'Achievement Gap' in City Schools Is Scrutinized

http://www.nysun.com/new-york/achievement-gap-in-city-schools-is-scrutinized/83215/

'Achievement Gap' in City Schools Is Scrutinized

Slight Gains in English Are Reported

ELIZABETH GREENPRINT
Scores of both black and Hispanic students on some state and national tests have gone up since Mayor Bloomberg took over the Department of Education in 2002, and by some measures the "proficiency gap" between black and Hispanic students and white and Asian ones has begun to close.

But by one other measure — not the test scores of black and Hispanic students alone or the percentage of them that met the bar called "proficiency," but a more subtle and relative measure known as the "achievement gap" — progress has been more elusive.

RELATED: Aaron Pallas's Achievement Gap Analysis | Department of Education Achievement Gap Analysis.

Three researchers studied that measure at the request of The New York Sun by analyzing detailed data the city Department of Education previously had not released. They found that the actual gap between different racial groups' test scores has not budged by most measures, and in some cases it has widened.

In the most encouraging case — the difference between black and white students' scores on an eighth-grade English test -- the gap has narrowed slightly. Yet it remains wide. In 2008, 74% of black eighth-graders in the city scored below the average white eighth-grader on the state English test, compared to 79% in 2002.

How much this achievement gap matters depends upon whom you talk to.

In an interview at Tweed Courthouse, the schools chancellor, Joel Klein, said the achievement gap is "an issue," but he said it should not obscure the significant gains black and Hispanic students have made under his watch.

Though in some cases the achievement gap is steady because no students have made gains on standardized tests, in other cases it is staying constant because scores have risen for all students — white, black, Hispanic, and Asian.

"If the way to close the achievement gap is to pull whites down, that's not a strategy that any intelligent person or any responsible school district would ever follow," Mr. Klein said.

Others say the relative differences between races the achievement gap exposes are important.

"In the real world, no one looks at proficiency scores to determine the likelihood of someone getting ahead," one of the researchers that analyzed the data for the Sun, Aaron Pallas, a professor of education and sociology at Columbia University's Teachers College, said. "What really matters is how people do in relation to one another. And so if you have groups remaining the same distance apart, then the group ahead is still going to remain ahead when you look at selection into colleges and the labor market."

Messrs. Bloomberg and Klein have previously said that New York City's achievement gap is narrowing.

"Over the past six years, we've done everything possible to narrow the achievement gap — and we have," Mr. Bloomberg said in testimony to Congress this summer. "In some cases, we've reduced it by half."

Their statements draw on two measures of progress. The first is actual improvements made by black and Hispanic students on standardized tests.

At some grade levels, more black and Hispanic students are passing both federal and state tests than ever before.

The percentage of black fourth-graders scoring above the "basic" level on a federal math test soared to 72% in 2007 from 58% in 2003.

In other grade levels -- notably the eighth grade -- there has been little if any change in the number of black and Hispanic students attaining proficiency on both state and federal tests, and in some cases the number of black and Hispanic students passing tests has declined.

The second measure is the percentage of students in different racial groups that meet the bar known as "proficiency." The gap between the percentage of, say, black students and white students who pass that bar is what Messrs. Bloomberg and Klein have been referring to as the achievement gap.

That measure has indeed been sliced in half in some cases. For instance, in 2002 the black-white gap on a state fourth-grade math test was 35 percentage points, with 76% of white students scoring "proficient" compared to 41% of black fourth-graders. By 2008, the gap had narrowed to 18 points: 91% of white students now score proficient compared to 73% of black students.

The proficiency gap is closing even as the achievement gap stays essentially the same because each gap represents a different kind of improvement. Proficiency rates detect movements across the proficiency bar, rising when students who had been below it learn enough knowledge and skills to reach the standard, but registering no change if students who were already meeting the standard surge even further above it. The achievement gap, on the other hand, is sensitive to changes both above and below the proficiency bar.

Black and Hispanic students are more likely to start out with scores below the "proficient" mark. That means that the proficiency gap can close even though all groups of students might be rising by equal amounts.

One of the three researchers who analyzed the achievement gap data for the Sun, Howard Everson, said that he puts more stock in proficiency scores, which are also the measure the federal government's No Child Left Behind law uses to judge schools and school districts.

