GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Last night, the Panel for Educational Policy approved the chancellor’s proposed schools budget, with only the fearless Patrick Sullivan, the Manhattan borough president’s appointee, voting against it. A handful of other representatives — none, of course, from the majority appointed by the chancellor — read prepared statements about how bad the budget cuts are, but when it came time to vote, they backed up the budget, which cuts money from all schools, especially those that are high-performing, and also earmarks a tremendous amount of money for testing programs, incentive programs that are transitioning onto the public dollar, and charter schools. But how could all but the most courageous PEP member vote against the budget? In the past, when PEP members opposed the chancellor’s wishes, he simply replaced them on the panel.

The PEP’s vote is required, but it isn’t the one that matters. The City Council must approve the budget before it goes into effect. And all but one City Council member has sworn to vote against the budget unless the cuts to the schools are reversed. The Council has until the end of this week to vote on the municipal budget.

• Huge gains in state reading and math test scores. (Times, Daily News, Post)
• Statewide, charters beat district schools. (Sun)
• Teacher bonuses correlate with mixed test score results. (Post)
• Student payments seem to make a bigger difference. (Post)
• How one “F” school made big improvements. (Post)
• Are time-consuming practice tests responsible for the gains? (Daily News)
• New York City teens are about twice as likely to experience sexual abuse than the average teen. (Post)
• Kids’ nutrition takes a hit once schools close for the summer. (Times)
• The state of Michigan is giving some families rent help so kids don’t have to switch schools. (Times)
• Budget cuts are hitting schools nationwide. (Christian Science Monitor)

No one was surprised when Chancellor Klein announced today that the city’s students posted dramatic gains on state test scores this year. Charting a clear trajectory of improvement has been fundamental to his reforms. This year, he announced, nearly 80 percent of 4th graders and 60 percent of 8th graders passed the state math test, and about 60 percent of 4th graders and 40 percent of 8th graders passed the state English test. Gains in the last six years, the DOE points out in its press release, range from about 15 points in 8th grade English to more than 30 points on math tests at all levels.

Even before the mayor made his announcement this afternoon, discussion had begun over whether this year’s test scores are a sign of victory, as the mayor believes, or of score inflation and manipulation. In today’s Sun, Elizabeth Green speaks to statisticians who warn that, for many reasons, large-scale score increases are not always to be believed.

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• Last year’s math and reading test scores come out today; the mayor’s impressed, but he’s alone. (Sun)
• A perennial problem: how to get immigrant parents involved? (Times)
• From coast to coast, 8th grade proms are out of control. (Times, LA Times)
• Prom is a different beast at a high school for new immigrants. (Times)
• The Khalil Gibran International Academy is still in lots of trouble. (City Room)
• Double Dutch may become a public school sport. (Daily News)
• A non-punitive programs appears to be good at lifting attendance rates. (Daily News)
• Professional musicians teach schoolkids in Brooklyn. (Times)
• The DOE keeps putting an assailant in the same class as his victim. (Post)
• Funding is thin for summer youth employment programs. (Post)
• Hillary Clinton spoke at a high school graduation this weekend in the Bronx. (Post)
• The DOE’s cell phone motivation program won an international advertising award. (Daily News)
• By closing Walton High this year, the DOE is leaving dozens of students with nowhere to go. (Daily News)
• NYC kids have too few playgrounds, a state senator says. (Sun)

• In Florida at a conference, Chancellor Klein says he would like to start a city-specific teacher certification system. (Sun)
• Bronx kids traveled to downtown Manhattan to protest the budget cuts. (Daily News)
• Friends Seminary will soon be the first city school without many Arabic-speaking students to offer Arabic classes. (Times)
• As another school year ends, more Catholic schools close. (Post)

Skola by bmw328driver

In celebration of the arrival of Swedish furniture superstore IKEA to New York City this week, I thought I would direct your attention to a recent Economist article about an organization that’s applying IKEAnomics to schools in Sweden.

