Eva Moskowitz.

Daily News columnist Juan Gonzalez, who has done some seriously good work in the past, this week took his pistol-like investigative skills to the skull of charter school operator and eternal politician Eva Moskowitz — first in a story on the erosion of parent voices in the city schools, and then in a story on Moskowitz’s salary. Gonzalez challenges the salary, which he reports as $371,000 last year (Moskowitz says the real figure is $250,000 plus a $60,000 bonus), suggesting that she should give some of her pay back to her charter schools.

This is hardly the first criticism that’s been thrown at Moskowitz, who previously served as the chair of the City Council’s education committee and ran for borough president of Manhattan, losing to Scott Stringer after the teachers union campaigned against her. As Gonzalez reports, her critics include “educators, parents, the teachers’ union and Harlem political leaders.”

Why’s there so much hate for a woman who has decided to spend her days starting schools for poor and mostly black children in Harlem? There are now many charter school operators in this city. Why focus on Moskowitz? I asked around today and collected three different theories:

1) This theory is the one that’s implicit in Gonzalez’s report: She deserves the scrutiny because she’s not what she claims. She claims that her charter schools are unfairly underfunded by the state — but then she rakes in a big salary herself. She similarly claims to want to improve public education — but then she goes along with a Department of Education plan to move her charter school into an existing public school, effectively allowing the city to go over the heads of parents and, as Gonzalez put it in an another piece this week, “rezone a public school.” (Only about 30 families will be displaced.)

2) The second theory comes by way of a charter school official who asked not to be named because he hadn’t shared his thoughts with Moskowitz. He told me that Moskowitz suffers a style problem. Rather than approaching the district public schools with respect, Moskowitz makes a habit of dismissing their work as unacceptable.

“‘You’re trash,’ is what the message is. ‘You’re trash, and get out of the way, because we know what to do and you don’t,’” the official said. “No person can say that. I don’t think any person has that authority. Especially someone who hasn’t run a successful school for more than a few years.” He said the better method, practiced by several other city charter schools, is to develop relationships of respect and trust, to work together rather than to fight the old system. “Even the KIPP people,who have a much logner track record of success, they speak with a level of humility,” the official said.

3) The third theory is Moskowitz’s own. She acknowledges that she doesn’t work in the same style as other charter school leaders might — but she thinks that’s a good thing. Here’s how she put it to me:

We have to always be respectful of people because being nice is the right thing to do and important, but I think we have a moral obligation to identify schools that are not working for kids, and unfortunately there are a lot of them. If that’s disrespectful – if saying that a school is failing is offensive – I think that we can’t be politically correct and sacrifice children in the process.

The result is that she’s willing and eager to declare schools as failures, and to urge that they be replaced with something new. And the result of that is a powerful challenge to the status quo that she says can mean a high price for her. “Even at considerable personal and professional cost, I’ve never been afraid to raise the bar and to do what I think is right for children and teaching and learning,” she said. “And that’s incredibly threatening.”

In a previous post, I noted that some New York City charter school leaders were surprised at the lack of controls on the administration of the state tests.  Apparently, at charter schools the tests are self-administered, i.e. there are no independent monitors.

This week, I learned another fact that surprised me.  The written sections of the tests (as opposed to the multiple choice sections) sit in boxes at the school for a week before they are sent to be graded.  Apparently, there is an administrative reason for this delay.  Whatever the reason, I can’t imagine it justifying the risk of leaving these tests with the schools for a week.  In recent school visits I have heard more stories about graders observing suspicious test booklets: unusual erasures and corrections, changing handwriting, and sudden gaps in the level of writing.

Improving this situation seems like low-hanging fruit: send independent monitors and have them remove the tests from the school on test day.  What am I missing?

Also Tuesday, Associate Superintendent Ann Clark told the board that 13 more Charlotte-Mecklenburg principals will earn new freedom to run their schools in 2009-10, based on their track record of success with students.

