GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• Patrick Sullivan offers a round-up of what happened at Monday’s PEP meeting.
• Obama’s proposed FY2010 budget funds pre-K, charter schools, and college graduation programs.
  
• Dana Goldstein thinks the budget also offers more evidence Obama is tilting towards national standards.
• Possible supporting reason: So are governors, an important constituency to win on that question.
• Will Richardson agrees with concerns with Arne Duncan. Debbie Meier ramps up her rhetoric.
• Speaking of people with concerns, a Broader Bolder meeting happened in D.C. today.
• And: Diane Ravitch suggested the feds punish districts that try to improve schools by shutting them down.
• A chorus of voices ask the Obama administration to preserve the D.C. voucher program.

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. (more…)

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. (more…)

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. (more…)

I recently reported about one mother’s high marks for the amount of testing at her son’s school, Explore Charter School in Brooklyn. Today I asked Morty Ballen, Explore’s founding principal, exactly how often Explore students are tested.

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. (more…)

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.

• The Bronx High School of Science is concerned about toxic fumes from a nearby project. (Riverdale Press)
• Errol Louis says the DOE is listening to parents by letting lots of charter schools open. (Daily News)
• A New Jersey town is trying to entice Jews to the public schools with a Hebrew program. (Times)
• Obama’s outline of education goals don’t include plans to reach them. (Wall Street Journal)
• High school debaters take on No Child Left Behind. (NPR)
• Schools say private fundraising can’t make all the difference when there are budget cuts. (Times)

Today, GothamSchools reported on new poll results released by Quinnipiac: “Nearly three-quarters of parent voters want more charter schools”.  These results are not surprising given the parental demand for charter schools in the annual lotteries.  No one seems to track lottery statistics in a detailed manner, but, in my experience, the better charter schools are usually oversubscribed by between two and ten times.

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.

• A Brookings study (PDF) ranks urban schools and puts NYC at No. 7. Via Kent in Dallas (which was 2).
• Tom Toch reports that Arne Duncan picked Jon Schnur, our fave poster boy, as his chief of staff.
• Kevin Carey offers a good roundup of recent answers to the “What are 21st century skills?” question.
• The principal at the South Carolina school Obama mentioned last night tells NPR he needs a new building.
• George W. Bush visited a school today. “Do you know who I am?” “George Washington!” was the reply.
• Teachers unions were disappointed by a court ruling yesterday banning them from political donations.
• Joanne Jacobs points out that education was the third challenge Obama listed last night.

I recently wrote about a Flatbush mom who likes the fact that her son’s charter school frequently tests him so they can find out how to target his instruction. She said her son’s old school didn’t do this.

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.