David Bloomfield urges pause in state regulations until Portrait is defined
David Bloomfield, Professor Emeritus at Brooklyn College and CUNY Graduate Center, says the state Regents meeting gave no confidence in defining Portrait. He warns exams may persist and return to teaching to the test, and urges the Council to recommend a pause until the field fills in blanks, especially for multilingual learners and students with disabilities.
Yes, hello.
My name is David Bloomfield, Professor Emeritus, Brooklyn College, and the CUNY Graduate Center.
Thank you, Chair Dinowitz, members of the Council.
Simply put, nothing in last week's Regents meeting gives confidence that the state is ready to define the portrait of a graduate's blurry outlines.
Surprisingly, staff even stepped back from their signature renunciation of Regents exams.
Despite Deputy Commissioner's memorandum that the exams are inappropriate as graduation requirements or even for grading, they now insist that the exams persist to align curriculum to learning standards.
Such a proposal would return districts to teaching to the test.
The very problem portrait of a graduate was meant to reform.
My urgent request is that the council recommend a
pause in the region's promulgation of regulations tied to Portrait of a Graduate until the field can fill in the blanks left unrealized by state ed.
Call it a clinical trial of Portrait of a Graduate's aspirations before regulations set its structures in stone.
Of particular importance are attention to the needs of multilingual learners, students with disabilities, other groups, and local circumstances which state ed has largely ignored in its overall plan.
New York City is well positioned to act without state ed's imposing mandates, clearly not ready for prime time.
Deputy Chancellor for High Schools Alan Chang has strong experience as a former superintendent for consortium, international, and expeditionary learning schools,
the very basis for Portrait of a Graduate's emphasis on project-based experiential curricula and well along in planning without premature state mandates complicating their work.
By putting graduation standards in the hands of educators, not standardized test vendors or politicians bent on inflating class rates, we can bring sanity to end an era when gimmicks like credit recovery
substitute for teacher judgment.
Thank you very much.