Yesterday, Kathy Korte (APS school board member and parent), sent you a letter expressing her frustration.

Below are corrections to each of Ms. Kortes false statements. 1. Students in kindergarten through 12th grade must take End of Course exams this year. These exams will determine a portion of a teacher's evaluation outcome, as well as impact the school grade. (How art, music and PE end of course tests for kindergartners are helpful is beyond me!) This is false. There are no End of Course Exams (EoCs) in Kindergarten. Kindergarten teachers utilize interim assessments (usually DIBELS) to help inform the teacher of student strengths and weaknesses and to help inform about the progress the student is making over the course of the year. Additionally, the DIBELS assessment, which is paid for by the state, is not a traditional fill in the correct bubble assessment. It is administered to the student verbally on a oneto-one basis and takes about 5 minutes. 2. Students in high school must pass End of Course exams -- not just because they are part of a teacher's evaluation but because some of them are required for a diploma. In addition to SBA exams and graduation credit requirements, End of Course exams are required to be taken beginning the freshman year. There are end of course exams being written for all courses -- right now the PED has written around 22. Not all 22 end of course exams impact graduation. These tests are written by the PED and no one knows what they contain -- not even the teachers whose students are taking these EOCs. How fair is that to the teachers and the students -- to be tested by a test written by someone who has not been in the classroom all year??!!!! This too is false. The current requirements for graduation were passed by the legislature in 2008, not by PED in 2013. End of Course Exams (EoCs) were entirely written by New Mexico teachers. Importantly, setting the passing score for the alternate demonstration of competency EoCs was also done by New Mexico teachers. EoCs were developed to provide students alternative ways of meeting the statutory requirements, (NMSA 1978, Section 22131.1,) to receive a diploma. The point of using EoCs for this purpose was to allow students to focus on a particular subject area and to receive additional individualized interventions, if required. EoCs are intended to replace finals. Finals are also a statutory requirement (also passed by the legislature) set forth in NMSA 1978, Section 22131.1 (J). The Public Education Department (PED) does not require students to take EoCs and finals; administering both would be solely at the discretion of a local district. If both assessments are being administered in Ms. Kortes district, it is a decision made at the district level and not encouraged by PED. The EoC blueprints (what each EoC will assess) are posted on the PED website at: http://ped.state.nm.us/AssessmentAccountability/AssessmentEvaluation/EOC/index.html. It is important to note that districts have been invited to submit their own EoCs if they wished to develop them. Information on criteria and how to submit EoCs to the PED are also available at the previously noted web address.

Specifically, the law requiring proficiency before graduation (Section 22-13-1.1, passed in 2008) requires that students must demonstrate competency in the five subject areas of Reading, Writing, Mathematics, Science, and Social Studies. Because of this statutory mandate, students are required to pass Reading, Math, and Science on the High School Graduation Assessment (HSGA) and pass Writing and Social Studies End-of-Course Exams (EoCs). If students do not pass these primary methods for demonstrating competency, they have a number of retakes as well as an Alternate Demonstration of Competency (ADC). The ADC Manual, posted on the PED website at http://www.ped.state.nm.us/AssessmentAccountability/AssessmentEvaluation/index.html, Please note that, if students meet graduation requirements by passing the HSGA and one EoC in the content areas of Writing and Social Studies, they are not required by the State to take additional graduation assessments. However, Section 22-13-1.1 (J) requires that all courses given for high school credit include final exams, and many schools are using EoCs as finals. Students may bank passing EoC scores as early as their freshman year to ensure that they will have met graduation requirements by the end of their senior year. We do not allow teachers to access the EoCs to prevent them from teaching only to the test items. We do provide detailed blueprints outlining the assessed standards and assessment specifications so teachers may adequately prepare students for these assessments. These blueprints are available on our website under the EoC tab. 3. End of Course exams are SEPARATE AND IN ADDITION to final exams. High schoolers are also taking their PSAT, SAT, ACT and AP exams! My daughter -- a highly gifted student with a 3.8 GPA -- is stressed out! This is false. End of Course Exams (EoCs) are intended to be given as final exams, not in addition to them. Giving two sets of exams at the completion of a course is a decision made at the district, not by the Public Education Department. It is important to note that SAT, ACT, and Advanced Placement (AP) passing scores can count towards meeting graduation requirements, therefore maximizing the ways in which a student can demonstrate competence. 4. Students who take AP classes have teachers who must submit their lesson plans to the College Board. These students in AP classes like English will take the EOC exam -- even if the EOC exam may not have materials that are required of the College Board coursework and the critical AP exam that students can take for a college credit. This is false. Advanced Placement (AP) teachers are not required to submit lesson plans to the College Board. AP coursework covers all of the standards on the EoCs plus additional content. Students who are successful in AP courses and prepared for the AP exams should be well prepared for EoCs. Additionally, we accept AP exam scores as ADCs so students are not required to double test.

