AFT Resolution on Testing

Testing Should Inform, Not Impede, Teaching and Learning

PASSED BY EXECUTIVE COUNCIL, MAY 2012 – TO BE RECOMMENDED AT AFT CONVENTION

 

All children deserve a rich, meaningful public education that prepares them for the opportunities, responsibilities and challenges that await them as they become contributing members of a democratic society. Growing our nation’s future citizens and workers is a serious undertaking that calls for a thoughtful focus on teaching and learning. Since the implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act, the growing fixation on high-stakes testing has undermined that focus, putting at grave risk our students’ learning and their ability to meet the demands of the 21^st century economy and fulfill their personal goals.
The current generation of low-level, high-stakes tests—and their extreme misuse as a result of ideologically and politically driven education policy—has not improved our schools. Indeed, several studies have shown the exact opposite: test-based rewards and sanctions for schools have slowed our progress in narrowing the achievement gap and have diverted attention away from many other important educational goals.
Appropriate assessments are an integral part of a high-quality public education. By contrast, the current test-and-punish accountability model has seriously damaged public education. We have lost vital parts of the curriculum because they are not subject to testing. Student learning time has been sacrificed in favor of testing and test preparation. Teachers have been led to focus their attention on the students closest to passing the tests, at the expense of developing every student’s full potential. All of this has stifled teachers’ ability to develop all students’ capacity to think deeply, critically and creatively, and has driven many talented teachers from classrooms that desperately need them. This loss has been especially pronounced in the schools and classrooms serving America’s neediest children, adding further insult to the injury of poverty and other social challenges.
In short, the inappropriate and punitive use of assessments, which too often are low quality to begin with, has eclipsed teaching in too many schools. It is time to restore a proper balance to public education, and to ensure that assessments--as important as they are-- inform and not impede teaching and learning.

• We believe in assessments that support teaching and learning, and align with curriculum rather than narrow it; that are developed through collaborative efforts, not picked off a shelf; that are focused on measuring growth and continuous development instead of arbitrary targets unconnected to how students learn; that rely on diverse, authentic, and multiple indicators of student performance rather than filling in bubbles; and that provide information leading to appropriate interventions that help students, teachers and schools improve, not sanctions that undermine them.

• Further, we believe that assessments designed to support teaching and learning must contribute to school and classroom environments that nurture growth, collaboration, curiosity and invention --essential elements of a 21st-century education that have too often been sacrificed in favor of test prep and testing. Specifically, wecall on the consortia currently developing assessments aligned to the Common Core State Standards to do their part in solving this by including the crucial voices of teachers in the development of these assessments. We know that collaboration with educators is necessary to ensure that high-quality instruction and content are given their proper emphasis.  

America’s public school accountability system must be re-examined and rebuilt. By every credible measure, the testing fixation rooted in the No Child Left Behind Act has failed our students. We commit to working with all who share our commitment to restoring balance to public education by prioritizing high-quality instruction informed by appropriate and useful assessments. Anything less would be unworthy of our children and of the world-class public schools they deserve. 

PASSED BY EXECUTIVE COUNCIL, MAY 2012 – TO BE RECOMMENDED AT AFT CONVENTION

 

Floyd Norris Blows Lid on ITT Ed Services

Colleges for Profit Are Growing, With Federal Help
By FLOYD NORRIS

There are a lot of government subsidies, and in the current fiscal atmosphere many are shrinking by necessity. What appears to be lacking is any rational way of deciding which should shrink.

The volume of federally guaranteed student loans to students at so-called proprietary colleges — the ones that intend to operate at a profit and get nearly all their revenue from the government — continues to grow.

At the same time, state and local governments across the country are slashing spending on higher education, and community colleges — the ones most likely to offer alternatives to the students recruited by the far more expensive proprietary schools — are suffering some of the largest reductions.

That trend has been welcome news to the proprietary colleges. “The competitive landscape” is getting better, Kevin M. Modany, the chief executive of ITT Educational Services, one of the larger for-profit colleges, told analysts this year.

“When you look at what’s going on right now from a community college perspective,” he said, “we’re seeing a lot of state budgets being constrained. We’re seeing dollars being pulled from their budgets and they’re really capped in terms of their enrollment opportunities.”

ITT Educational, on the other hand, opened four new campuses in the first three months of this year, raising its total to 148 locations in 48 states. It expects to open at least four more later this year. It has 71,000 students enrolled.

In Washington, the Obama administration has been trying to write rules that would stop loans going to students at the most exploitative of the schools, ones whose students are most likely to default on the loans and least likely to get jobs if they graduate. The Department of Education is expected to announce within a few weeks which programs at which schools are failing, but that determination will have little immediate impact. The earliest that any school will lose financing is 2014.

ITT Educational Services, which runs ITT Technical Institute, used to be part of the international phone company known as ITT, but it was spun off years ago. It issues associate’s and bachelor’s degrees, and even some master’s degrees. Its shares trade on the New York Stock Exchange and it advertises heavily.

I got interested in ITT Tech after I watched one of its commercials, full of promise of bright career opportunities for students who sign up. At the end of the commercial, the following words flashed on the screen, in small type and for only a few seconds:

“Credits earned are unlikely to transfer.”

If you enroll in a public community college and get a two-year associate degree, you can almost certainly transfer to a four-year college and complete your bachelor’s degree in two more years. If you drop out, as many do, you can return to the same or another college years later and complete a degree. But it appears that ITT Tech students are stuck. ITT Tech will award degrees to students who complete enough classes, but any student who wants to transfer will probably have to start over.

How many students who enroll at ITT Tech go on to get a degree?

That sounds like a simple question, but it is not one that ITT Educational wants to answer.

The company does disclose a lot of numbers. But many of those numbers are not very useful. From the Web site, I learned that half the students who earn associate’s degrees in business administration do so within the normal period, while the other half take longer. For that two-year diploma, I learned that they pay an average of $48,000 in tuition and fees. Similar numbers are available for the myriad other programs ITT Tech offers. But there are no hints as to how many students actually get degrees, or how many drop out. The company would not provide any overall figures.

It did, however, point me to a government Web site that lets you check graduation rates campus by campus. Some of ITT Tech’s campuses had no information available, but the headquarters location in Indianapolis said that 16 percent of students who entered the school in 2004 earned degrees within three years of enrolling in associate degree programs or six years of enrolling in bachelor’s degree programs. In the fall of 2010, the Indianapolis campus had 7,619 undergraduate students. By the end of that school year, it had awarded 538 associate’s and 336 bachelor’s degrees. Last year, ITT Educational had revenue of $1.5 billion, of which 89 percent came directly from the government through grants and loans. Some of that money came from states, but a large majority came from Uncle Sam. Students and their parents put up about 4 percent, and 7 percent came from nongovernment loans.

Raising that 7 percent has been an issue. Last year, the company was able to arrange such nongovernment guaranteed loans by promising lenders it would repay the loans if the students did not. This year it could not renew that arrangement and is having to finance the loans itself. In effect, that means it gets less than full tuition from some students, with a promise they will pay the money later.

ITT Educational has impressive profit margins. In 2009 and 2010, pretax profits exceeded what it spent on educating students. Even in this year’s first quarter, when revenue and profits were off from a year earlier, pretax profit amounted to just under 30 percent of revenue.

The decline in earnings did not slow the flow of money to shareholders. During those three months, the company spent $135 million on education costs and paid nearly $147 million to buy back shares. Those education expenses were down 2 percent from a year earlier, while spending on share buybacks rose 5 percent. Marketing costs were up 6 percent.

All those profits would dry up and vanish were government support to wither away, but so far there is little sign of that. In the 2010-11 academic year, the government guaranteed nearly $24 billion in loans to students at proprietary schools and provided almost $9 billion more in grants. All that money went to the schools.

Critics of the schools say that many students, even those who graduate, are unable to earn enough to repay the loans. Students who attend such colleges are far more likely to default on their loans than are students who attend other types of schools.