Mr. Everson, a psychometrician at Fordham University, is the lead testing adviser to the New York State Education Department and an adviser to the federal government on its testing regime.

He said the proficiency figures are important because they contain not only information about test scores but also a professional judgment on whether a student has adequate skills and knowledge. Expert math and English teachers set "proficiency" bars, and Mr. Everson said he takes their judgments seriously.

On those grounds he said, "I think overall it looks to be pretty good news."

The third researcher who analyzed the data for the Sun, Robert Tobias, a New York University professor who was the city's testing director for 13 years, said he puts more stock in the achievement gap than in the proficiency gap because it reflects changes in students across the spectrum -- not just those who moved above or below the proficiency bar.

Mr. Tobias said the achievement gap's changes contradict claims the Bloomberg administration has made of impressive progress, which he said he has read in press releases and newspaper articles. "When one looks at this presentation, the picture is a lot more modest," he said.

The three researchers found that the gap between black and white students' average scores on an English test has closed slightly, as has the gap on that test between Hispanics and whites, and that no gap has closed on a mathematics test. It also found that the gap between Asian students and their black and Hispanic peers has widened slightly since 2002.

In some cases the gap remains wide because black and Hispanic students are making no progress and neither are white and Asian students. In other cases, black and Hispanic students are gaining some ground -- but white and Asian students' scores are improving at roughly the same pace.

The Department of Education also conducted an analysis of the achievement gap, reproducing the same process the outside researchers conducted. Pointing to small changes in figures, the department's analysis concluded that the gap has closed across the board even by this measure. "We are closing the achievement gap," the analysis said.

The researchers challenged that conclusion.

"This is not strong evidence that the gap is closing," Mr. Everson said. "The only thing you can say is that they're relatively flat, that the gap is relatively stable."

The achievement gap can also be examined by looking at New York City students' scores on a federal test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which is known as the nation's report card.

An analysis by the National Center for Education Statistics, the research arm of the federal Education Department, concludes that no achievement gaps have narrowed at all in New York City between 2003 and 2007. The only gap that moved in any significant direction is the one between poor students and the rest of the population, which widened slightly, that analysis said.

The National Center for Education Statistics also concludes that upward trends in the reading scores of black and Hispanic fourth-graders lauded by Mr. Klein are not statistically significant.

Mr. Klein criticized the National Center on Education Statistics analysis.

"Those are just confidence levels. Nobody is saying this is a science," Mr. Klein said. He added: "If three points is flat, and four points is statistically significant, then what you're doing is, you're playing something of a game."

Mr. Klein said he stands by his positive stance on New York City's success at closing the achievement gap.

"My view is that our black kids in the fourth grade are outperforming all black kids in America," Mr. Klein said. "Our kids are ripping the leather off the ball of the other kids around the country."

Others drew a more discouraging conclusion.

Mr. Pallas said the results should lead people around the country to question whether they should reproduce the policies being enacted in New York City.

"We need to be aware that what we're doing right now to close the achievement gap may not be working," Mr. Pallas said. "If what we're doing isn't working, we need to be aware of that and perhaps think about doing something else."

Lawrence Feinberg, the assistant director for reporting and analysis at the National Assessment Governing Board, the group that oversees the federal test, wrote in a memo last year that Mr. Klein's conclusions about progress by black students are "incomplete." The conclusions "may be questioned by his critics" because they depend on trends in test scores and do not take into account whether increases are statistically significant, the memo said.

The interim executive director of NAGB, Mary Crovo, to whom the memo was addressed, said in a telephone call to the Sun that the memo was an internal staff memo that was not meant to reflect the official position of the governing board. Asked whether she supported the memo's argument, she said, "I think the data in the memo are accurate, and that's as much as we can say."

A spokesman for the city's education department, David Cantor, called the memo "a politicized gloss" and said the outgoing executive director of NAGB, Charles Smith, had called Mr. Klein to apologize.

An Apparent Heir to Weingarten Emerges at N.Y. Teachers Union

ELIZABETH GREEN, Staff Reporter of the Sun | July 18, 2008

Having been elected president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten is saying she has no current plans to leave her other job as president of the AFT's New York City local, the United Federation of Teachers. But she is indicating who her preferred New York City successor is: a former high school English teacher known as a fighter and an independent thinker, Michael Mulgrew.