5. If you don't pass the End of Course exams, there are retake possibilities. If you don't pass retakes, what happens then? The PED talks about an alternate demonstration of competency or a certificate of completion. We learned that NM colleges will take students with certificates or alternative demonstrations of competency. But these students do not qualify for any scholarships (lottery or bridge) or financial aid! How is that helpful to our students?! Talk about a killer of dreams. There is a full guidance manual that details alternate demonstration competency options available on the PED website at http://www.ped.state.nm.us/ped/adc/ADC2012.pdf. 6. Right now, seniors who are a couple of points shy on their SBA science exams are taking End of Course exams in biology or chemistry. They took these classes their freshman or sophomore years because EOCs werent around then. So with a few days of review, these seniors have to try to cram an entire year of biology and chemistry into their recall memory to take an EOC and if they dont pass the EOC or if their SBA retake doesnt improve, they have the chance to not earn their diploma. What a nice surprise for seniors and their families! Who thought that additional requirements could just be handed down without any warning?! Its undemocratic. The statute requiring that students pass the Math, Reading, Social Studies, Science and Writing passed by the legislature in 2008 while these students were in 7th grade. The implementation of the statute was formalized in March of 2012, while these students were juniors. Proactive districts planned refresher courses for the junior year or for the summer. Again, districts had (and have) the opportunity to develop additional End of Course Exams (EoCs) that might better align to the course taking patterns of a particular district. EoCs were in place in 2012, so many of these students had the opportunity to test at the completion of these courses. The PED has given districts the option of producing districtdeveloped EoCs for additional courses to give students another opportunity to meet graduation requirements. In cases where students already completed biology and chemistry and have not passed the HSGA, districts may produce EoCs in alternative science courses to give these students additional opportunities to demonstrate competence in science. Please remember that these EoCs are only used as Alternative Demonstration of Competency (ADC) in cases where students do not pass Science on the HSGA. Additionally, the goal of the 2008 law to prove proficiency is to ensure our students are ready for college or career. Ms. Korte fails to mention the over $25 million dollars taxpayers pay every year for remedial courses at New Mexico higher education institutions. Recent studies have shown if a student takes just 1 remedial course in New Mexico, they are 5 times less likely to earn a college degree. Ensuring our students are ready is the right thing to do.

I am dumbfounded that government officials at the state level can dictate -- unchecked -- our students' so-called academic careers and replace them with testing regimens that leave teachers