It is far from clear whether the Obama administration’s effort to cut off loans to particularly unsuccessful schools will have much impact, or even if it will happen. A trade group of proprietary schools has filed suit to halt the rule, calling it an unjustified “regulatory excess.”

That group used to be called the Career College Association, but it changed its name to the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities and proudly proclaims that “the market” has determined the success of its members. If so, it is a market in which the government pays nearly all the bills but leaves students with debts many cannot pay.

Whatever the case used to be for subsidizing these highly profitable companies, it ought to be a lot less compelling now when the country is slashing subsidies for other types of schools — ones that generally do a better job for their students but that spend far less on lobbyists.

Floyd Norris writes about finance and the economy on nytimes.com/economix.

Obama Campaign Proud of Bashing Teachers’ Unions

http://news.firedoglake.com/2012/05/25/obama-campaign-proud-of-bashing-teachers-unions/

Obama Campaign Proud of Bashing Teachers’ Unions
By: David Dayen Friday May 25, 2012 9:38 am	Tweet327

It looks like we’re going to have six more months of the Obama campaign trying to prove that their candidate has conservative values and believes in conservative ideas. That’s what we can learn from the latest fact check from Deputy Campaign Manager for Obama 2012 Stephanie Cutter.

FACT CHECK: Romney off on Obama’s relationship with teachers’ unions; it’s anything but cozy: http://wapo.st/Lu0nYZ

The link takes you to a story at the Washington Post with the same name as what Cutter quoted approvingly. And I can’t say that anything in the Post’s fact-check is wrong. It makes the case that President Obama has promoted ideas and instituted policies that teachers’ unions oppose, and that’s true.

Obama has promoted initiatives that encourage districts to tie teacher evaluations to student performance and to expand the number of charter schools — actions the teacher unions have long been against, and which Romney himself promoted Wednesday in a speech in Washington outlining his education platform [...]
At its annual meeting last year, the National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers union, sent a message to Obama that it was “appalled” with Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s practice of focusing heavily on charter schools, supporting decisions to fire all staff and using high-stakes standardized test scores for teacher evaluations, along with 10 other policies mentioned.
“Obama has taken on teachers unions unlike any previous Democratic president,” said Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution. “Because of that his support among union members, although it is still there, is rather tepid.”

Again, nothing you don’t know if you pay attention to Race to the Top and other education policies.
But the question becomes, why does Stephanie Cutter, Deputy Campaign Manager for Obama 2012, feel so strongly about needing to broadcast that teachers’ unions don’t like her candidate? Is this a typical approach for campaigns? Don’t you normally want to tout support rather than opposition?
Not when it comes to teachers’ unions, apparently. And who needs them, they only represent 3.2 million members in the National Education Association and 1.5 million in the American Federation of Teachers. And they only represent one out of ten delegates on the typical Democratic National Committee Convention floor. It makes perfect sense for the head of the party to display his independence from such a marginal group.
Education “reform” is a pretty contentious topic with a split in the Democratic coalition. But Obama has always lined up on the opposite side of the unions on the matter. Not only that, he boasts of it.
Of course this is a pattern. The previous tweet from Stephanie Cutter highlights the President’s commitment to austerity, proudly stating for the record that federal spending has slowed down under Obama to the largest degree since the Eisenhower Administration. So we’re going to have six months of the President’s allies stating the record, showing all of Obama’s conservative positions on a host of issues. You would think this would be the role of, say, a primary challenger to the President from the left. But no, it’s the President’s own campaign doing this.
UPDATE: Pressured about this, Cutter has responded: “Pres. fights for unions/teachers b/c he believes in them-Mitt dishonest about being beholden to them.” The link she approvingly cited before has nothing whatsoever about the President fighting for unions and teachers, just fighting with them. His education policies are generally disfavored by teachers’ unions, and I should add, disfavored by reality, because the data on charters and teacher evaluations is weak to the point of totally being debunked.

When big data is bad data

http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/the_press_and_standardized_tes.php?page=all

 