Ms. Weingarten named Mr. Mulgrew the union's new chief operating officer in a memo sent to union officers yesterday evening. The promotion makes him the no. 2 person at the United Federation of Teachers, which calls itself America's largest union local, and puts Mr. Mulgrew in a strong, though not guaranteed, position to become the union's fourth president when Ms. Weingarten decides she is ready to leave.

Ms. Weingarten has been UFT president for 10 years. She was elected president of the American Federation of Teachers on Monday at the union's annual convention in Chicago.

UFT presidents also must be voted in, but both previous presidents were handpicked by their predecessors and groomed for the roles before standing for election. Traditionally, holders of the job have been powerful in shaping both the city's education policy and its broader politics.

Asked how long she will remain president of the New York City union, Ms. Weingarten said her main concern is making sure the UFT remains strong.

Whether Mr. Mulgrew proves he can do that is an open question and his main challenge.

In an interview with The New York Sun earlier this year about who would succeed her, Ms. Weingarten said, "Anybody who thinks that they can just walk into New York City and become the next Randi Weingarten is smoking something."

Several people at the union who were long considered likely successors to Ms. Weingarten have ended up falling out of the running.

Yet now Mr. Mulgrew's star appears to be rising — and the timing of his rise, just as Ms. Weingarten is taking on a national role, could make him the last man standing.

At the same convention where Ms. Weingarten was elected president, Mr. Mulgrew became for the first time a vice president of the national American Federation of Teachers; the same thing happened to Ms. Weingarten when her predecessor, Sandra Feldman, was elected AFT president.

In an interview with The New York Sun, Ms. Weingarten said she is modeling her steps on Ms. Feldman's transition plan.

Mr. Mulgrew is known in the union as a "fighter" who stands out for being bold enough to stand up to Ms. Weingarten when he disagrees with her.

A Staten Island resident, Mr. Mulgrew began his career in construction, where he belonged to the carpenters union. He became a teacher in 1990, starting as a substitute.

By 2005 — after more than a decade teaching English at a career and technical education high school on Coney Island, William Grady — he was being elected vice president of the union.

In recent months Mr. Mulgrew's profile has risen inside and outside of the union. He led the union's efforts to fight threatened school budget cuts, standing in for Ms. Weingarten at press events, traveling to Albany with her, and being introduced to the union's allies and partners.

Among his new contacts is Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott, who yesterday praised him as a "forceful" advocate, saying the two have a "great relationship."

Following in Ms. Weingarten's footsteps, Mr. Mulgrew seems already to have won the disdain of the union's internal opposition caucus, the Independent Community of Educators, or ICE.

An ICE leader, Jeffrey Kaufman, said Mr. Mulgrew allowed the department to get its way in its overhaul of special education schools. Ms. Weingarten's memo cited Mr. Mulgrew's work in that effort as a reason she promoted him, saying he forced the department to protect teachers' rights.

Others at the UFT praised Mr. Mulgrew. "I think he's extraordinarily talented and the right person," a union vice president, Leo Casey, said.

Mr. Mulgrew declined several requests for comment.

