Photo by p_a_h

Elected officials, teachers, and parents offered up a litany of concerns about the DOE’s proposed Contracts for Excellence — regarding both their content and the process by which they were developed — last night at the final public hearing in Manhattan.

The hearing, chaired by Terence Tolbert, executive director of the DOE’s Department of Intergovernmental Affairs (and soon to direct Obama’s Nevada campaign), was well-attended by representatives from numerous organizations, including ACORN, Class Size Matters, the Coalition for Educational Justice, the Alliance for Quality Education, the City Council, school level PTAs, the UFT, and others.

Legally, Contracts for Excellence funding must “supplement, not supplant” existing spending; several speakers expressed concerns that the money will be spent to close holes in the budget rather than create or expand programs. Others worried that the new funding would be used to make up losses due to budget cuts in low-performing schools, rather than expanding services for high-needs children in those schools. Complicating these issues, several speakers noted, the plan includes little oversight of whether principals spend the Contracts for Excellence money as intended.

A series of speakers addressed the effect of Contracts for Excellence spending on class size reduction, often drawing their points from Leonie Haimson’s “40 reasons why NY state should reject the city’s Contracts for Excellence proposal.” Speakers argued that without oversight and support, schools would not actually reduce class sizes, as was the case in half of schools that received special funds to reduce class size last year; that the collaborative team teaching (CTT) model in special education was not designed to be a class size reduction strategy, as it is being used; and that without alignment between the DOE’s class size and capital plan, it will be impossible for principals to reduce class size when no new classroom space is available.

Several speakers noted that last year, thousands of students who dropped out or were discharged during the year were included in measures of class size reduction at the secondary level. City Council member Rosie Mendez, who represents parts of districts 1 and 2, suggested that class size should be measured early in the school year to avoid this problem

Several speakers pointed out that the plan provides no examples of model programs for English Language Learners, and that few schools chose this funding option, and others mentioned that the Contracts for Excellence funding ought not to be spent on the DOE’s Leadership Academy, which has previously been privately funded and has not been independently evaluated as effective.

The contracts process also received attention. Speakers raised concerns that principals and school leadership teams had too little time to determine how to use the Contracts for Excellence funding when writing their Comprehensive Education Plans this spring. Ilene Feliciano Quinn, a teacher at PS 38, suggested that SLTs should have an opportunity in the fall to review and revise the Contracts for Excellence spending at their schools. Others said while they appreciated the new information released by the DOE before this round of public hearings, it was released far too close to the hearing dates, giving the public too little time to appraise the new plan.

Photo by Annie Mole

When it comes to alleviating school overcrowding, the squeaky wheel gets the grease in New York City.

Earlier this spring, the DOE responded to a rising tide of dissatisfaction and protest in Manhattan’s District 2 by announcing plans for a new elementary school in Greenwich Village and releasing a long-anticipated blueprint for further reducing overcrowding. And this week, Chancellor Klein announced that the DOE will build an annex for the popular PS 8 in Brooklyn Heights. Already, the Brooklyn Paper is reporting that parents and community leaders see the annex, tentatively slated to open in 2011, as a way for PS 8 to expand through the middle school grades, something PS 8 parents have long been seeking. Last month, Chancellor Klein told Brownstoner that no new middle schools are needed in District 13 since the district’s schools are overall under capacity — but he also didn’t seem too torn up about the impending arrival of portable classrooms at PS 8, and now there’s a plan for their removal.

Last night at the Contracts for Excellence hearing in Manhattan, I heard that parents in District 3 are planning to adopt the strategies used this past year in District 2 to push for a new school on the Upper West Side, where new residential construction will soon flood already overcrowded schools with extra students. Upper West Siders — and parents at other overcrowded schools — start squeaking!

New York City’s Proposed Citywide Contracts for Excellence plan provides:

• 63% or $242 million in discretionary allocations to schools, which may be used for new or expanded programs in any of six areas: class size reduction, time on task, teacher & principal quality initiatives, middle and high school restructuring, full-day pre-kindergarten programs, and model programs for English Language Learners (ELLs).  The DOE has posted more details about options within each program area.
• 20% or $76 million for targeted allocations to schools based on student need and the school’s capacity to carry out programs.  These funds will be spent on new collaborative team teaching (CTT) classrooms, full-day pre-K expansion, new and expanded autism spectrum disorder, and ELL summer school expansion.  An additional $7 million will be allocated this week to a small group of high-needs schools.
• 10% or $37 million to district-wide initiatives, with $10 million going to new and expanded principal training initiatives, $20 million going to school-wide performance bonuses, and $7 million to new and expanded multiple pathways to graduation initiatives.
• 8% or $30 million to maintenance of effort, specifically maintaining summer programs that target the lowest-performing students.