The press and standardized testing numbers: a cautionary tale

By LynNell Hancock

Disks of never-before-released data from the Department of Education landed with a befuddling thud in New York City’s newsrooms at the end of February. The swarm of spreadsheets had promised to provide a single ranking of 18,000 teachers (by name!) from zero to 99 based on students’ standardized test scores.
A bonanza for education reporters, right? Time to celebrate? Well, not exactly; not for me, anyway.
My intrepid journalism students wondered why I didn’t seem to share their enthusiasm for the data. Wasn’t I the same teacher who became semi-deranged when they turned in stories without any quantitative evidence? Think of the stories to be done, the fun graphics to design.
Here were not only reams of data, but hot data—from the center of a national controversy over how teachers should be evaluated. Adding to the buildup, the reports had been locked away for more than a year while a city judge refereed a high-octane legal fracas between the teachers union and the city over whether to release them. Nearly a dozen news organizations had become either witting or unwitting pawns in this dispute when they filed Freedom of Information requests for the data’s release.
“Isn’t it our job to bring information into the light, and let the public judge for themselves?” one student asked me. She had learned her lessons well.
Last year, I was certain what my killjoy answer would be: Just because you have data doesn’t mean it is always right to publish it—especially if you know the numbers are no good. And these numbers do have huge problems. Everyone from economists, to educators, to knowledgeable city education reporters know that the arcane algorithms that generated the teacher-rating numbers are as statistically flawed as they are politically fraught.
The complex formulas are meant to measure how much value a teacher contributes to a student’s learning growth (or lack of growth) over time. It would be useful if they actually did. But the data are riddled with mistakes, useless sample sizes, flawed measuring tools, and cavernous margins of error. The Department of Education says that a math teacher’s ranking could be off by 35 percent; an English teacher’s by 53 percent. That means a reading teacher with a ho-hum 35 could either be as horrid as a 1 or as awesome as an 86—take your pick. What election survey with these kinds of gaping margins would be published in the papers?
Most damning—and most often ignored in the coverage—is that the sole basis for these ratings are old student tests that have since been discredited by the New York State Board of Regents. The 2007-2010 scores used for these teacher rankings were inflated, the Regents determined. The Department of Education had lowered the pass score so far that the tests had become far too easy. So not only were the algorithms suspect, but the numbers fed into them were flawed. News organizations that publish them next to teachers’ names run the risk of not only knowingly misleading the public, but also of becoming entangled in the political web surrounding teacher evaluations, which extends from the mayor’s office, to the state house, to unions, philanthropy board rooms, and to the White House.
And yet, nearly every city news organization went ahead and printed them anyway.
To my mind, all reasons not to publish still exist. They are still true. But in the last month, I’ve come around to an opposite, perhaps more cynical, conclusion about the virtues of making them public. Publishing them, it seems to me, has had an odd, clarifying effect. Releasing the data to public scrutiny, alongside context and caveats, has exposed just how flawed they really are.
Apparently, the public has received that message. A Quinnipiac poll released in mid-March showed that 58 percent of the respondents approved of releasing the teacher data reports, while at the same time 46 percent believed they were flawed. The more the public sees, the less enamored they are (Go, Journalism!).
Perhaps that was what philanthropist Bill Gates feared in February when he lectured the media days before the data were released. In a February 23 op ed in The New York Times, “Shame is not the Solution,” Gates warned news organizations not to humiliate teachers by publishing their names next to their value-added rankings.
What was up? Gates is usually bullish on the use of test scores to evaluate teachers. Concern for their feelings had rarely been a top concern. Yet, he argued, correctly, test scores were not “a sensitive enough measure to gauge effective teaching” all by themselves.
Some chose to believe Gates had finally come to appreciate the complexities and nuances of good teaching, something that cannot be boiled down to a number based on students’ tests. But if that were the case, he would have backed away from endorsing the value-added formulas. Instead, he advocated only that they be kept from the public. It’s more plausible to me that he is worried the public will turn against the test-driven accountability agenda promoted by his foundation—which has fueled policy for the last several decades—as these not-ready-for-primetime rankings are scrutinized to death. Whatever the case, it was an unexpected signal from one of the nation’s most influential data-driven reformers.
Even more surprising was the detour taken by Arne Duncan, the US Secretary of Education. Last year, Duncan applauded the Los Angeles Times for being the first newspaper to print rankings—its own—next to teachers’ names. He encouraged other news organizations to do the same. This year, he recently posed and answered his own question to Education Week’s Stephen Sawchuck, “Do you need to publish every single teacher’s rating in the paper? I don’t think you do.”
All of the above
Obviously, the mood in recent months had been dialed back from fever pitch to tepid, possibly in recognition that teacher-bashing as a reform strategy had seen its best days.
Last year, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Joel Klein, then the city’s Chancellor of Education, gave these numbers their high-five support. Even after Klein left to head the education division of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., his city department went so far as to encourage local news organizations to make sure they FOILED for the teacher data in a timely fashion—with names. And back then the department responded to their requests with uncharacteristic speed.
At the New York Daily News, Deputy Editor Arthur Browne said he discussed releasing the reports with department officials several times last year when he was editorial-page editor, in response to the bold Los Angeles Times move. “There wasn’t any resistance on Tweed’s part to us getting them,” Browne said in a recent interview, referring to Tweed Hall, city schools headquarters. Pressure mounted among the city’s education reporters—who were nearly all opposed to publishing the data. Some even threatened to quit over it. Just as the drama began to boil over, the United Federation of Teachers filed a lawsuit to stop the release.
That left Klein’s laid-back successor, Dennis Walcott, holding the data bag more than a year later, after the union’s court appeals had run their course. On February 24, Walcott finally released the reports, all wrapped in caveats and finger wagging. “It would be irresponsible for anyone to use this information to render judgments about individual teachers,” he wrote in a Daily News op ed that same day. He repeatedly reminded readers that the numbers were two years old, and should never be used in isolation. “I’m deeply concerned that some of our hardworking teachers might be denigrated in the media based on this information. That would be inexcusable.” Clearly, his heart wasn’t in it.
Walcott’s sheepish tone mystified news editors as their staff scrambled to build apps and technical platforms to house the numbers. “It was disarming,” said Mary Ann Giordano, editor of the New York Times’s SchoolBook.org. “Walcott was stepping back from these numbers, blaming news organizations if they published names.”
Editors had to work fast to decide what to do. Publish the raw spreadsheets? Take the numbers at face value and march out the best and worst teachers, one by one? Write thoughtful critiques of all the downsides of the data and publish them anyway, next to teachers’ names? Or refuse to publish at all, for fear of misleading the public with faulty figures and maligning teachers with bogus data?
Maybe it was the robust news climate, or all the tangled messages from on high, but for New York’s media, the answer was: all of the above.
Some outlets rose above the fray and refused to go near the reports on principle. The local Riverdale Press and two citywide online news services—InsideSchools.org and GothamSchools.org—all took the high road. “No amount of context could justify attaching teachers’ names to the statistics,” wrote Elizabeth Green, GothamSchools.org’s editor, in a column she had prepared a full year earlier. By contrast, NY1, the local 24-hour cable news television station, downloaded the entire Department of Education spreadsheet collection, which included three years of scores and more than 100 data points per teacher. The New York Post surprised no one by taking the most reckless road of all, galloping through the numbers as if they represented reality, scooping up names for its gallery of the “best” and the “worst” teachers. Its editors and reporters did not bother to dwell on the caveats and nuances, or even to include, at least at first, each score’s margin of error. (It added the intervals later).
The low point was on day two, when the Post ran a photo and story about Pascal Mauclair, the so-called city’s “worst teacher,” thus handing the union its first real teacher data report martyr.
The teachers union reported that Mauclair’s father opened his Queens apartment door the first day of the public release to find Post reporters telling him his daughter was the worst teacher in the city. Next, reporters found their way to his daughter’s apartment. She called police. Reporters turned to neighbors for comment. The Post story the next day identified Mauclair at the “bottom of the heap,” amongst those who do “zero, zilch, zippo” for students.
The backstory of her score does more to undermine the validity of the stats than the Post had in mind. Its’ reporters might have spent their time digging into the calculations behind her zero rating, by interviewing Mauclair’s principal and colleagues at PS 11 in Queens, where she taught small sixth grade classes of recent immigrants. Her students do not speak English. It’s not uncommon for some to take the state exams after being in her class for only a few months. The union says her score was based on 11 students, only 7 of whom had enough data to compute a real report—a meaningless sample size by any measure. Her fellow teachers, parents of students, and her principal were nonplussed. “I would put my own children in her class,” Principal Anna Efkarpides told Leo Casey of the UFT. The Queens school is consistently one of the highest performing schools among similar schools, and Mauclair is one of its top teachers. “The truth is the truth.” By contrast, the Daily News managed to steer clear of its rival’s instinct to tick off the 10 worst and 10 best. In many ways it exhibited the most caution of all the city newspapers, by weeding out all those teachers whose rankings were based on only one year’s worth of classes.
Last year, the News’s Arthur Browne told me that the data was obviously not perfect, but that was no reason not to publish. This year, he had apparently done more homework. “We were leery of naming names if we couldn’t be invested in the accuracy of them,” said Browne, who also edits the op ed page. “We screened out the biggest problems in the database. We got the margins of error down into the zero range. We are committed to publication of the data, with all the caveats. We believe the public can make sound judgments.”
Still, there were some head-scratchers. The News’s first-day headline was a case in point: “More Than a Dozen Teachers Earned Lowest Scores.” This was a “Bridges-Help-People-Cross-Rivers” kind of headline. The rankings are calculated on a curve, meaning there will always be dozens at the bottom, dozens at the top, wide swaths of fair-to-middlin’ in between. That’s the nature of a bell curve, another controversial aspect of this calculation, which means the city will never be able to announce that all its teachers are high-performing.
The Times goes both ways
This brings us to the puzzling experience of reading about the test data in The New York Times. In partnership with WNYC public radio, the Times produced the city’s most sophisticated stories, and, next to The Wall Street Journal, the most polished graphics. Reporters took care to detail the data’s myriad errors, political nuances, and to put them into context. A careful reader could not help but come away believing the numbers were anything but radioactive.
Then the Times published every one of them anyway, with names.
Anna Phillips hammered out incisive blog after blog for SchoolBook.org about mistakes teachers found in their reports, about the DOE’s conflicting messages, about parents’ reactions. National education columnist Michael Winerip found a top-ranked school with bottom-ranked teachers to illustrate the numerical idiosyncrasies. In a second column he was the first to argue that publishing the bad numbers was the best thing that could happen to ultimately discredit them. SchoolBook.org editors created a helpful 14-point FAQ column covering nearly every base (except the inflated state tests). Teachers were invited to contribute blogs for the site. One 20-year veteran teacher wrote about being slapped with a 6th percentile ranking one year and exonerated by a 96th the next, underscoring how pointless, and demoralizing, they were.
And yet, there the rankings were, on display on its SchoolBook.org homepage, begging the question, why publish them at all?
Two reasons, explained Jodi Rudoren, the Times’ education editor at the time (she now heads the paper’s Jerusalem bureau): First, “We’re in the business of disclosing information that’s in the public interest,” she said. And second, “We do not operate in a vacuum,” meaning if the Times didn’t publish them, another news organization would anyway.
Some attention was paid to minimizing harm. The Times invited teachers to add comments next to their scores on a Google Doc, for example. By last count, only 60 out of a possible 18,000 had participated, most of them correcting their reports. Editors briefly flirted with the idea of somehow fiddling with the search function so that teachers’ rankings would not be the first thing that popped up when anyone Googled their name. “We considered it, but it’s a weird business to get involved in—suppressing searches,” said Rudoren. “It would be a gesture blocking the tabloidization of this data. But in the end, we felt it was not our role.”
The bottom line for Times editors was the fact that the Department of Education used this data to evaluate teachers, most recently stalling tenure decisions for those trapped in the bottom. Currently, the State Department of Education is generating new value-added reports that will be used in the city and beyond to make high-stakes decisions about teachers; and the legislature is embroiled in tortured debates over whether to make the results partially or fully public. “We thought it was important to provide parents with the same information that the DOE was using to evaluate teachers, shedding light on its decisions,” said Rudoren.
Maybe so, but are parents taking the data seriously? Principals in both New York and Los Angeles worried that parents would arm themselves with these numbers and storm their offices, causing chaos by demanding to switch their children from low-scoring teachers to higher scoring ones. If they are, the union representing New York City principals hasn’t heard about it yet. And if Los Angeles is a bellwether, in the two years since parents have been able to read their teachers’ scores in the paper, there has been little organizing around them.

