There’s a controversy about the 2006 fourth grade ELA tests. Go to Brownie the Cow and learn all about it:

• The two main essay questions on the 2006 ELA test (including
  the one about “Brownie the Cow” and the even more illogical question
  about "The Stolen Moon") make no sense!
• Only 1 in 17 NYC 4th graders scored a 4 — down 60% from 2005
• It’s yet another writing-test debacle for CTB/McGraw Hill, the state’s testing contractor
• NY State says its tests aren’t all-purpose diagnostic tools – but that’s how Klein uses them
• NYC
  uses the state’s 4th grade test as an "SAT" for middle school —
  excluding students from selective schools and programs based on their
  scores

If we’re going to let test scores drive everything from
student promotions to curricular adjustments to personnel decisions,
shouldn’t we at least make sure the tests make sense and the
test-makers are competent?

Contact Klein & other decision-makers

BrownieTheCow.org is a loose group of parents and
educators appalled at how bad this year’s New York State fourth-grade
English Language Arts test was – in particular, the writing sections.
We’re also appalled, the more we learn, at the process the state uses
to develop these pseudo-scientific tests, and at how the New York City
schools keep using them as all-purpose diagnostic tools.

None of us believe this is the most important issue in the world, or
even in the NYC schools. We’ve watched, over the last few years, as
test-taking and test-prep have crept ever closer to the center of our
children’s school experience (and even into the curriculum itself) –
and we’ve done nothing. Most of us had decided that the excesses and
occasional absurdities of this new educational world are, on the whole,
tolerable.

But this year’s excesses were, well, excessive. And this moment
seems like a good time to start asking some hard questions about where
we’re going with this. If we’re going to replace the old structure at
110 Livingston Street with a new edifice we call “standards and
accountability”, hadn’t we better make sure the cornerstone of that
whole effort – the state’s testing program – is sound? Before we let
test scores drive everything from student promotions to curricular
adjustments to personnel decisions, shouldn’t we make sure the tests
make sense and the test-makers are competent?

And in the case of writing tests, now that we’ve seen the 2006
model, shouldn’t we be asking the most basic questions: Can a state
bureaucracy and a profit-seeking corporation really be trusted to
competently tell us how well every child in the state of New York is
writing? Why should we believe that could ever work?

BrownieTheCow.org wants to start a spirited debate
about these questions. We want to laugh at a test that is laughably
bad, and then get policy-makers to do better.