Letters

Chancellor Robert Bennett
201 Millwood Lane
Tonawanda, NY 14150

Dear Chancellor Bennett:

In June, you and the members of the Board of Regents assured parents that the State Education Department would immediately rectify all the documented problems on the English Language Arts exam. As demonstrated by the August ELA exam, however, the State Education Department completely failed to live up to its promises of reform. In fact, the August exam contains some of the worst violations of academic standards we have yet seen.

This suggests either a failure of intelligence or a failure of ethics: either the SED never understood what it was doing wrong in the first place; or it took the cynical attitude that once the it had promised to police itself, the public would credulously trust it to do the right thing and would never attempt to verify whether it had in fact reformed. The public denials of Deputy Commissioner Kadamus and SED spokesman Alan Ray show utter contempt for both students and parents. The Commissioner and his staff clearly assume the public either doesn't actually care how students are tested or is too uninformed to understand the content of the tests.

With these exams, the Board of Regents have lowered academic standards and set a terrible example for our children. If any student did what the SED has done -- manipulate texts to suit their own purposes, misidentify sources, and then claim that the misidentification was justifiable because it made the work read "more smoothly," that student would surely fail and possibly face expulsion.

The Board of Regents has told parents that it is proud of appointing Commissioner Mills and providing oversight. What oversight is the Board actually providing? You and the Board can no longer abdicate responsibility for the actions of your appointee and his staff.

The recently published study by Amreiner and Berlin of high-school exit exams raises serious questions about the predictive validity of these tests. Amreiner and Berlin showed that success on high-school exit tests did not correlate with academic achievement on any other measure. These exams violate academic standards and have little if any predictive value. Yet you continue to use them as the sole determinant of our children's future.

As parents, we cannot allow our children to be guinea pigs for an educational remedy that has no proven efficacy and many proven negative side effects, including thousands of casualties every year -- students who are denied diplomas on the basis of this flawed test.

Until you can demonstrate that these exams actually uphold high academic standards and are postively correlated with future success, we demand an immediate moratorium.

I look forward to receiving your reply and learning what you plan to do to hold Commissioner Mills and the SED accountable.

Sincerely,

cc: Members of the Board of Regents
Assemblyman Steven Sanders
Stephen M. Saland