An Anonymous Education Blogger Becomes Thorn in City's Side

By ELIZABETH GREEN, Staff Reporter of the Sun

July 7, 2008
Told that her child could not enroll at the local public school, a concerned mother this spring sent a frantic e-mail message to a person she hoped could help. Days later, her child had a spot and the problem was solved.
Her hero was not the Department of Education, the school principal, or an elected official: It was Eduwonkette, an anonymous academic researcher who for the past year has been writing a Web log about education news and research. She identifies herself only with an image of a masked lady superhero.
It was perhaps a sign of the blog's rising prominence that the mother said all she needed to solve her enrollment crisis was to threaten the principal and a city school official with a leak to Eduwonkette.
"It seems the prospect of you writing about this was a less than welcome one," the mother wrote in an e-mail to Eduwonkette. "Thanks again masked cyber guy."
Beginning first as an independent blog and then quickly migrating to the Web site of America's education paper of record, Education Week, Eduwonkette in the past year has become a stubborn thorn in the Bloomberg administration's side.
She sometimes stands with the city Department of Education on its policies; for instance, she supports the moves to make teacher hiring more like an open-market system, and she stood with Mayor Bloomberg and against the union in opposing a new law that bans teachers from using test scores as a factor in determining tenure.
She has also not been afraid to point out when she disagrees, and to do so with gusto.
She depicted Chancellor Joel Klein as "Darth Klein" in a Halloween-themed post, using Photoshop to mix his image with the Star Wars villain Darth Vader. She has excoriated Mr. Klein's signature small-schools initiative, under which large, failing high schools are split into smaller new schools, as a "bulldozer" that has displaced students with special needs.
A department spokesman, David Cantor, disputed that claim. He said 8% of students at small schools have disabilities, the same as the citywide average.
Eduwonkette has also tackled the prized policy that now bans middle-schoolers who have not passed certain courses from being promoted to high school. Criticizing this policy as contradicting academic research, Eduwonkette concocted a rap: "Shameful practice?/ DOE, you're just like a cactus/ Soaking up data but ya head is all dry."
Guessing her identity when the site first started was a popular parlor game not just among fellow academics but also Department of Education staffers.
Some have speculated that she works for the city teachers union, but Eduwonkette and the union's president, Randi Weingarten, disputed that. Ms. Weingarten even grilled newspaper reporters about the blogger's identity, asking if they were Eduwonkette.
In a recent telephone interview with The New York Sun, Eduwonkette insisted on preserving her anonymity.
"Universities expect us to devote our time exclusively to research, and blogging is a hard sell in that environment," she said. "It's still a new enough activity that universities don't quite know how to appraise its value."
She said she started a blog in order to summarize research on schools for a wider audience. "There's this large body of research that never sees the light of day," she said. The idea of the blog was to reverse that situation. Hypothesizing that policymakers were not taking research into account in their work, and doing so not on purpose but because they just did not have the time to comb through it all, she set out to provide them an entertaining crib sheet.
Yet as it has gone on, a running theme of the blog has become the failure of policymakers to take research findings into account and steer their practice accordingly.
"Call me old fashioned and curmudgeonly, but I can't stand it when the wonks break out in a 'research shows' chorus with no references," Eduwonkette wrote in one post. "If research so valiantly and definitively shows it, you should be able to tell us whose research shows it."
Then she quoted a top city administrator, Garth Harries, as speaking at an event about research showing that teacher quality has a greater effect on student learning than class-size reduction and yet, upon questioning, not being able to cite any studies to demonstrate it.
The blog has gotten a mix of reviews.
Mr. Cantor said: "She comes on like she's keeping it real, but time after time — on small schools, excessive testing, the budget — she uses evidence selectively or outright gets it wrong, always to the detriment of the DOE. Basically, she's a con artist, like lots of anonymous people on the Web."
A co-director of the Education Sector think tank, Andrew Rotherham, suggested on his blog Eduwonk that Eduwonkette might be unfairly pretending to be unbiased because she has "skin in the game."
A research and policy manager at Education Sector, Kevin Carey, criticized her on his blog as unreliable, saying she is "not exactly a disinterested observer."
Mr. Rotherham in an interview said he does not know who Eduwonkette is. He said her blog is good, but challenged her decision to write it anonymously.
"I don't think this is going to be remembered as Ed Week's finest hour," he said. "It's this issue of you got all this information to readers, without a vital piece of information for them to put it in context."
Others said they are not concerned with the anonymity issue.
The education historian Diane Ravitch described Eduwonkette's analysis as "brilliant."
Ms. Weingarten used the same word.
She said Eduwonkette is a rare voice in the chorus of those who have raised complaints with the Department of Education because of the way Bloomberg administration officials have responded to her.
"They have not yet figured out how to marginalize her," Ms. Weingarten said. "She knows her stuff, and she's very dispassionate about it."
Political science and education professor Jeffrey Henig, who coordinates a program on education policy at Columbia Teachers College and has written a guest-blog for Eduwonkette, said of her, "I don't follow the education blogs on a regular basis, but when I do I have admired how she wrestles with the complexities of education research in a way that makes them understandable but still does them justice."
Other people who have guest-blogged include the researcher Michael Klonsky; the founder of the left-wing activist group the Weather Underground, William Ayers, who is now a professor of education at the University of Illinois, and the Manhattan Institute scholar Sol Stern, who posted a rebuttal to Mr. Ayers's writing.

UFT in a Race To Avert a School Revolt

Emergency PTA Meeting of Parents at Its Charter


BY ELIZABETH GREEN - Staff Reporter of the Sun
March 25, 2008
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/73539

Top United Federation of Teachers leaders are moving to avert a crisis at a
charter school run by the union after an ultimatum by parents upset by what
they say is a lack of security guards, poor communication with
administrators, and high teacher turnover.