In the last decade, school choice has blossomed in Sweden thanks to an experimental government that in 1994 put in place regulations that make it easy for private operators to receive government funds to run secular, inclusive “free” schools. There’s no cost to students, who are admitted on a first-come, first-serve basis, and school operators receive the same amount of money per student that local municipalities spend. Making a profit is fair game under the law.

The Economist article profiles Kunskapsskolan, or Knowledge Schools, a company that operates 10 schools throughout the country. Kunskapsskolan are similar to IKEA products in two key respects: first, they require customers to do the assembly themselves. In this case, teachers assemble lessons from material available online and students spend a significant amount of time in independent study and small-group work. In addition, schools take a “flatpack” approach to construction, eschewing frills in favor of function; to enrich the curriculum, the company rents space in nearby facilities so students can have gym, shop, and art classes. For students’ sake, we can hope the IKEA analogy fails when it comes to the schools’ quality and durability.

The Economist article skirts two issues that are essential to understanding whether the Swedish model could have lessons for us. First, do we know that the IKEA-esque schools are successful? An independent-schools advocate says free schools in Sweden can compete “head-to-head” with state schools, which generally score high in international competition. But how do Kunskapsskolan students compare to their state-school peers, especially after factoring in demographic considerations? The head of Kunskapsskolan doesn’t inspire confidence: “We tell our teachers it is more important to do things the same way than to do them well,” he told the Economist.

Second, the article doesn’t explain how Kunskapsskolan delivers a 5-7 percent return on its expenditures each year. What isn’t the company giving its students that it could be? School operators with the goal of turning a profit, such as Edison Schools, have been politically unpopular in the States — not to mention unsuccessful in helping children learn more.

Especially without more information, it’s hard to know whether there’s anything we can learn from Sweden’s growing experiment in private schools, and especially from a school operator that doesn’t mind being compared to a company that produces low-cost, no-frills alternatives to heirloom furniture. What’s more, Sweden had few non-state schools before the 1994 legislation created incentives for private schools to open. Here, a model like Sweden’s — essentially a voucher program — would contend with a thriving private, charter, and parochial school scene.

• Standardizing admission to G&T programs citywide has resulted in less diverse gifted classes. (Times)
• A wife-and-husband team runs Teach for American and the KIPP network of charter schools. (Times)
• A deal with developers will give the city one new school and one expanded school in Manhattan. (Sun)
• Most schools don’t give kids enough physical education. (Daily News)
• Columbia University’s 5-year-old primary school is not quite the model its founders had hoped. (Sun)
• Scary times yesterday when an armed fugitive ran into a Brooklyn elementary school. (Post)
• Principals in the Bronx are starting to decide what programs they’ll cut this fall. (Riverdale Press)

Bad news for residents of Brooklyn Heights and DUMBO — there are no new schools planned for the area, despite parents’ recent campaign for a new middle school, Chancellor Klein told the Brooklyn real estate blog Brownstoner in an interview published today. For the most part, the interview focuses on the issues of supply and demand of school seats in the booming neighborhoods of brownstone Brooklyn. In Brooklyn Heights, PS 8 has grown so popular that it must house its pre-K program in portable trailers, and in Park Slope, PS 321 is so crowded that district leaders have begun to contemplate the prospect of making the school’s zone smaller. Throughout Brooklyn, parents and politicians are complaining that construction of residential units outpaces the creation of new school seats, leaving classrooms packed.

Another pressing issue for Brownstoner’s readers, many of whom are homeowners in areas of Brooklyn where development is happening rapidly, is where to send their kids for middle school. Unsatisfied with the middle school options in District 13, many parents at PS 8, as well as middle-class families throughout the district, currently choose to send their children to private middle schools or schools in other districts. Earlier this year, developers hoping to improve their chances of getting approval to construct a residential tower in DUMBO proposed allocating space for a new middle school in the building, and City Council member David Yassky briefly led a quixotc bid to locate a middle school inside the Brooklyn House of Detention. But Klein tells Brownstoner that because District 13 schools are, in aggregate, operating under capacity, there are no plans to create new schools in the area.

