Post a comment about the budget cuts at your school on our interactive comment map. more »
GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools
skoolboy
April 3, 2009
In honor of the Educational Equality Project conference this week—you remember the Educational Equality Project, don’t you? The unholy alliance between Rev. Al Sharpton and Chancellor Joel Klein, funded by a $500,000 tax-deductible gift from former Chancellor Harold Levy’s Connecticut-based hedge fund to Sharpton’s National Action Network that was laundered through Education Reform Now, a non-profit linked to Education Reform Now Advocacy Inc. (a lobbying group), and Democrats for Education Reform (a political action committee)? Throw in how the gift helped to offset Sharpton’s personal and organizational IRS tax woes—a $1 million settlement last July—and Levy’s lobbying City Hall on a range of horseracing initiatives worth hundreds of millions to his company and its partners, and you have the making of a John Grisham novel. All that’s missing is a few hookers.
The Educational Equality Project, which has garnered signatories from a large number of prominent politicians and education leaders, recently launched its website. At the top of the page is a rotating list of “facts,” backed by a list of “all the facts,” with links to references that presumably document or support the facts. skoolboy decided to fact-check some of the facts. Are they fact or fiction?
Barely half of African-American and Latino students graduate from high school, while nearly 80% of white students do.
Toss-Up: These figures are accurate if we limit consideration to on-time graduation rates. Chris Swanson of Editorial Projects in Education reports a Cumulative Promotion Index, an estimate of the four-year graduation rate, of 58% for Hispanics and 55% for African-Americans in the class of 2005. These rates would likely increase if we extended the possible time to completion to five or six years.
A black male is more likely to be in prison than to have a post-graduate degree; one in nine black men between 20-34 are incarcerated.
Fact: According to the 2006 American Community Survey, 492,000 Black men aged 25 or older held a graduate degree. This is fewer than the 634,000 Black men aged 25 or older who are incarcerated. The Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that about 11% of non-Hispanic Black male U.S. residents were in state or federal prisons or local jails in mid-year 2006.
Four years in a row with a top-quartile teacher is enough to close the Black-white test score gap.
Fiction: No study has ever shown this. The obvious citation is the Gordon, Kane and Staiger Brookings report, which suggests that this would be the case if results cumulate. But the statement here is what happens when people get sloppy. What Gordon, Kane and Staiger actually said was that four years in a row with a top-quartile teacher versus four years in a row with a bottom-quartile teacher could close the Black-white test score gap. That second part is pretty important, because the odds of any student having a bottom-quartile teacher four years in a row are pretty slender. But, as eduwonkette and I have argued elsewhere, Brian Jacob has shown that the effects of exposure to an effective teacher decline sharply over time, so there is no evidence that this claim could be true.
White students in the 12th grade are, on average, four years ahead of their African American peers.
Fiction: The original sourcing of this claim appears to be the Thernstrom and Thernstrom book No Excuses, which compared the scores of eighth-graders and 12th-graders on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Elizabeth Green quoted an NCES official on why such comparisons are inappropriate. Even though NAEP uses a common proficiency scale for fourth, eighth, and 12th grade reading and mathematics, the underlying skills being assessed in eighth grade and 12th grade are sufficiently different that a given score does not represent the same competencies in both grades.
Third grade reading scores are used by Arizona, California, and New Mexico as a factor to estimate the future need of prison beds.
Fiction: The source provided for this is an op-ed piece written by an advocate that appeared in the New Mexico Sun News in 2007. “We should also know that children—our children are being targeted—third grade reading scores are one of the components tallied in the projected need for prison beds,” wrote Tilda Sosaya. But I have found no evidence of the use of third-grade test scores in projections for prison populations in any of the models currently in use, and it’s really hard to imagine how third-grade test scores could possibly be useful for this purpose.
The reading skills gap between white 17 year-olds and 17 year-olds of color is wider now than it was in 1990.
Fiction: Data from both the long-term trend National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and the main NAEP show that the reading gap between white and racial/ethnic minority youth is not wider today than it was in 1990.
2004 graduation rates for Black boys: 21% in Indianapolis, 31% in Detroit, and 35% in Atlanta.
Toss-Up: I can’t verify the 2004 data, which come from the Schott Foundation. The state of Michigan reported an on-time graduation rate of 48% for Black males for the 2007 cohort of graduates. Georgia reported a 67% graduation rate for Black students (male and female combined) in Atlanta in 2007.
So what’s the point? The achievement gap is no joke: racial and ethnic differences in educational outcomes have real consequences for individuals’ lives. But there’s little to be gained by misrepresenting the facts about the achievement gap. Signing on to a half-baked set of claims about the facts undermines the seriousness of purpose that I am sure characterizes most of the Educational Equality Project’s board, staff and signatories. This part of the act shouldn’t be hard to clean up.