Gorman introduced the “freedom and flexibility” plan last spring, tapping 48 of his most successful veteran principals and two former principals who have moved into other administrative jobs.

Paging Eric Nadelstern…

The study, published in the latest Education Next, was partially funded by one of the companies it examined.

Maybe I fell victim to the blindly trust-Harvard-professors trap when writing about a recent report on for-profit school management in Philadelphia. The report found that for-profit companies like Edison are doing a better job of running the schools than non-profit managers and the regular district, and it led some readers to ask me why New York City doesn’t bring in companies to manage the schools here. (All we have our “support” organizations that are run either by school district employees or by nonprofits.)

But the report should not be seen as the final word on the Philadelphia experiment. Here’s a critique of the research, which was conducted by Paul Peterson (he of Harvard) that’s worth reading as a counter-point. Written by a parent activist who has argued against for-profit school management, the critique argues that Peterson also has a bias, demonstrated by his track record of studies favoring market-based school reforms. More important, the parent activist points to three independent studies that found opposite results — at least one of which inspired Peterson’s effort to look at the numbers again.

Maybe even more important than the other studies is the fact that, if you look into the report a little more closely, as I did this morning, you’ll find that part of its funding comes from one of the for-profit companies it praises: EdisonLearning. Other funds come from the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute for Education Sciences, under the Bush administration’s leadership, presumably, and from two right-leaning foundations, Olin and Bradley.

I spoke to an associate director at the Harvard research center, Antonio Wendland, this morning. He said that he doesn’t think the funds from Edison compromise the center’s research, which doesn’t just appear in the center’s journal, Education Next, but will also be presented at conferences around the country. “Someone has to pay for it,” Wendland said, explaining that the center is financed almost entirely by grants. “I guess you could characterize it as a criticism that we have accepted money from some people who have stake in it, but we’ve been open about it, and no one has said, ‘Oh let me show you the fault in the research.’”

All semester, I told these seniors that I was teaching them to get over. And, while I tried to teach the math and the concepts, I mostly concentrated on test preparation. I sometimes meet some of those students at the community college I work at and feel sad about their lack of preparation. I wonder if they would have been better off spending the extra year in high school, really learning something, and then going on to college. Maybe then their college years would be more successful.

Background on how credit-recovery programs can be abused to award diplomas to students who haven’t earned them is in this New York Times story.

UPDATE: An earlier version of this post incorrectly suggested that students can graduate without passing Regents exams. That’s not possible, even if you do credit recovery, a DOE spokesman, Andy Jacob, just told me. My bad.

“Precise, but irrelevant” is my three-word assessment of the recent study of traditional and alternative teacher certification conducted by Mathematica Policy Research for the Institute of Education Sciences in the U.S. Department of Education.  (And the study really isn’t very precise, but that’s a more technical story.)  The design of this study successfully precludes it from addressing the most salient policy questions about alternative teacher certification–but we get a pretty clean estimate of the relative effectiveness of pairs of traditional-route and alternate-route teachers that are not representative of any population of teacher education programs, teachers, or schools.

The biggest weakness of the study, in skoolboy’s opinion, is that it fails to take seriously the idea that the elements of teacher education programs differ from one another, and that there is variability in the quality of programs–within both the population of traditional teacher certification programs and the population of alternative route teacher certification programs.  The design of the Mathematica study doesn’t evaluate the operations and outcomes of particular traditional or alternative programs.  And yet most of the relevant policy questions pertain to investment in particular programs or the hiring of graduates of particular programs.  The study design cannot address these questions.

