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January 20, 2009
School support organizations will be graded, too — and publicly
The organizations that schools can choose to affiliate with for bureaucratic support, like New Visions for Public Schools, the Knowledge Network, and the Empowerment network, are being graded this month for their effectiveness. The Department of Education’s accountability office is writing the grades of the “school support organizations,” and Chief Schools Officer Eric Nadelstern said the outcome will eventually be made public.
“It will definitely be public before schools have to make the selection as to which SSO they want to affiliate with next year, so that parents and teachers and principals can make that decision on the basis of all sorts of factors,” Nadelstern said yesterday.
The school support organizations were created last year as part of an overhaul of the school system’s bureaucracy. Rather than being forced to report to the superintendent in their neighborhood, schools can shop around among a set of support organizations to decide which bureaucracy they prefer.
This is the first year that the support organizations will be graded, since they’ve now amassed a year’s worth of a track record in student test scores. Nadelstern said that the accountability office, headed up by Columbia law professor Jim Liebman, is basing its grades on both schools’ progress report cards and on their quality reviews, written reports about schools based on in-person interviews and observations.
The report cards have come under heavy criticism for being statistically problematic, if not meaningless. Researchers say a major reason to be cautious about trusting the report cards is that they draw on just one year of student test scores, which carry large margins of error. That’s not to mention the fact that the tests themselves are not robust enough to use for these kinds of comparisons, or that the things officials are comparing — proficiency scores — don’t make statistical sense to compare, or the problem of so much measurement “noise” that the report card grades from one year to the next are almost as good as random.
Nadelstern, who recently took over the responsibility of overseeing all support organizations, said that he does not plan to shut down any organizations based on their evaluations. “Once we publish what the results are, if there are schools that wish to affiliate, we don’t want to be in a position where we’re telling princpals you can’t,” Nadelstern said. “We just want them to make an informed decision.”
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January 20th, 2009 10:54 pm
This “accountability” process gets sillier with each new announcement. Shouldn’t the fact that these grades will be thoroughly unscientific give at least a moment’s pause to these crazies at the DOE? It’s funny to see lawyers trying to develop a process that they would never use in their own profession in order to force it on a profession they know nothing about. Could you imagine them coming up with grades for law firms and then recommending that corporations choose their counsel based on the grade? If principals want to know which organization to choose they can pick up the phone, ask around, and find out who’s good. Just like they do in the legal world.
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January 21st, 2009 7:27 am
This is the oddest thing I have read or heard in a while. “Nadelstern, who recently took over the responsibility of overseeing all support organizations, said that he does not plan to shut down any organizations based on their evaluations. “Once we publish what the results are, if there are schools that wish to affiliate, we don’t want to be in a position where we’re telling princpals you can’t,” Nadelstern said. “We just want them to make an informed decision.”
If you evaluate the support organization and it is not up to snuff, wouldn’t you either fix it or end it? If we evaluate schools and close them based on a poor or failing evaluation, if we evaluate students and pass or fail them based on the evaluations, if we evaluate teachers and rate them as satisfactory or not, if we evaluate politicians and decide about how we will vote on their record, why wouldn’t we act in the same manner with support organizations?
Weird. -
January 21st, 2009 5:44 pm
School support organizations? HAH! They have No Vision because of their Lack of Knowledge and are Empowering nothing but their own coffers. Could someone please explain what these organizations actually do?
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