School-based allocations of the discretionary funding were combined with targeted allocations and other funding to produce this overview of Contracts for Excellence spending by program area:

According to the citywide plan, within the class size reduction program area, $100 million will go to reducing teacher-student ratios through team teaching, while $46 million will go to creation of additional classrooms.  The majority of time on task dollars will go to dedicated instructional time ($42 million) and summer school programs ($31 million), and the majority of teacher and principal quality dollars will go to instructional coaches for teachers ($45 million).

Much more information, including summaries and tables of district and school-level distribution of funds to specific program areas and strategies, and a breakdown of spending by student need category, along with model ELL strategies outlined by the state, can be found on the DOE’s website.

This note on the spreadsheet, coupled with concerns that the tests may have gotten easier, makes you realize just how tricky it is to get a clear picture of how the kids are doing:

As of 2006 the New York State Education Department expanded the ELA and mathematics testing programs to Grades 3-8. Previously, state tests were administered in Grades 4 and 8 and citywide tests were administered in Grades 3,5, 6, and 7. State tests at Grades 3-8 include both multiple-choice and extended response questions. Citywide tests were composed of multiple-choice questions only. As a result of the changes in the testing program, scale score results from 1999 to 2005 cannot be compared with scale scores from 2006 to 2008 because the state changed the scale scores and its corresponding ranges with the introduction of state tests in ELA and math in grades 3-8.

Personally, I’m hoping for some visuals to help bring the numbers to life… (hint, hint).

While the Contracts For Excellence are meant to be spent on specific initiatives that fall into a handful of categories dictated by the state, a great deal of the DOE’s planned expenditures seem to reflect the department’s existing initiatives, such as the Leadership Academy and differentiated pay for teachers. For a critical look at the city’s proposed plan, which must be approved by the state before the $385 million will be awarded, take a look at Leonie Haimson’s “40 reasons why NY state should reject the city’s Contract for Excellence proposal.”

If you can’t make it tonight, the public comment period extends until Aug. 22; email ContractsForExcellence@schools.nyc.gov with your thoughts — and post them in the comments, too!

If Black students did poorly in all schools, we would plausibly seek solutions to the problem of their achievement among those students themselves. The same would be the case if, in schools with majority Black enrollments, Black students did poorly and the other students did well. But in reality, Black students in good schools do well. At the same time, White, non-Hispanic students who attend schools where most of the students are Black and their graduation rates are low, also do poorly. The crisis of the education of Black males sits squarely in the middle of the crisis America faces as we work to create a world-class public education system that will support and maintain the values of a fair and equitable democratic society.

According to the report, in New York State, 39 percent of black male students graduated from high school in 2005-06, compared to 75 percent of white male students, and far more black male students performed at the Below Basic level on all sections of the NAEP tests compared to white male students. Also, as the report points out, on the eighth grade NAEP reading assessment, “virtually none reach the Advanced level.” Furthermore, black males in New York State are about 5 times less likely to be placed in Gifted and Talented programs, and nearly 3 times more likely to be classified as mentally retarded.

To compare districts and states, the Schott Foundation calculated a “Schott Education Inequity Index,” taking into account both the size of the gap and the absolute graduation rate of black males.  According to this index, New York State ranks fifth from the bottom of the fifty states in educating black male students.

Overall,

The worst problems are concentrated in a few large metropolitan areas. Specifically, New York City, Chicago, Detroit, and Dade County fail to graduate the great majority of their Black male students with their peers. Districts such as these, in which Black students are concentrated, tend to have racially segregated schools that are demonstrably inferior educational institutions; very few children do well in these schools.

Reading this report, I immediately thought of the July 20th New York Times Magazine article about class-based integration, The Next Kind of Integration – Class, Race, and Desegregating American Schools.  According to that article, decades of research shows that all children in high-poverty schools perform worse academically, although Ronald Ferguson, of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, warns that racial achievement gaps can persist even in higher-class school districts unless educators make a strong commitment to the best instruction for all.

He stresses that to reap the benefits, poor kids have to be evenly distributed among classrooms and not just grouped together in the lowest tracks. “To the degree a district takes the kids who struggle the most academically and spreads them across different classrooms, they’re making teachers’ work more doable,” he says. “And that may be the biggest effect.”

The article goes on to look at examples of class-based integration across the country.  In Wake County, N.C., class-based integration helped raise black students’ test scores significantly, and with greater effects at older grade levels, apparently bucking the trend of falling-off performance in middle school.  So it seems that class-based integration holds some promise for helping alleviate the problems shown so starkly in the Schott report.