Here’s what the Mathematica researchers did:  They compiled a list of 165 alternative teacher certification programs across the country that are not as selective as high-profile programs such as Teach for America, some sponsored by institutions of higher education and others by school districts or regional education agencies, and drew a stratified random sample of 63 programs.  Then they looked for elementary schools that had hired an alternatively-certified teacher from one of these programs within the past three to five years.  They then filtered these schools to the subset that had hired a relative novice traditionally-certified teacher in the same grade, creating a pair of teachers-one traditionally certified, and one alternatively certified, both with less than five years of experience, in the same grade in the same school.  Students in that grade were then randomly assigned either to the traditionally-certified teacher’s classroom or the alternatively-certified teacher’s classroom.  The use of random assignment created what Mathematica refers to as a mini-experiment, which led the researchers to attribute any achievement differences observed at the end of the school year to the effect of having an alternatively-certified vs. traditionally-certified teacher.  The researchers observed each teacher, rating them on classroom instruction practices, and distinguished between alternative-certified teachers from high-coursework programs and those from low-coursework programs.  The resulting study involved 2,600 students in 63 schools in 20 districts, spread across 7 states.  The key conclusion: “The study found no benefit, on average, to student achievement from placing an [alternatively-certified] teacher in the classroom when the alternative was a [traditionally-certified] teacher, but there was no evidence of harm, either.”

Sounds pretty good, right?  No way to address the fact that prospective teachers self-select into traditional or alternative certification programs, of course, but we can’t rely on random assignment to solve that problem, and the researchers acknowledge this, saying, “Because of likely differences in the types of people who attend various certification programs, the results cannot be used to rigorously address how a graduate of one type of program would fare if he or she had attended another type.”  A large, diverse sample … random assignment to control selection into a teacher’s classroom … what’s to complain about? 

How about this:  the alternatively-certified teachers and traditionally-certified teachers in the study were not necessarily representative of graduates of the programs they attended.  In fact, both the alternatively-certified teachers and traditionally-certified teachers in the study were persisters;  any program graduate who had left teaching in the early career–and there are concerns about early attrition within the alternate-route population–would not appear in the sample.  Moreover, the alternative certification programs and traditional certification programs in the study were not necessarily representative of all alternative certification programs and traditional certification programs.  The schools in the study were not necessarily representative of all schools that hire both alternatively-certified and traditionally-certified teachers.  And finally, the skills and competencies appearing on the California Achievement Test (CAT-5) may not be aligned with, and hence representative of, state and district curricular priorities.

Some evidence of the problems that this causes:  One-half of all of the teachers in the study are from a single state, Texas.  71% of all of the classrooms in the study are kindergarten through second grade.  The average number of students per classroom at the start of the year was 15.

So:  if you’re a Texas principal interested in hiring an early elementary grade teacher with a few years of experience into a small classroom based on generic standardized test scores, this is the study for you.  On the other hand, if you are interested in the quality of particular traditional certification programs or alternative certification programs, at either the elementary or secondary levels … or if you are a policymaker wondering whether to increase investment in alternative certification programs … or if you’re a principal wondering whether your next hire should be a traditionally-certified or alternatively-certified teacher … keep looking.  The Mathematica study won’t tell you what you want to know.

Here’s a run-down of some relatively new efforts to keep local school journalism alive in the new media atmosphere:

• In Dayton, editorial writer Scott Elliott has won awards for his Get on the Bus ed blog.
• Kent Fischer of Dallas innovates with his Dallas ISD blog, whose readers helped him dig up big scoops.
• Emily Alpert of the new online-only, donation-funded Voice of San Diego writes great in-depth stories.
• The long-running site about the Philadelphia schools, The Notebook, has started a blog.
• Catalyst Chicago has a blog, and Russo’s Chicago schools blog is going strong. So is Catalyst Ohio.
  
• L.A. Times reporters give regular updates on the schools at a blog called L.A. Now.
• The Journal News, a lower-upstate New York paper, has a Hall Monitor education blog.
• The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has a blog called Get Schooled.
• A live-blog of a superintendent search was the recent topic at The Houston Chronicle’s School Zone.
• A D.C. writer has started a chronicle of school news there.

