Beacon — and our portfolio process — was the focus of an article in the Washington Post this week by education writer Jay Mathews. Our out-going principal, Steve Stoll, is quoted and really comes off lamenting what we have lost by the mandate of Regents tests in our school. He’s right, of course.

At Beacon, Stoll said the faculty is trying to maintain the portfolio system in a limited form, “but it is hard. You have the teacher telling the student to get his portfolio done and he says that he is studying for the regents test. It is like mixing two different currencies, and the bad currency drives out the good currency in a certain sense.”

And here’s the quote that really hammers it home:

When portfolios were at their peak at Beacon, seniors would present portfolios of essays, lab reports, problem solutions and research projects of the past three years — specifically, three science projects, three history projects, four English projects and three foreign language projects. But when New York state revived the regents tests as the prime determination of who would graduate, Beacon was forced to reduce the number of projects and cut the time for assessing them. Principal Stephen Stoll told me the biology course that, for instance, a year ago had 70 labs now has only 30, because students need more time to learn terms and concepts that will be on the regents test.

We’ll see where the latest push by the legislature takes us. (What, you say? Yes… there’s a longer post I have to write about where we are in the fight…)

But in the meantime, thanks to the WaPo for highlighting the problem.