Clear as mud

Perhaps this data dump was the best thing to happen to those who have been trying to steer the national school conversation away from testing and more testing, to thinking and learning how to learn. What should be central in all these stories is the fundamental problem: What’s the best way to evaluate teachers? How can authentic learning be measured? Should standardized tests be used at all to do it? They are one-day snapshots of how well one student answers a handful of basic, low-level questions. At best they are crude instruments; at worst, they are vulnerable to manipulation.
Sarah Wysocki’stale from the nation’s capital shines a cautionary headlight on the real-life dangers that may lie ahead for districts that put a lot of stock in these numbers. In DC, value-added numbers count for a full half of a teacher’s evaluation, even more than in New York. Bill Turque reported in The Washington Post that the highly regarded fifth-grade teacher received a stellar review by her principal and peers, and was then fired because so many of her students didn’t show any progress on their math and reading tests last year.
Wysocki offered a new twist on the data troubles. She pointed out to Turque that about half her students arrived in her fifth grade class with what she believed were inflated scores from their previous school—a school that is now under investigation for test tampering. Any honest teacher could never hope to improve on fraudulent scores. She appealed her dismissal, lost, and moved away.
Back in my own journalism class, I decided to walk through some of the teacher data online to see what we could learn. World Journalism Preparatory High School, in Flushing Queens popped up on the screen, a small, energetic 6th through 12th grade school that my students have become very familiar with since it opened in 2006. The DOE gave it a “B” grade this year on its controversial School Report Cards, and past years’ numbers have shown steady improvement. Its’ graduation rate is better than the average high school’s; its’ Regents English scores are above average. But the teachers? According to the clumsy measures, they ranked among the very worst in the city. Of course, it was hardly possible that all the children were teaching themselves.
Principal Cynthia Schneider has learned to ignore these spreadsheets over the last three years. “It’s not good data. It’s bad data, and we know it,” she said. “We know what we’re doing here.” The school had to send only eight kids to summer school last year to catch up, she said. The high school is ranked number 41 in the city. Still, her students and teachers suffered the indignity of a front-page article in the hyperlocal Whitestone Times—a photo of the school, plus the poor teacher rankings. Reporters did not call her for comment.
“I’m all about trying to get a handle on matching student achievement to teacher effectiveness. That’s a good thing,” said Schneider. “But that’s not what this does. At all.”
The data? Clear as mud. And now just about everybody in New York and beyond knows it.

Cory Booker is Dirty - and Not From Fighting Fires

Groups linked to Booker, Cerf received nearly one-third of first $13M of Facebook donation to Newark schools

Published: Thursday, October 27, 2011, 6:30 AM     Updated: Friday, October 28, 2011, 10:46 AM

http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2011/10/one-third_of_facebook_donation.html

By Star-Ledger Staff
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Robert Sciarrino/The Star-LedgerNewark Mayor Cory Booker and acting Commissioner of Education Chris Cerf, shown in this January 2011 file photo. One of every three dollars of private money spent so far in Newark's bid to reform its schools has gone to consultants and contractors, many with ties to Booker and Cerf, records show. 

NEWARK — One of every three dollars of private money spent so far in Newark’s bid to reform its schools has gone to consultants and contractors, many with ties to Mayor Cory Booker and acting state Education Commissioner Chris Cerf, records show.
The records, from the state Department of Education, are part of a spate of e-mails obtained by the Newark-based Education Law Center. They detail for the first time how the Foundation for Newark’s Future has spent the first $13 million of the $148 million donated by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and other philanthropists to help turn around the city’s struggling public school system.

While the foundation — the group created to distribute the money — spent $7.4 million between January and September of this year on school-based programs, it has also spent $4.3 million on political and educational consultants. At least $3.9 million of the consultant spending has gone to companies and individuals with ties to Cerf and Booker, records show.
Foundation director Greg Taylor was not at the helm for any of the spending decisions made before June, but Wednesday defended the expenses as necessary and common to most start-up foundations.

"(Foundation for Newark’s Future) runs on a very lean budget so that the overwhelming majority of dollars can — and are — going to improve education for Newark’s school children," Taylor said in an e-mail. "To be clear, most of these expenses represent start-up costs and precede my arrival in June and the launch of the organization’s grant-making ... These people have extensive executive leadership, community engagement and philanthropic experience."

In July, the Education Law Center filed a request for correspondence between Cerf, Booker, officials from Start Up: Education — Zuckerberg’s national philanthropic foundation — and the Foundation for Newark’s Future. This month, the Department of Education released 49 pages of e-mails, meeting minutes and budget documents.

PREVIOUS COVERAGE:
• Newark public schools to receive $3.6M disbursement of Facebook donation
• ACLU suing Newark over transparency in Facebook founder's $100M donation to city schools
• Mark Zuckerberg discusses Newark's school reform efforts with Mayor Cory Booker, Gov. Chris Christie
• Youth advocate chosen to administer $100M Facebook grant to Newark schools
• Newark schools come closer to meeting $100 million matching funds goal

"What’s clear is that despite all the talk, there’s been very little real community engagement around the decisions about how these funds are being used so far," said David Sciarra, the center’s director. "Without that support from the community, these grants are going to have very little difference in improving the lives of Newark school children."
THE LARGEST GRANTS
Taken together, the classroom grants have funded four experimental high schools, an extended school day and professional development for principals and teachers, along with numerous other reform initiatives.
But the largest single grant recipient has been Global Education Advisors, the consulting company Cerf started out of his Montclair home and later divested from before taking his post in the Christie administration late last year. The group was chosen by Booker to do consulting work in Newark before Cerf was named education commissioner.
Cerf said Wednesday he has no involvement in the work being done by Global for the foundation.
"I think the documents make incredibly clear, and I hope your reporting reflects this, that I am not in these details at all," Cerf said.
Global received $1.9 million from the foundation to analyze resources and academic performance in the Newark Public Schools and make recommendations to the incoming superintendent. Previously, officials only disclosed the group’s initial $500,000 grant. Founder Rajeev Bajaj could not be reached for comment.
Global came under fire from Newark parents in late February for drafting a plan to close and consolidate some failing city schools and lease district facilities to charter schools.
Asked about the expenditures, Cerf cited the important role consultants can play in crafting education policy.
"What is a consultant?" Cerf asked. "Is a person not on the payroll, but working for a superintendent, a consultant?"
He added that his past relation-ship with Global has nothing to do with the work it has done for the foundation.
“Knowing people is not the same as directing them, knowing the particulars of their budget or actions, or anything of the like,” Cerf said.
In one of the e-mails released earlier this month, Cerf praised his former company for its work in recommending reform and helping with the transition between superintendents.