The new reporting format certainly has its problems. But innovation will be the only way for good journalism about schools to survive, and the only way to keep the new efforts up to par is to keep track of “best practices.” Please keep up the critiques of our coverage, and please send more good local education news sites that I missed. Or lay it all out in the comments.

• Senator Schumer breaks down the city’s education stimulus expectations. (Daily News)
• Juan Gonzalez: Eva Moskowitz makes big bucks running nonprofit charter schools. (Daily News)
• Students at Millennium High School fear they could lose their dance program. (Downtown Express)
• School districts statewide are undergoing a new level of financial scrutiny. (Times)
• Harvey Milk High School, which serves LGBT students and is losing money, gets a gift. (City Room)
• A study says an international test that some want used to evaluate U.S. students is flawed. (USA Today)

75 Morton Street, the subject of a rally last summer, could still become a school. (GothamSchools)

A meeting about overcrowding in Manhattan schools last night ended in surprising fashion: with the Department of Education being lauded for listening to parents.

Parents from one local school, the Clinton School for Writers and Artists, showed up to the meeting of the Community Education Council for District 2 in red, as planned, to protest the idea of their school moving. Hundreds of other parents arrived armed with protest signs and talking points about the need for more school seats in the district, which covers most of Manhattan below 59th Street and the Upper East Side. Advocates have criticized the DOE for understating the extent of crowding in the area.

But the mood relaxed after John White, the DOE official on hand, dispatched with the idea that Clinton would be asked to move. White said the DOE instead would try to ease crowding by finding a new space for Greenwich Village Middle School. That school is eager to move out of its current location on the top floor of the already overcrowded PS 3 building.

One potential site for the school, according to White: part of the state-owned office building at 75 Morton Street that parents and elected officials lobbied mightily last summer for the DOE to obtain. The state ultimately took the building off the market, but it isn’t using the seventh floor. Several elected officials, led by City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, this week asked the DOE to reconsider using the space. White said the DOE is in the process of scheduling a walkthrough, the first step toward determining whether a space can become a public school.

“This is a huge shift,” said Irene Kaufman after the meeting. Kaufman is a founding member of the Public School Parent Advocacy Committee, a District 2-based group that has called for the DOE to address crowding in the district’s schools. She told me she is relieved to see the department acknowledge that moving Greenwich Village Middle School is essential to relieving the neighborhood’s space crunch.

If Morton Street doesn’t pan out, White said Greenwich Village Middle could relocate into one of the new downtown elementary schools, scheduled to come online in 2010 and 2011 with plenty of space to spare. The department would then have to move the middle school again, after the elementary schools expand.

Other space issues are yet to be resolved, including where a new middle school will be housed and what will happen if more children register for two Greenwich Village elementary schools, PS 3 and PS 41, than the schools can accommodate. But several parents said the DOE appears to be on the right track in the area.

“This is good news,” said Robert Ely, a neighborhood parent who has long argued for 75 Morton St. “That’s the bottom line. They’re actually listening.”

The Department of Education created videos to explain the reports. View them here.

The Department of Education is moving to extend a program that judges teachers based on their students’ test scores — and it plans to start paying for the project with taxpayer dollars, at a projected cost of $1.5 million over the next three years. A formal request for vendor proposals released today indicates officials are also mulling an expansion of the program to more teachers.

The program, called the Teacher Data Initiative, launched quietly this school year after causing a politically explosive fight between the DOE and the teachers union the year before. The reports allow principals to track the “value” teachers add to students by looking at student test scores from one year to the next. The teachers union here has gone along with programs to judge entire schools based on test scores, but it drew the line at measuring individual teachers’ performance, arguing that so-called “value-added” models risk unfairly misjudging teachers. (Many academic researchers make this claim as well.)

After news of the effort surfaced, the union fought back by ushering a bill into state law that made it illegal for the city to use test scores when making decisions about job security. Both Mayor Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein decried the bill (Bloomberg called it a “special interest protection”), which the legislature passed with no public debate, and the data reports went out as planned.