overworked and stressed out about the tests because now their evaluation results hinge on them (outside factors not taken into consideration at all). The EoCs, the SBA, and the NMTEACH effectiveness system all received feedback from New Mexico teachers. In fact, the SBA and the EoCs, as noted, are a direct result of New Mexico teacher inputin terms of item writing, standard setting, item, and bias review. Improved student achievement is only a portion of a teachers evaluation. It does consider outside factors such as the focus of student achievement, and is not simply the level of a students performance, but the unique contribution to each students learning for that year. Additionally, the New Mexico SBA is ranked #15 in the nation and the NMTEACH effectiveness system has been reviewed and approved by national experts both inside and outside the U.S. Department of Education. Adding to teachers' stress levels are the ridiculous requirements for the other part of the evaluations: their observations by principals and the new computer system they are learning to input their observation materials into! The new TeachScape system is not working right now. There are serious problems with it. It is wasting hundreds of hours of time to teachers whose time is already stretched very, very thin. How much did TeachScape cost the state? How much is it costing the state in recurring maintenance? How long is the TeachScape contract? Who owns this company? Is the company linked to any other reform movement making money off of education reform? Have you asked these questions???? Albuquerque Public Schools has been fully launched into the Teachscape tool. The Public Education Department (PED) provided direct training to all administrators and added additional training to ensure that the largest district was adequately prepared to utilize this tool. Teachscape is an additional tool for principals and teachers to share data, feedback, and professional development information. The NMTEACH effectiveness system does not require specific criteria on uploading lesson plans or other artifacts, but the new tool does provide an additional resource for teachers and principals to collect these items. Ultimately, it is a local decision regarding which artifacts need to be collected, at what times, and how often. The contract for Teachscape is about $1,888,000.00 per year for a two-year period. Teachscape won the contract in a competitive Request for Proposal (RFP) bid over seven competitors. The evaluation team that chose the tool included seven educational stakeholders from regional areas in New Mexico including teachers, principals, and central office staff. The contract was awarded to Teachscape after they were the highest scoring company of the three finalists. All documents and scoring rubrics can be retrieved from the General Services Division of the Department of Finance and Administration. Add to the stress of TeachScape the new common core curriculum mandate that teachers are implementing this year. Teachers are building lesson plans around common core standards and

they are likely to tell you that common core is going to be great for their students and building their content is the best part of their jobs. But evaluation requirements and the TeachScape problems are keeping them from fully engaging in their curriculum preparation. Have you visited a teacher or a school and asked them what common core and teacher evaluations are doing to them?? Or do you just listen to what the PED Secretary-designate tells you up in Santa Fe? The evaluation process does not require additional work from teachers. The Teachscape tool is a resource that provides additional, free professional development opportunities to teachers, feedback loops for principals, and data collection components for districts to ensure that effective instruction is prioritized daily. In addition, the NMTEACH observation rubric has provided teachers with concrete language regarding performance expectations. Classroom teachers can be more clear about what will be observed while using these tools, and more importantly, they will be able to reflect on best practices that will help them improve their teaching delivery. All the testing requirements mentioned above are in addition to the assessments given to our students three times a year and the other normal pop quizzes and chapter tests they take. Add all of these tests together and I want to know how many hours are devoted to actual instruction time. Do you know this? Have you asked teachers to compile individual hours spent teaching, preparing for their teaching, inputting their pre- and post-evaluation observations and lesson plan rubrics into TeachScape? Are you just listening to the secretary-designate? State mandated testing is a very small part of the time students spend in a classroom. Students spend about 1,100 hours in classrooms. Of this about 8 or 9 hours are used for the New Mexico Standards Based Assessment (NMSBA) amounting to about 0.7% of the time. Interim assessments, which are not required, are substantially shorter and may bring this total up to 1% of the time. If we assume a student must take six (6) End of Course (EoC) exams, the total time spent on state mandated testing is about 1.2% of their total time in school every year. Given that teachers know how best to monitor their students progress, how best to inform themselves when they have taught successfully, or when they need to re-teach many opt to use additional pop quizzes etc. But, these are not state mandated. I am hoping you get many, many more emails, letters and phone calls. I want action from my representatives in Santa Fe. I want questions asked for my four children since I cant be in Santa Fe every day and since I voted for you to represent me. I am going to spread the word as best as I can that lawmakers are failing students and parents and that the Public Education Departments secretary-designate is killing public education. I am going to be a loud voice for the unfairness and lack of common sense that is the framework for these so-called reforms and I will continue screaming until this train wreck is stopped by someone who is listening to parents and students.

And if nothing is done by lawmakers, then Ill take my anger to the voting booth and vote for anyone but the incumbent in 2014, political party be damned. Please do your job.

Sincerely, Kathy Korte APS Board of Education APS parent of four students inundated with tests this year