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"The world may never know or appreciate what you accomplished between last December and the transition to Cami," Cerf wrote, referring to Newark superintendent Cami Anderson. "This effort saved the district from complete meltdown, enabled an orderly transition to Cami’s amazing leadership, and avoided a ‘lost year’ in the reform effort."
The Education Law Center received no e-mails in February and March of this year, when Global Education Advisors was being scrutinized by community members in Newark.
The second biggest recipient of the Facebook money is Tusk Strategies, a New York political consulting firm that managed Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s 2009 re-election campaign. Cerf left his post as a deputy education chancellor in Bloomberg’s administration to serve on the campaign.
Calls to Tusk were not returned, but according to founder Bradley Tusk’s online biography, the group was responsible for creating and advising PENewark, the heavily-criticized campaign to gather public input on the school reform effort in Newark.
When PENewark first began its work last November, Booker said only $1 million would be spent on the effort — roughly $500,000 for salaries and $500,000 for advertising. Tusk was paid more than $1.5 million between October 2010 and April 2011, according to the e-mails. Taylor said Wednesday the cost of the PENewark initiative was $2 million.
Bari Mattes, Booker’s long-time fundraiser, was paid $120,000 to help launch the foundation and recruit its leadership. De’Shawn Wright, the mayor’s then-education adviser, was paid $94,500 "to develop a strategy for accepting Mark Zuckerberg’s generous gift and to support Bari’s work," Taylor said. Neither is still under contract with the group and neither could be reached for comment.
Since the money was donated, there have been constant calls for greater transparency, including by the American Civil Liberties Union, which has filed suit to obtain records of Booker’s correspondence about the grant.
In an e-mail to Cerf, Booker and others in March, Shavar Jeffries, then chairman of Newark’s advisory school board, expressed a sentiment oft repeated among local community members: Who decides how to spend the donated funds?
"I’d like to know how funding decisions are being made, who’s at the table when they’re being made, and how all of this is tied into district decision-making and planning," Jeffries wrote. "This remains a black hole to me, and thus I suspect everyone."
By David Giambusso and Jessica Calefati/The Star-Ledger
Staff writer Jeanette Rundquist contributed to this report.

What's in a (School) Name?

Elementary Dad: A school by any other name

by Skip Card

 

 

 

Monday, 21 May 2012 06:38 

 

Inside Schools: http://goo.gl/mTEB8

 

New York’s Department of Education recently announced 24 city schools were given new names. About the same time, 5th-graders learned which middle school they were selected to attend. Combined, the two events might result in letters from DOE like this:

Dear scholar (formerly known as “student”),
We are pleased to inform you that you have been accepted to the Albert Einstein Academy of Integrated Sciences in the Rosa Parks Campus, formerly known as Middle School 525. The ivy-covered walls of AEAISRPC eagerly await you, and we feel sure that your class will set high standards for the five or six future classes who will attend this school before its name gets changed again.
Please note that the Albert Einstein Academy is merely one of several institutes of learning (formerly known as “schools”) at the Rosa Parks Campus (formerly known as George Wallace High School for Accounting and Carpentry, and before that as Washington High). Also sharing the building will be:
- Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Academy of Dramatic Arts (formerly Laurel & Hardy High)
- Fashion School of the Bronx (formerly known as Bronx Fashion School, and briefly known as the J-Lo School for Showing You Got It Girl Fashion Academy before the department invalidated the student-run name-selection contest)
- Middle School 32 (formerly MS 23, but the stone carver was dyslexic)
To avoid confusion and metal detectors, we request that you and other Albert Einstein Academy students enter the building through the Relativity Gate (formerly known as “that door near the gym”) and follow Princeton Hall (formerly “the hall”) to your homeroom (formerly a closet).
We hope you are as excited about attending Albert Einstein Academy as we are about the prospect of providing a high-quality educational experience that integrates the new Common Core Standards within a cohesive metric designed for optimal success (formerly known as “teaching to the test”). We believe students in this pioneering middle school will leave 8th grade fully prepared for success at some of the city’s top high schools, including Global Scholars Academy at Flushing, the College and Careers Exploratory Institute at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Campus, and the Academy of Humanities and Applied Science at Shoreline High School in the Ephraim Zimbalist Jr. Campus at Greenpoint West.
We can’t wait to see you this September. So study hard and keep learning right up until the last day of school on June 22 (formerly June 27).

Williamsburg Charter Argues Bias Led to Closing Decision Inbox x

Apparently the attorney for Williamsburg charter spent most of her time questioning Joshua Morales, former DOE charter office guy, Williamsburg charter consultant and now at Bedford-Stuyvesant New Beginnings Charter School about DOE’s conflicts of interest. 

Williamsburg Charter attorney Argues DOE riddled w/conflict of interest; no kidding! Article here and belowhttp://goo.gl/rXJbN

http://goo.gl/GxMMU

Here is Morales linked in profile, which doesn’t even mention his new job:

·         Trustee/Finance & Evaluation Subcommittees at St. Hope Leadership Academy

·         Walton Foundation Grant NYC Advisory Committee Member at NYCSA

·         Trustee/Accountability Subcommittee Chair at Democracy Preparatory Charter School

Past:

·         Director of Citywide Charter Operations & Support Services at NYC Department of Education

·         Associate Director at NYC Department of Education

·         Regional Operations/Business Manager at NYC Department of Education

Williamsburg Charter Argues Bias Led to Closing Decision

May 21, 2012, 6:24 p.m.
By Theodoric Meyer
More than 100 parents, students, teachers and administrators from Williamsburg Charter High School packed a Brooklyn courtroom on Monday for the start of a hearing to determine whether the school would shut down.
The city announced in January that it intended to close Williamsburg Charter, but the school won a temporary restraining order last month, allowing it to remain open until a hearing could determine its fate.
With Peninsula Preparatory Academy Charter School, it was the second charter school to win a reprieve, out of four charter schools the city had identified for closing this year.
Williamsburg Charter, which has 870 students, received a C on its latest school progress report.
The city had placed the school on probation in September after an investigation by Eric T. Schneiderman, the state attorney general, raised questions about management and finances.
At the center of those questions was Eddie Calderon-Melendez, the school’s controversial founder. The school’s board subsequently fired him, and Ellen K. Eagen, the school’s lawyer, has cited him as the source of most of Williamsburg Charter’s problems.
(Mr. Calderon-Melendez was also arrested last month and indicted on 11 felony charges, though Ms. Eagen has stressed that those charges were against Mr. Calderon-Melendez, not the school.)
In court on Monday, Ms. Eagen argued that the Department of Education’s decision to close Williamsburg Charter was biased and riddled with conflicts of interest — contentions that Andrew Rauchberg, the city’s lawyer, dismissed as a “fantastic hypothesis of conspiracy.”
Ms. Eagen spent the better part of two hours questioning Joshua Morales, a former Education Department employee and a consultant for Williamsburg Charter who is now the chief operating officer for Bedford-Stuyvesant New Beginnings Charter School in Brooklyn. A number of her questions focused on Mr. Morales’s ties to department and charter school officials.
Little of the hearing focused on the actual teaching and learning going on at Williamsburg Charter, though, and that frustrated Lisa Johnson, 40, a parent who had taken the day off from her job at a Park Slope day care center to attend the hearing.
“If the kids are doing well in school academically, what’s the problem?” she said.
Ms. Johnson chose to send her son, Daquell Lugo, who is in ninth grade, to Williamsburg Charter for the individual attention it gives its students, she said, and she has not been disappointed. Last week, her son’s father called one of Daquell’s teachers, Mr. McGhee, around 9 p.m. with a question about one of his grades. Mr. McGhee picked up the phone and answered the question, she said.
“That’s what I call dedication, and that’s what I like,” Ms. Johnson said. “I don’t think I’d get that at any other school.”
Ms. Johnson hasn’t enrolled Daquell in another high school for the fall — that would be admitting defeat, she said — and she is hoping Judge Ellen M. Spodek will produce a decision quickly. “We want to know what our future is for September,” she said.
The hearing is set to continue at Kings County Supreme Court on Tuesday at 11 a.m.