About 12,000 teachers received the reports this year, all of whom who teach fourth-through-eighth-graders and either English or math (the most-tested subjects in the city). The reports grade teachers based on how much progress their students made on tests last year and give extra credit to those who made progress despite limitations such as students’ race, poverty, and class size.

I’ve spoken to some educators who think the reports are a great first step toward helping teachers think carefully about how to improve their work. The executive director of Teaching Matters, Lynette Guastaferro, called New York “a thought leader” for creating the reports. Others have been wary, including a teacher who wrote about his experience anonymously at the union activist Norm Scott’s blog, reporting that his principal is threatening to use the reports to determine which teachers remain at the school when it phases out. (Asked about the teacher’s allegations, Forte said she hadn’t heard of them but that the city has clarified procedures for teachers to follow if reports are misused.)

The Carnegie Foundation has been financing the reports so far this year, but the grant is about to run out, so the DOE issued a request today seeking a vendor that would keep up the work on the taxpayer dime. The vendor would publish the reports and manage any future expansions. You can see the full Request for Proposals below.

A technology company called the Battelle Memorial Institute has been working on the project until now, Ann Forte, a school spokeswoman, said.

Read the full RFP (which an earlier version of this post said was not available, but now is):

A SurveyQuest comparison of two Bronx high schools.

Out of all the criticisms that have been hurled at the Department of Education’s accountability regime, there’s one that I don’t think even the DOE would dispute: The reports that explain every school’s grade, review, and survey results are too hard to find.

To fetch these documents, a parent or principal or poor old reporter must first traverse a maze of Web links. Then she must risk possible system crash to open the PDF documents that house the reports. And please do not consider comparing two different schools’ grades or even one school’s grade over two different years. Before you know it you will have too many windows open and think about something else, like maybe a cookie.

This week, officials made a move to change that, launching a new online tool called SurveyQuest that allows users to sift through the results of surveys given to parents, teachers, and students at every school. SurveyQuest also offers a tool that allows users to compare two different schools.

The idea, according to spokesman Andrew Jacob, is to give principals a way to find schools that might help them improve. Say, for instance, your school scored poorly on the communications portion of the survey. You can search for a school with a high score and call that principal for advice.

Jacob says the tool is also meant to help parents and students find a good school for them. The big book of high schools can make it hard to compare schools’ results, but SurveyQuest, Jacob said, is a way for a parent to place the opinions of families at two different schools side-by-side, instantaneously. Eventually, the tool could expand to include information from the progress reports and quality reviews, too, Jacob said.

There could definitely be a big Achilles heel here, though, which is the quality of the survey information. The surveys, called Learning Environment Surveys, are the Bloomberg administration’s new way to pry information from, ideally, every single teacher, parent, and student in the city. The surveys ask a battery of questions about a school, from the quality of its art projects to how high it sets academic expectations. The results make up a small part of a school’s progress report grade, so that if many parents and students are unhappy, the school loses points.

But some critics have challenged the surveys’ validity. If survey results could cause a school to get an F or even get shut down, why, they ask, would parents and teachers feel comfortable answering the questions honestly? Indeed, the New York Post reported last year that a set of about 60 principals were advised last year to steer the surveys away from “toxic” people who might judge the school poorly. Others have accused the surveys of asking an incomplete set of questions. Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum has dismissed the survey results as pure p.r.

But the DOE has maintained its faith in the survey results. And in a new paper, the economist Jonah Rockoff at Columbia, who is studying the Bloomberg administration’s school accountability measures, finds evidence that the results are probably accurate, at least among parents.

That depends on how testing is defined, Ballen answered. “There’s a really big difference between test prep and getting information from assessments,” he told me. Where tests, and test prep, are meant to judge students and teachers, assessments are used to generate information that teachers can use to improve their instruction, Ballen said. Explore prefers assessments.