Union officials agreed to address and study the issues, promising changes
that seem intended to avert what some worried could become a publicly
embarrassing parent revolt.

The concerns were aired before several top UFT officials at an "Emergency
PTA Meeting" last night. The meeting was hastily organized after more than
25 dissatisfied parents turned a regular PTA meeting last week into an
emotional grievance session, ultimately threatening to publicize their
troubles if the school's top administrator, Rita Danis, declined to give
them an audience.

"If Ms. Danis refuses to attend Emergency PTA meeting on Monday Mar 24 2008
[parents] will contact the media and their politicians for outside help,"
the PTA president, Rosa Cribb, wrote in her meeting notes.

The charter school was opened in 2005 by the UFT to great fanfare. Across
the country teachers unions usually oppose charter schools, which are
publicly funded but operate outside ordinary regulations - including, in
many cases, teachers' contracts. Here in New York, the UFT has pledged
instead to bring non-unionized charter schools under its wing and start its
own charter schools.

Along with the elementary school at issue in the current flare-up, the union
runs a secondary charter school and is planning to open a third charter
school with the California-based group Green Dot.

Ms. Cribb said she adores the UFT Elementary Charter School, where her
grandson is a student, and moved quickly to ask Ms. Danis and top UFT
officials to attend an emergency meeting because she feared that, if
concerns went unaddressed, the whole school would suffer.

"The parents are very unhappy. Some of the parents are talking about taking
their kids out of the school," Ms. Cribb said before the meeting. "I don't
want parents to take their kids out."

A regular review of the school issued by the State University of New York's
Charter School Institute about the 2006-2007 school year called teacher
quality "limited," describing "a lack of student engagement throughout most
classrooms" and widespread misbehavior.
The report also noted that, "Teachers did not capitalize on 'teaching
moments.'"

The union's vice president for elementary education, Michelle Bodden; its
general manager, David Hickey; a parent official; and its top charter school
official, Jonathan Gyurko, attended the meeting. So did Ms. Danis, who acts
in the role of principal but, in keeping with the school's philosophy, is
known as a "teacher leader" and is a UFT member, not a member of the
principals' union.

About 50 parents came to the meeting, some armed with concerns and some out
of curiosity at the flier that had been sent home in their children's
notebooks and blown up on an oversized poster to hang in the school's foyer.
The meeting was originally slotted to be held in the school library, but was
moved to the auditorium to accommodate all the parents who came, many with
several children in tow.

Union officials declined a request by a reporter to sit in on the meeting,
but many parents spoke on their way in and on their way out.

They said one man, a former parent who is a city firefighter, gave a
stirring description of challenges his son faced at the school that
ultimately led him to pull his son out.

"Things like that should not happen," the father of two children at the
school, Daniel Morgan, said as he left the meeting. "I've had an excellent
experience with my children, but I would like to make sure it remains that
way,"

Another parent who recently joined the school's board of trustees, Zakiyah
Ansari, raised concerns about teacher turnover rates.
Ms. Ansari said she did not have specific figures on turnover but had
observed several departures. "You notice people not here, and being
in a small school, it's easier to notice," she said.

School officials said two teachers left in the school's first year, and five
left in the 2006-07 school year. Other additions are a result of the
school's expansion; it began serving just kindergarten and first graders and
has added a new grade every year.

Ms. Danis is quoted in a 2007 union publication as saying the school was
adding 19 new staff members.

Several parents praised the quality of the teachers, saying they are pleased
with their children's high level of work and how much they are being
challenged.

Others raised complaints.

Parent Rachel White said the school leader is not respected. "A lot of
parents did not come because, if she's here, they're not going to say
anything," she said.

One parent, Taisha Robinson, said she considered pulling her son out of the
school after he was unexpectedly asked to repeat the second grade this year.
She said the reason was that he did not score high enough on a test, but
that a private tutor who is a Department of Education employee she hired
disputed the decision, saying he should have been moved forward.

School officials said seven students were held back this year, including
three second-graders. Test scores and attendance data are used to make the
decisions, they said.

On her way out last night, Ms. Bodden said the meeting was positive. "There
is a real receptiveness on everybody's part to making the school work," she
said.