By Jordan Heller
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
MANHATTAN — A coalition of teachers, students, parents and elected officials upset by the Education Department's failure to take accountability for a shocking drop in standardized test scores protested Thursday in front of DOE headquarters in lower Manhattan.
"Less testing, more teaching" was the rallying cry as hundreds gathered to demand the department address the fact that more than 200,000 public school children are not on track for college.
That number is nearly double of what it was in 2009, thanks to New York State raising the standards on accountability tests.
According to DOE critics, the new test scores — which were announced in July — reveal that the gains the department has been trumpeting throughout the Bloomberg administration have been an illusion.
"At the expense of our children, education officials were taught a harsh lesson this summer: that the reforms of the past nine years have not closed the [racial] achievement gap or led to enough significant progress for City students," parent leader Zakiyah Ansari said in a statement.
"Now they must learn from it," she added. "We must acknowledge the educational crisis in New York with an unprecedented message of urgency. The only solution is immediate supplementary support for students and schools, and a review of the policies that got us here."
But the Education Department argued that they have been working for months to address the problem with more instruction time and encouraging more teacher teams to meet and discuss their lowest-performing students.
"We will continue to hold schools accountable for performance," Chancellor press secretary Natalie Ravitz said in a statement.
Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, who participated in the rally, accused the department of "misleading thousands of parents and students across the city."
“The DOE needs to spend less time on damage control and more time on concrete and constructive solutions to a school crisis that they helped create," he added in a statement.
The rally came just one month after a group of angry parents succeeded in shutting down a public school policy meeting, which led to a public forum with DOE officials a week later where parents and teachers voiced concerns over test-score inflation, the pitfalls of test prep, a widening racial achievement gap and a lack of accountability by DOE officials.
Also at Thursday's protest was Councilman Robert Jackson, the chair of the Education Committee, who announced a hearing on the controversy surrounding the test scores for September 27.