So how are Explore students assessed, and how often? In a variety of ways, and every day. Here’s a summary of the school’s testing regimen:

• Students complete tests and assignments that their teachers create on a daily basis.
• They also take interim assessments several times during the year to give their teachers information about their progress in math, science, and social studies. These tests are created by Explore’s teachers.
• Explore holds practice runs for both the math and ELA state tests to simulate the testing conditions for those tests.
• Teachers work with each student one-on-one at least three times a year to check his or her reading skills. The number jumps to eight times for children in kindergarten and first grade.
• Of course, Explore students take all required annual state tests.
• Because administrators aren’t sure the state tests are rigorous enough, the school also gives something called the Terra Nova assessment once a year to see how Explore’s students stack up against other students nationally.

Does all of this testing cause students any anxiety? “I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t” fear, Ballen told me. But he said students were quick to support the school’s recent decision to set their performance goal at 100 percent proficient on the state tests. “The adults were so much more scared about this than the kids,” he said.

As a charter school, Explore could face steep consequences if it doesn’t post high test scores. “Those tests keep us in business,” Ballen said. At the same time, he said, Explore’s charter status makes it able to take steps that prevent test anxiety from mounting as the big state tests approach, such as redeploying teachers’ time and energy based on students’ scores on interim assessments. “We can do that within a day, and we can hire people who are excited about that proposition,” Ballen said.

Another important feature of testing at Explore is the school’s focus on getting students and parents to understand the need for frequent assessments, Ballen said. About Stephanie Campbell, the mother I interviewed last week, he said, “She did not know what her kid knew and didn’t know until he was in second grade and came to Explore. That’s scary!”

This Daily Hornet flier was passed out at a recent District 2 parent meeting.

A West Village father is promoting a new web site he says will help working parents transport their thoughts on the public school system to elected officials. Eric Zerof says he built the site, called the Daily Hornet, after repeatedly finding himself with opinions to share, but no time to voice them at public hearings.

The site, promoted at a District 2 parents meeting last night, promises “Direct Democracy in Action,” and it focuses on topics close to Zerof’s heart. His wife, Ann Kjellberg, is closely aligned with Class Size Matters, and in turn one of the first issues the site is taking up is school crowding. The site’s goal is to collect parent opinions through surveys, and then send the survey results to city and state lawmakers.

“A lot of people I talk to are frustrated by the process, but they’re also very busy parents who don’t necessarily have time to [attend] all these meetings,” Zerof told me after he launched the site earlier this month. “So I’m trying to make it so that they don’t have to go to all these meetings to be heard, but can just go on the site.”

One note: The Daily Hornet links to GothamSchools reports, but we’re unaffiliated.

I’ve seen parents literally praying at charter school lotteries.  What do these parents think about debates on “creaming”?  I think they would be perturbed by arguments that they are leaving behind the children with the least active parents, especially when those arguments come from people that would never let their own kids set foot in the schools in which some inner-city children are expected to remain.

The simplest and perhaps best argument for increasing the number of charter schools in New York City is that the parents, the ones whose voices we should be most concerned about, want more of them.

It might not have, but testing for the purpose of tailoring instruction to students’ needs is not a new innovation. In 1936, the New York Times ran an excited report about a conference where experts said that testing had been refined to the point where educators would be able to “determine accurately the studies that will fit the student’s particular needs and capacities.”

In some ways, the tests described at that 1936 conference, which took place at Columbia, are very different from those under debate right now: The wayback tests were meant to decide whether students should go on to college or to a trade. The point of the tests being debated in the comments section on GothamSchools and elsewhere is not to sort, but to avoid sorting by ensuring that all students can meet the same standards.

One similarity stands out, though: The Columbia experts said their post-war tests were so sophisticated that they “outstripped the ability of teachers to use them.” That’s a complaint I’ve heard from 21st century teachers, who say they spend so much time generating data about their students that they have too little time to determine how best to use the new information.