How to Destroy Education While Making a Trillion Dollars

https://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/04/29-0#.T6uD2MUjtPN.facebook

by Robert Freeman

The Vietnam War produced more than its share of iconic idiocies. Perhaps the most revelatory was the psychotic assertion of an army major explaining the U.S. bombing of the provincial hamlet of Ben Tre: “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” If only such self-extinguishing claims for intelligence were confined to military war.
The U.S is ratcheting up a societal-level war on public education. At issue is whether we are going to make it better — build it into something estimable, a social asset that undergirds a noble and prosperous society — or whether we’re going to tear it down so that private investors can get their hands on the almost $1 trillion we spend on it every year. The tear-it-down option is the civilian equivalent of Ben Tre, but on a vastly larger scale and with incomparably greater stakes: we must destroy public education in order to save it. It’s still early in the game, but right now the momentum is with the wreckers because that’s where the money is. Whether they succeed or not will be up to you.
Here’s a three-step recipe for how to destroy education. It maps perfectly to how to make a prodigious profit by privatizing it. It is the essential game plan of the big money boys.
First, lower the costs so you can jack up the profits. Since the overwhelming cost in education is the salaries of the teachers, this means firing the experienced teachers, for they are the most expensive. Replace them with “teachers” who are young, inexperienced, and inexpensive. Better yet, waive requirements that they have to have any training, that is to say, that they be credentialed. That way, you can get the absolute cheapest workers available. Roll them over frequently so they don’t develop any expectation that they’ll ever make a career out of it.
Second, make the curriculum as narrow, rote, and regimented as you can. This makes it possible for low-skilled “teachers” to “teach.” All they need do is maintain order while drilling students in mindless memorization and robotic repetition. By all means avoid messy things like context, nuance, values, complexity, reflection, depth, ambiguity—all the things that actually make for true intelligence. It’s too hard to teach those things and, besides, you need intelligent, experienced people to be able to do it. Stick with the model: Profitable equals simplistic and formulaic. Go with it.
Finally, rinse and repeat five thousand times. Proliferate franchised, chartered McSchools with each classroom in each McSchool teaching the same thing on the same day in exactly the same way. So, for the math lesson on the formula of a line, you only need develop it once. But you download it in Power Point on the assigned day so the room monitors, i.e., the “teachers,” know what bullets to read. Now repeat this for every lesson in every course in every school, every day. In biology, chemistry, geometry, history, English, Spanish, indeed, all of a K-12 curriculum. Develop the lesson literally once, but distribute and reuse it thousands of times with low-cost proctors doing the supervision. The cost is infinitesimal making the profit potential astronomical.
This is the essential charter school model and the money is all the rationale its promoters need. Think about it. There’s a trillion dollars a year spent on public education in the U.S. and enterprising investors want to get their meat hooks on it. Where else in the world can you find a $1 trillion opportunity that is essentially untouched? Not in automobiles. Not in health care. Not in weapons, computers, banking, telecommunications, agriculture, entertainment, retail, manufacturing, housing. Nowhere.
Oh, to be sure, you have to soften up the public with a decades-long PR campaign bashing teachers, vilifying their unions, trashing schools, and condemning public education in general, all the while promising the sun, moon, and stars for privatization, which is the ultimate charter goal. Voila! You’ve got your chance.
But to really make a killing, you need not just revenues, but profits. That’s why the low cost delivery and “build it once but resell it millions of times” model is so key. It was that very model that made Bill Gates the richest man in the world. It is what earned Microsoft 13 TIMES the rate of profit of the average Fortune 500 company in the 1990s and persuaded the Justice Department to declare it a “felony monopolist”. Gates recognizes the model very well, which is why his foundation is pouring tens of millions of dollars into charters. And you thought it was his altruism.
Of course, anybody who actually knows education, indeed, anybody who is simply intelligent, knows that intelligence does not come from rote repetition or parroting Power Point slides at the regimented direction of a room monitor, no matter how perky or well intended. It comes from an agonizingly complex, intricate, sustained set of challenges to the mind that are exquisitely choreographed over the better part of two decades, all intimately tailored to the specific needs of an individual, inquisitive, aspiring student.
That is what real teachers do. And it is precisely what a cookie-cutter, low-content, low-cost, high-turnover, high-profit money mill cannot do. Because it’s not intended to do that. It’s intended to produce profits. Real education, real intelligence, real character are agonizingly slow, dazzlingly complex, maddeningly difficult things to create. You can’t make a profit off of it, unless you destroy it in the process. That is why not one of the nations of the world that surpass the U.S. in education performance operate charter-based or privatized educational systems.
If America wants better education, it needs to fix the greatest force undermining education, which is poverty. The single most powerful predictor of student performance is the average income of the zip code in which they live. But one out of four American students now live in poverty, and the numbers are growing. One out of two will live in poverty sometime during their lives. Forty-seven million Americans are on food stamps. Is it any wonder American school performance is faltering?
But poverty is a hard and expensive problem to fix. We prefer easy, painless fixes, or even better, vapid clichés about the “magic of the market” and such. Why, look what we got from the deregulation of the banking system: the greatest economic collapse of the last 80 years and the greatest plunder of the public treasury in the history of the world.
This is the essential neo-liberal agenda which Obama enthusiastically supports: privatize and deregulate everything, especially public services, so that the money spent on them can be transferred to private hands. This is how Arne Duncan, Obama’s Secretary of Education, earned his bureaucratic bonafides: he converted more than 100 of Chicago’s public schools to charters while the city’s school superintendent. It’s unbelievable how credulous we are but obviously, propaganda works. That’s why the likes of the Gates Foundation keep pouring money into the cause.
The problem with charter schools is that they simply don’t work, at least not for delivering high quality education. Of course, given their formula, how could they? The most thorough research on charter schools, by Stanford University, shows that while charters do better than public schools in 17% of cases, they actually do worse in 37%, a more than 2-to-1 bad-to-good ratio!
If your doctor injured two patients for every one he cured, would you go to him? If your mechanic wrecked two cars for every one he fixed, would you go to him? Yet that is literally the proposition that charter school operators are peddling. And that 2-to-1 failure rate is after charters have skimmed off the better students and run what can only be called ethnically cleansed schools, counseling out poor performers, special needs cases, and “undesirable” minorities, leaving them for the public schools to deal with. For the data show they do that as well.
The irony of all this, indeed, the hypocrisy, is that America is at least nominally a capitalist county. You would think it would be ok to be honest about your intentions to make money by pillaging children’s futures while looting the public purse. God knows the weapons makers, the banks, the oil companies, the pharmaceutical companies, agribusiness and others aren’t bashful about it. But that doesn’t seem to be true here, in education.
Here, it’s all about “the children,” about “streamlining” education, boosting scores, uplifting minorities, making America competitive, and just about every other infantile fairy tale they can invoke to convince the country to hand over the loot. For that’s what it’s really about. The trillion dollars a year to be made by turning “the children” into intellectually impotent dullards but profit producing zombies? Well, that’s just a lavishly fortunate coincidence. Right?
Remember, you can’t save something by destroying it. Which isn’t to say that swashbuckling entrepreneurs aren’t willing to try. All they need is the liberating impetus of that essential American ethic: “I’m getting mine, screw you.” But the cost of this plunder will be incalculable, for it will ripple through the economy for decades. And the damage will be irreversible for, while public education is the most powerful democratizing institution in the world, it only works when the schools work. When they cease to work, it’s over.
So watch out. A destroyed educational system, a desiccated economy, and a debauched democracy are coming soon to a school district near you.