But what about New York City, where, according to the Times article, 74 percent of students are poor and 63 percent are black?  In this and other large urban districts, neither class nor race-based integration may be feasible.  We will have to continue to look for solutions that do not depend on socioeconomic diversity.

(An interesting footnote to the New York State section of the Schott report: “New York State enrollment and diploma data has been reported to the National Center for Education Statistics irregularly and is not considered as reliable as data from other states.”  Worth remembering that we’re still waiting for 2007 graduation rates here in New York State).

I was under the impression that Edison’s free-market glow had dimmed as its schools barely inched up academically, lost enrollment, were plagued by safety issues and high teacher turnover, and ultimately even were taken back over by the district that once saw the company as path out of persistent failure. The Journal mentions the six-school seizure in Philadelphia but attributes it to Democratic myopia, not market forces. Last month, the company announced that it was becoming EdisonLearning, an education technology and data management provider. Looks like the only folks who didn’t get the memo about the end of the Edison era were those penning the Wall Street Journal’s education editorial.

Moore had some progressive values, which she espoused in her reviews:

She could be a tough critic, especially of books that violated her rules: “Books about girls should be as interesting as girls are” or “Avoid those histories that gain dramatic interest by appeal to prejudice. Especially true of American histories.”

But Moore’s taste tended towards the sentimental, while Katharine White favored smartly-written books, hated the idea of “juvenile literature,” and questioned whether teenagers needed books written specifically for their age group when they could understand and appreciate books written for a general adult audience.

The article goes on to narrate Moore’s battle with E.B. White over the value of Stuart Little, which she encouraged him to publish but then panned, at least in part on the basis that children would not be able to handle the blending of reality and fantasy in the tale of a mouse’s adventures in the human world.

Today, when children’s literature is an established, profitable field within publishing, and reading at home is linked to better academic outcomes for children, parents and educators are asking whether reading on-line “counts” as reading. Many children (not to mention adults!) spend hours a day on the internet, and sometimes a fair amount of that time reading and writing, but how does this kind of reading compare to reading literature? Should children be pushed to read books? Does the more interactive nature of the internet promote different kinds of thinking about text? Should schools teach internet literacy in addition to standard literacy classes? Could reading on-line actually help some students – such as those with learning disabilities – engage with ideas? The jury is still out.

test books by menlophoto

From the Washington Post, a glaring example of why it’s so important for educators, parents, and concerned citizens to turn a critical eye on education reporting, especially reporting about test scores:

Today, the paper ran a story about across-the-board improvements in test scores in Maryland’s Anne Arundel County, where reading test scores increased by 4 percentage points, to 86 percent proficient, and math test scores increased by 3 percentage points, to 84 percent proficient. Sounds pretty good, right? School leaders attribute the gains to the fact that they broke down test score data to focus on the particular skills individual students needed to improve and to teachers’ increased cultural sensitivity to how children learn. The Post reporter takes her sources at their words, writing, “Countywide results reflect that effort.”

But there is more to this story, and much of it appeared in the Post last week, in an article about statewide test results and the skepticism with which they have been received. First, Anne Arundel County’s scores may have increased, but they didn’t keep pace with the average gain in Maryland — statewide, reading scores increased by six percentage points, and math scores by four percentage points.

In addition, the Post reported just last weekend that Maryland test was shorter this year than in the past and that the state dropped its practice of drawing some test questions from a national exam. That important information didn’t make it into today’s article. A shorter test could have reduced fatigue that might have inhibited students from performing at their best in previous years. And because the test contained fewer items, the results should be considered less reliable than in past years. Finally, by including only questions devised by Maryland teachers in line with the state’s standards, test makers increased the likelihood that students would be able to answer more questions. Together, these changes could account for much, or even all, of the rise in test scores, but not surprisingly, state education officials are uninterested in examining whether that’s true.

Students in Anne Arundel County — home of the elementary school profiled in Tested, Linda Perlstein’s expert 2007 book about the effects of high-stakes testing on students, classrooms, and schools — might be doing better than they ever have before. But the county’s test scores don’t tell us that, and neither does the Washington Post.

Randi Weingarten

This week and last, bloggers around the web reacted to Randi Weingarten’s AFT President acceptance speech, in which she proposed that schools serving low-income communities integrate medical care, tutoring and homework help, childcare, and recreational programs on-site:

D-ed Reckoning observed that Weingarten has no evidence that the community center approach makes any difference to student achievement, and criticized the idea of expanding the role of the public sector in providing these services. Lindsey at InsideSchools asked what Weingarten’s plan is for creating school-based community centers, and how she’s going to manage being president of both the national and New York City unions.