Klein does note that in the next round of capital planning, which will begin in July 2009 and account for construction through the year 2014, the School Construction Authority and DOE will for the first time look at demand within districts when deciding where and when to build new schools. This could augur relief for popular schools in underenrolled districts.

Unfortunately for families, the DOE’s most recent strategy to battle overcrowding has been to limit principals’ flexibility to admit students from outside their zone. (more…)

Today’s big news is what the Times terms “the Robin Hood effect” of No Child Left Behind: the reality that as schools have redoubled their efforts to help low-performing students get higher test scores, more successful students have lost out. This reality is the subject of a new report out of the Fordham Foundation, titled “High Achieving Students in the Era of NCLB” (pdf), which concludes that new accountability systems invariably increase pressure most for increased performance among the lowest achievers and that despite their widespread belief in equal time for all students, teachers make their weakest students their highest priorities. Since 2000, the report finds, the lowest-scoring students in states with test-based accountability systems increased their scores on federal tests by almost 6 percentage points, while the highest-scoring kids boosted their scores by less than 2 percent.

Two questions: First, doesn’t the conclusion suggest that NCLB is doing its job? After all, we’re not closing the achievement gap when everyone improves equally — we’re just moving it.

Second, and more seriously, Eduwonkette has written before about the need for “interval scaling” in analyzing the implications of test scores — that is, in recognizing that movement at the low end of the spectrum is easier to accomplish than movement at the top. It’s not clear to me whether the folks at Fordham took interval scaling into account. If not, the numbers suggest to me that it’s possible that both sets of students may have derived equal benefit from their teachers and schools — but that equal benefit does not correlate with equal score gains.

Despite the unanswered questions, the blogs are abuzz today with suggestions about how NCLB can be tweaked to provide incentives to help high-performing kids, given that the law’s incentives for teachers to help their weakest students appear to have been effective. Chad Aldeman at the Quick and the Ed, the Education Sector’s blog, writes that he hopes the report opens the door to value-added assessment becoming an accepted form of accountability under NCLB. Like many others, he wants to see schools evaluated on the basis of how successful their teachers are in moving students at least one grade level in one school year.

A variation on value-added was part of the progress reports that the DOE issued for the city’s schools for the first time last year. More than half of each school’s letter grade was based on what the DOE termed “student progress”: a combination of whether teachers moved students one grade during the year and “extra credit” based on the improvement of subgroups within each school, such as black students, the lowest third of students, and kids in special education. But in addition to being statistically flawed, the progress reports were poorly received because they gave low grades to high-performing schools and high grades to low-performing ones, including many that are on the state’s list of failing schools and a few that are on the verge of closing. The progress reports contained some useful information — information that many education pundits today say has been missing from the national conversation about achievement — but their reception underscores the fact that data ought not be associated with consequences in order to be illuminating.

Finally, in response to the Fordham report, Amy Wilkins of the Education Trust makes the important point in the Times that schools don’t actually have to pick between helping weak and strong students — a successful school will offer opportunities for both kinds of kids to improve. In some pockets of the city, such as in Brooklyn’s District 15, principals, aware of the targeted resources made available for low-scoring students, have made a deliberate effort to create special opportunities for all students by introducing what’s known as the Schoolwide Enrichment Model. Under this model, promoted by University of Connecticut professor Joseph Renzulli, all students choose a topic or skill of interest to them and pursue those topics in small, mixed-ability, and often mixed-age groups. Of course, like all programs, SEM can be implemented well or botched, depending on the school. But it offers a low-cost model under which teachers might direct attention to students with all levels of ability.

• No Child Left Behind’s focus on raising the test scores of the lowest-performing students has held higher-performing kids back, according to a new report. (Times)
• Campaign for Fiscal Equity analysis has found that Chancellor Klein plans to spend more money on successful schools than state law allows. (Post, Daily News)
• A senior prank lands teachers in the hospital — and might reveal larger issues at the Brooklyn secondary school where it took place. (Daily News)
• Local farmers and vendors say the DOE’s new, borough-wide purchasing policies will drive up the cost of milk and cause logistical problems. (Post)
• State legislators will meet until they vote on Gov. Paterson’s school property tax cap. (Post)