Robert Freeman teaches history and economics at a public high school in northern California. He is the founder of One Dollar For Life, a national non-profit that helps American schools build schools in the developing world with donations of one dollar. He can be reached at robertfreeman10@yahoo.com.

http://www.scpr.org/blogs/education/2012/04/27/5836/students-post-several-hundred-images-state-tests-s/

Blog: Pass / Fail

Students post several hundred images of state tests on social media networks

April 27, 2012 | By Tami Abdollah

10

Rogers Herr Middle School

Standarized test scantron answer sheet

Students have posted several hundred images of this year's state tests online on social networking sites including Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest, California Department of Education officials said today.
The California Department of Education learned about the testing security breach within the last 24 hours after a district notified them that a student was seen taking a photo of an exam with their cell phone, said department spokesman Paul Hefner.
Schools across the state are currently in their annual testing season (which spans several months) for the STAR, or Standardized Testing and Reporting Program, and California High School Exit Examination.
The department has asked the website operators to remove the pictures of these tests, and notified all school districts statewide as well as testing coordinators today to "be extra vigilant" in following security protocols, Hefner said.
"Our security protocols require that students not have access to any electronic devices while taking the test or handling testing materials," Hefner said. "The good thing is that for the prevention of this all schools really need to do is follow the established security protocols we have."
Officials are also working with ETS, its statewide testing contractor, to help assess the vulnerability of the tests and particular questions. Specific questions may not be scored if they are determined to have been especially compromised, Hefner said.
Most of the images, which go back as far as four days, showed students posing with closed test books celebrating a finished test, or posing and playing around with answer sheets, such as filling in dots to spell out words, Hefner said. In one case a student wrote out "YOLO" in dots, or "you only live once," and posed with the sheet, Hefner said. In a limited number of cases there are pictures of test booklets open to a particular question, where it may be possible to read the question and answers, Hefner said.
"Again, students should not have access to any kind of electronic device while they're working with test materials," Hefner said. "Any kinds of pictures are a problem to a degree. Obviously it's lesser than seeing an answer to a particular test question."
Students with special needs are the only ones allowed to have cell phones with them in testing situations and may use them only under close supervision, state officials said.
The department is still trying to determine the total number of unique test pictures and accounts that have posted them. Hefner said in many cases one photo is cross posted on Instagram, Tumblr and Facebook, for example. "We're still just getting our arms around this problem," he said.
In some cases the student's name or school is identifiable, and those districts are being notified, Hefner said. He said at least a "couple dozen districts" have been able to identify images that relate to them.
"Schools have a responsibility, in fact they all sign legal affidavits, that they will properly administer the test," Hefner said. "And so if there’s any question about the administration of the test they have to conduct a probe...and report back to us."
Public Instruction Superintendent Tom Torlakson said in a statement that following proper security protocol for testing was "vital to maintain the integrity of the testing process."
Tami Abdollah can be reached via email and on Twitter (@latams).

Comparing Two School Districts

http://theassailedteacher.com/2012/04/23/a-tale-of-two-school-districts/

A Tale of Two School Districts

What do you know? A school that does not look like a jail.

To teachers in New York City, schools in the “suburbs” are mythical places. They have parking lots, swimming pools, computer labs, debate teams and lacrosse. Class sizes are small, educational resources abound and students sit still with hands folded and have names like “Cody” and “Brianna”. Teacher salaries are higher while less is generally asked of them. The only negatives we hear are about the parents who, as the polar opposite of many of those in NYC, are overly engaged in their children’s education and ready to challenge a teacher as to why their kid received a 95 and not a 97.
Urban myths? I guess it depends on the suburb.
I have a friend who is about to finish his first year as a high school teacher in an upper class school district. Before this gig, he taught in NYC for several years. In his own words, the transition from urban to suburban has been a “culture shock”.
He is treated like a professional. Administrators do not yell at him, subject him to useless professional development, lecture him in staff meetings like a child or berate him because he did not hand in or sign off on some meaningless paperwork. They respect his time as a teacher and understand that he has lessons to write, assignments to grade and students to tutor.
Perhaps this is because there are so few administrators at the school: three for a student body of about 1,300 kids. They handle the day-to-day operations of the campus while teachers lead academic departments. The only time the principal asked the teachers to do anything outside of teach is when she tried to mobilize the staff to resist the new value-added teacher evaluations.
My friend still has a tough time believing that a school like this can exist. He still fears that, whenever he sees the principal, he is going to be yelled at or harassed. He fears that one day the principal is going to take off her mask and reveal herself to be a reptilian overlord out to make his life a living hell. I think he can sue the NYC DOE and his former principal for an acute case of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Since his time there, no teacher has been sent to a rubber room or reassigned. In fact, he has never even heard of any teacher being investigated for anything at the school. The staff is filled with veterans who have been there for several years, if not decades. Teachers hug their students, entertain them in their classrooms during lunch and routinely give them pats on the back and reassuring rubs on the shoulder.
And there is no small-minded administrator or ghoulish newspaper reporter there to cry “pervert”.
If I did not know any better, it seems as if my friend teaches in a healthy environment. Teachers do not come to work fearing what their principal will put them through today, nor do they have to put up with an autocratic mayor who sees himself as God Almighty. They can come to work and focus on teaching which, hard as it is for us in the city to believe, is the real job of the teacher.
You think the students at the school benefit from having a veteran teaching staff whose professionalism is respected? Gee, I don’t know, that is a tough one.
And what about us poor schlubs in the city? We may not be able to have the swimming pools or lacrosse teams that they have in the suburbs, but why is it that we are not entitled to the same healthy work environment my friend has? Why are we constantly broken down by administrators with questionable teaching backgrounds and ethics? Why do we have to open up the newspaper every day to find another round of bash the teacher?
You think the students at our schools lose out by having a teaching staff who are treated like criminals? Gee, that is a tough one as well.
So, why the contrast between my friend’s suburban school and New York City?
Because the parents in my friend’s upper class school district would never stand for it. They send their children to school to learn, to earn good grades and to build a transcript that will get them into a good college. They do not expect teachers to be babysitters, nannies or counselors. They expect teachers to teach. They cannot do that if they are in constant turmoil. A school that rubber rooms its teachers, wastes their staff’s time with useless meetings and PD and generally harasses them as a matter of policy would bring up serious questions about the leadership of that school. Angry parents will show up to school board meetings, point out the fact that their property taxes are funding their children’s school and call for the administration’s head on a platter.
On the other hand, parents in NYC are largely absent. Not only are they unaware about what their children do at school on a daily basis, but they expect teachers to raise their children for them. This creates a vacuum, one that administrators are all too happy to fill. It starts with people like the Mayor and Governor who claim to be “lobbyists” for children. Of course, this implies that parents are incapable of playing that role. And in the name of “the children”, they foist all types of “reforms” on the system that have nothing to do with learning and everything to do with building a billion-dollar edu-industry of testing and data. In order to implement these reforms, they seek out the most pliant and unimaginative people to be administrators.
That is why when an administrator says they intend to do something for the sake or safety of “the children”, you better run the other way. This means a teacher is going to get harassed. It is just like Napoleon who made all of his reforms in the name of “the people” of France.
Parents in the suburbs do not fall for this shtick. Nobody can tell them what is good for their children because they know what is good. They know what is good because they are present and engaged.
Imagine Mayor Bloomberg going out to the Hamptons to run a school system and telling the parents he knows how to educate their children. Imagine him closing down their schools, harassing their teachers and hiring yes-men (and women) as administrators. He would be run out of town as a laughing stock.
But this is par for the course in NYC, as well as urban school districts across the country. That is why in battling education reform, teachers who actually care about what is happening need to activate the parent community. They need to get parents to take the type of stock in their children’s educations as parents in the suburbs.
There is a long road ahead in this regard, but it is a fight that we cannot give up. The alternative is an eternity of harassment and misery.

Gary Rubinstein Punches Holes in MDRC Report

Examining NYC DOE’s Only Egg Basket

by Gary Rubinstein

http://garyrubinstein.teachforus.org/2012/05/01/examining-nyc-does-only-egg-basket/

When the leaders of the largest school district in the country decide to put all of their proverbial eggs in one basket, that basket had better be strong.  In the case of New York City, this basket is the June 2010 ‘research’ report by MDRC entitled ‘Transforming the High School Experience:  How New York City’s New Small Schools Are Boosting Student Achievement and Graduation Rates’ and the January 2012 follow up report ‘Sustained Positive Effects on Graduation Rates Produced by New York City’s Small Public High Schools of Choice.’
This is the paper that is always cited by Bloomberg, Walcott, and Suransky when they proclaim that the ends justify the means when it comes to shutting down schools.  In his recent New York Daily News editorial, ‘Close bad schools, save their students’ Walcott wrote

A study by the independent education research group MDRC confirmed how well our new schools are working. Among other things, the study found that they “markedly improved graduation rates for a large population of low-income, disadvantaged students of color.”