But perhaps the most interesting discussion of the speech happened at the Fordham Foundation’s Education Gadfly forum. Checker Finn started it all off with this analysis of Weingarten’s speech (and of the “Broader, Bolder” movement):

A growing number of America’s education leaders appear to be abandoning hope for schools that significantly boost student achievement and are instead coming to view schools as multi-service community centers that do everything but teach.

Diane Ravitch reacted to Checker Finn with this powerful statement:

I care as much about academic achievement as Checker or anyone else in the world, but I don’t see any contradiction between caring about academic achievement and caring about children’s health and well-being. Will it help or harm children’s academic achievement–most especially children who are living in poverty–if they have access to good pre-K programs? Will it help or harm children’s academic achievement–most especially the neediest children–if they have access to good medical care, with dental treatment, vision screening, and the like? Will it help or harm children’s academic achievement–the children whose lives are blighted by the burdens of poverty–to have access to high-quality after-school programs?”

To which Randi Weingarten added,

Teachers, by themselves, even without additional support from families or the community, can help kids immensely, especially if they can work one-on-one with students, are well-trained and have access to excellent curriculum materials. But teachers alone can’t get kids all the way to proficiency, when disadvantaged children typically enter school already three years and 30 million words behind.

But Finn still believes that “many of [the Broader, Bolder coalition] really are trying to change the subject, diverting attention away from U.S. schools’ mostly-woeful academic performance while letting schools and educators off the hook for academic results.”

Robert Pondiscio described this back-and-forth as representative of “the great schism.”

Maisie, at Edwize, shared her experience of community schools started by the Children’s Aid Society:

One I visited years ago was a joy to walk into. The dentist was there, with a line of giggling children waiting to see him. Moms who feared to go into most schools were coming in for English classes or to see their child’s teacher. There were fundraising projects going on involving whole families and an atmosphere of health and well-being that was rare for schools in this Dominican community in Washington Heights in the 1990s

It seems to me that, whether through school-based community centers or another approach, it’s past time for the United States to coordinate services for children and families. Address poverty so that children’s achievement improves, or address it because it’s the right thing to do, but address it, already. I’m pleased to see prominent education thinkers pushing for awareness and action on the myriad problems facing families in poverty in America.

The first thing that broke my heart was the pervasiveness of sexual abuse. By about 15 pages in, every single woman and girl in the book up to that point had been sexually abused by a family member, family friend, or acquaintance. One girl was only two years old when she was molested. The psychological toll of abuse is enormous, and when a problem is as widespread as this book suggests that it is, where do you even begin in helping people heal? The legacy of abuse runs through families, as daughters blame their mothers for not protecting them, even as they are often unable to protect their own daughters.

Secondly, at several points in the story, the failure of our social programs to provide meaningful help at the moment when it is most needed becomes crystal clear. For example, Jessica, a young mother, enters a special rehab program while in prison, hoping to shorten her term by a year in return for completing the program. She initially does well in the highly structured environment, and begins to explore and rethink her past while participating in counselling. When the counselling begins to explore her history of sexual abuse, she can’t handle the strong emotions and begins acting out in ways subconsciously calculated to get her kicked out of the program. That is the very moment when true progress might have been made – her anger and self-destructiveness must stem, at least in part, from the abuse, and of course it will be painful for her to revisit that part of her childhood. Yet instead of sticking with her and doubling or tripling the support provided at this crucial moment, the program booted her. Certainly, I understand that programs like this must be very strict, but it still felt like a tragedy.

This article from City Limits about re-engaging youth ages 16-24 who aren’t working or attending school describes exactly the kinds of issues that come up in Random Family. Most of the young people in the book dropped out of school and have little or no work experience, and it is striking the degree to which they are on their own, even when they might be ready to seek support.

The lesson for me is that for programs to make a real difference, they must find ways to hang in there with their clients, through the times of resistance to change and of acting out and of disorganization or irresponsibility. Rules and expectations must be set, but so must an ability to stick with the person, help them through the worst part of the change process, and still be there for them. Where are these programs? How can we create more of them?

I wonder what process the committees will use to consolidate all the opinions they gather through these forums and meetings, and, of course, what voters have to say about national education policy.  I haven’t created an account to participate in either party’s forum, but I wonder whether participants will be able to see and respond to other participants’ postings, as in a blog, bulletin board, or wiki, or whether each participant will simply submit his or her views.  In a face-to-face meeting, enough consensus must be reached to create a position paper (although, of course, varying opinions could be reflected within).  A process (on-line or in person) where citizens are encouraged to explore the issues and think about other citizens’ responses holds more potential for refinement of ideas, sharing of knowledge, and learning by everyone.

This promises to be interesting….