When these reports were released, many of the flaws in the conclusions were analyzed.  But since the DOE had no other evidence that their reforms were working, they continued to cite this study every chance they could.  Since the other excellent efforts to demonstrate the flaws in these reports have not caught on enough, I’ve decided to reinforce by analyzing the papers myself using the most recent data about the schools involved in the study.

The study attempts to measure the effect of shutting down 23 large high schools and opening 216 small high schools.  As the big high schools were closed, their students were scattered around the district.  The new small schools got new crops of ninth graders so it seems difficult to compare the new schools to the old schools since they have different kids.  For this study, they came up with an interesting approach.  Since students apply to the different schools, and many of the schools require a lottery to see who gets in, they set out to compare the achievement and graduation rates of the students who entered the lottery and were admitted to 105 of the small schools to the students who entered the lottery but ‘lost’ and went to regular schools.
The big finding was that the graduation rate for the students who won the lottery was 6.8% higher that for students who had entered the lottery but didn’t get into one of those 105 schools.
As an isolated statistic, this sounds moderately successful.  Certainly for the 6.8% who graduated and might not have otherwise, it is significant.  As these small schools serve about 400 students each, they have a combined enrollment of 40,000, so 6.8% is over 2,700 students.  But as I examined these two papers carefully I’ve determined that there are many additional factors that call the success of this program into question.  In this post, I’ll highlight the most significant ones.
1.  Who wrote the paper?
The paper was written by MDRC, which is “a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization” according to the Jan 2012 update.  It was funded by Gates, which is interesting, but not surprising.  Gates funds a lot of research and much of it contradicts the corporate reform theories.
What I learned, though, and what I haven’t seen reported elsewhere is that while three authors wrote the June 2010 paper, Howard S. Bloom, Saskia Levy Thompson, and Rebecca Unterman, only two of them wrote the Jan 2012 update.  Missing from the update is Saskia Levy Thompson.  Why the omission?  Well, she couldn’t work on that because two months after the first paper, in August 2010, she was hired as a top DOE executive making $174,410.  And, no, I’m not implying that she created skewed research to land a job, but it is still something ‘interesting’ considering that this paper remains the only piece of ‘proof’ that closing down schools is an effective reform strategy.
2.  Do the 105 schools serve the ‘same kids’ as the schools they replaced?
The schools that had been shut down, according to the report, had graduation rates around 45%.  The new schools had a 68.7% graduation rate.  If it were the ‘same kids’ this would be quite an accomplishment.  Well, they don’t try to claim that it is the same kids which is why they don’t boast a 20% increase, but just a 6.8% one.  This is because the ‘control group’ which are the students who lost the lottery and had to go to a regular school had a graduation rate of 61.9%.  In other words, the kids who entered the lottery were ‘better’ than kids who didn’t.
This is revealed completely in table 2.3 on page 31 of the June 2010 paper.

The most dramatic line is the one about special education.  While 14% of NYC 9th graders are Special Education students, the percent of students who entered the lottery was actually 15.5%.  But somehow only 6.7% went to the 105 small schools.  How can this be?  Statistically, it is nearly impossible that only 6.7% would win the lottery if the pool had 15.5%.  Well, the reason was not that only that number happened to win the lottery.  But most of of the Special Education students who ‘won’ the lottery were not able to attend those schools since those schools, being small schools, could not offer the accommodations that they were entitled to.  This statistic, alone, should invalidate any conclusions made in the study.  Of course when you have much fewer Special Education students, you also have fewer sever behavior issues which tend to take a lot of time and energy to address.
In several other categories we see that the 8th grade lottery winners were ‘better’ than the lottery losers.
The net result of all this manipulation of the entering students could surely account for the 6.8% increase in graduation rate.
3.  What is the ‘expected’ graduation rate increase based on peer effects?
The fact that the graduation rate of the students who went to these 105 schools was 6.8% higher than the graduation rate of the students who lost the lottery and went to regular schools can easily be explained by peer effects.  If you separate the more motivated students, they will do a little better than if you mix those students in with less motivated students.  This is something that everyone already knows.  It is not, though, something that can be the basis of a policy change.  If they really wanted to take this experiment to an extreme, they would separate all the more motivated students out and have schools just for them.  The other schools would get much worse since they would not have enough motivated students to set examples for the others.  I would have expected the graduation rate to increase by more than 6.8% so I don’t see this experiment as much of a success.
4.  What about some of the other results, not often quoted?
On page 53 of the June 2010 report, they have this table comparing different levels of graduation rate and also achievement results on certain tests.

Notice that the control group (students who lost the lottery) actually had a higher percent of Advanced Regents diplomas and also had a higher percent of students getting over a 75 on the Math A Regents.  Looking at this table, it is safe to say that the results of this experiment are, at best, mixed.
5.  What level of achievement have these small schools actually accomplished?
Looking over the 2010-2011 Comprehensive Information Reports (CIR) for these schools, I was struck by how poor their achievement was.  In a school that is producing many ‘college ready’ students, we should see a good number of students taking some of the more advanced Regents.  These would include Chemistry, Physics, and higher math.  There are three different math regents, Integrated Algebra, Geometry, and Algebra 2 / Trigonometry.  Advanced 8th graders often take the Integrated Algebra Regents, even in a low performing middle school.  ‘Average’ 9th graders and 10th graders who are behind could take that test too.  I took a random school from the list, Validus Preparatory Academy, to see what sorts of Regents they took.  Only 42% of 190 students passed Integrated Algebra.  This is a test, I know from grading it, that only requires getting about 30% correct to get scaled to a passing 65%.  Only 45 students took Geometry, of which only 16% passed.  Only 5 students took Algebra 2 / Trigonometry, of which just 1 student passed.  One student took Chemistry, though there was not a score for that student, and zero students took Physics.  The combined SAT average for this school was 1062 out of 2400.  This is only a little better than you get for writing your name on the paper.
As Validus Preparatory Academy was just chosen since it was the last school on the list alphabetically, I decided to look at the ‘best’ school, according to the 2010-2011 city progress report.  The ‘It Takes A Village’ school scored at the 99.4th percentile on the city progress report.  In a school that high, you should expect a lot of kids taking Algebra 2 since that is really an 11th grade course while 12th graders would be taking precalculus, or even calculus.  We should also see many students passing Chemistry and Physics.
It Takes A Village had 23 students take Algebra 2 (19 passed), 31 for Chemistry (19 passed), and 40 for Physics (25 passed)
The fourth ‘best’ school, The Urban Assembly School for Media Studies had 9 students take Algebra 2 (5 passed), no Chemistry, and no Physics.
Some other schools had higher percentages than these, but, in general the academic achievement and rigor at these schools was very thin.  For their five best schools, the average SAT scores were 1135, which was below the city average of 1222.  For AP exams, they had an average of 17% passing vs. 30% for the city.  And since the demographics of these schools gave them a ‘peer index’ of 2.27 which is above the city average of 2.25, they can’t even use their demographics as an ‘excuse.’

6.  Have any of these 105 schools been, since, shut down?
As of the most recent school closure announcements, seven of the 105 schools have been closed.  This 7% is not that different than the percent of schools throughout the 1,100 schools that have been shut down.
The seven schools are International Arts Business School, Gateway School for Environmental Research and Tech, Manhattan Theater Lab High School, Global Enterprise High School, Performance Conservatory High School, Urban Assembly Academy for History and Citizenship, and The School for Community Research and Learning.
Conclusion
Shutting down schools and reopening new ones is likely to create an illusory bump in some statistics — in this case the 6.8% improvement in graduation rate.  A brand new school with all first time freshmen will be free of the distraction of the repeater freshmen.  In that way, I’m not surprised that there were minor increases.  But these increases are just a result of this dynamic and not from getting a crop of better teachers.  In time these schools will likely begin to suffer the same problems that brought down the schools they replaced.
This is not a scalable solution and it seems to be doing much more harm than it is good.
As always, I really encourage professional journalists to dig deeper into this than I am able to do in my limited spare time.  There is certainly a Pulitzer Prize in journalism waiting for the reporter who takes down the corrupt corporate reform movement.

 

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