-
April 3rd, 2009 8:09 am
It is very good to see people checking facts related to educational achievement here in the US. We have done far too little of that over the past 40 years. Here in Dallas we had paid school district staff speaking in public as recently as 2006 about “dropout rates” below 2%. The strange source of their numbers is not the issue. The issue is that the CPI real rate has not been above 50% for our Cumulative Promotion Index in the past 11 years except once in 2004-2005. In 2005-2006 it then fell over 10 points!
Bottom line is we must do something differently. We are doing it with a spreading project to focus students onto their own futures in a simple, credible manner that is popular: a 10-year time-capsule and 8th grade class reunion project. This $2 per student project appears to be helping cut the 9th to 10th grade attrition rate by over 26%. See details at http://www.studentmotivation.org. -
April 3rd, 2009 2:52 pm
I would be happy to discuss the Schott data if you are interested.
-
April 5th, 2009 12:53 pm
[...] Schools’ Aaron Pallas fact checks the Education Equality Project and they come out short. [...]
-
April 5th, 2009 7:55 pm
Dear Mr. Pallas,
To follow-up, you say that in regard to the Schott data, for which I am responsible, “The state of Michigan reported an on-time graduation rate of 48% for Black males for the 2007 cohort of graduates.” The Schott data is for Detroit, not Michigan, for 2004, not 2007. Similarly, you state that “Georgia reported a 67% graduation rate for Black students (male and female combined) in Atlanta in 2007.” Combining male and female rates is not good practice, as there are wide differences between them; 2007 data is not 2004 data, and you do not give the basis for the state of Georgia’s graduation rate calculations, which are not necessarily the four year cohort rates used by Schott. You do not comment on Indianapolis. All the Schott data is based on NCES publicly available statistics and easily verified.
This does not affect your main point, but it is good to be careful in these matters.
Sincerely,
Michael Holzman
-
April 5th, 2009 8:54 pm
Michael,
I apologize if it appeared that I was questioning the data in the Schott Foundation report. I simply couldn’t verify the data based on what was stated in the report. The report stated that “Diploma
statistics are from districts or state departments of education, or estimated as indicated in the notes to the
tables.” I couldn’t find district or state reports on diploma statistics specifically for Black males. With a bit more digging, I think the report was relying on the 2003-04 Common Core of Data LEA Universe Survey, which does report counts of non-Hispanic Black male diploma recipients.
The more recent data on Detroit, reported by the state of Michigan, and Atlanta (which, as you note, combines males and females when there is reason to believe that completion rates are much lower for males) suggest that the high school completion rates may have risen since 2003-04. I’ll look forward to your next report to see if that’s the case. -
June 2nd, 2009 11:43 am
Please note that there is in fact strong evidence that elementary school reading scores are used to predict the future need for prisons.
“Based on this year’s fourth-grade reading scores,” observes Paul Schwartz, a Coalition principal in residence at the U. S. Department of Education, “California is already planning the number of new prison cells it will need in the next century.”
http://www.essentialschools.org/cs/resources/view/ces_res/114 Before you attack an organization fighting to close the achievement gap, such as the Education Equality Project, (a cause I think we can all agree is critical) please check your facts.
-
June 2nd, 2009 12:49 pm
Anon, that’s not evidence; that’s a quote giving secondhand information, with no backup, data or detail whatsoever.
-
June 2nd, 2009 1:28 pm
Incarceration rates for Hispanics and White non-Hispanics coordinate with education levels. Incarceration rates for Black, non-Hispanics are much higher and do not coordinate with education levels. They are an artifact of drug arrests, which, given fairly equal drug usage rates among race/ethnicities, are an artifact of disparate police enforcement policies and court practices. Statistic on this are available from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the CDC and Human Rights Watch.
-
January 12th, 2010 2:44 pm
Dear Ellin Winn,
Can we stop the bull crap and the time waisting. Here sits a parent who has exposed whats really at work in the RACIST NY SCHOOLS. You see, you say that we as parents are not coming to the meetings. You can’t say that we don’t discuss school on a day to day basis with our children. You cannot say that our children are low achievers in fact they are high achievers. We beg to volunteer in the school when you can’t get passed the front door. In this county (orange) BLACK AND LATINO parents are stopped at the door. Not even invited to celebrate our childrens birthdays with them in the classroom. In this school our son who is perfectly behaved, who never misses a homework, who is never late for school has to fight for every grade. His teachers ”lose” his homework bringing his grades down. Apparently to keep him from competing with the kids they want in the top. Otherwise there is no excuse. Lets not forget that there are no sports opportunities for him here and they kept him off JV basketball when he is a natural born athlete. This year when he was ready they kept the basketball sign up day deadline a COMPLETE secret. He never knew when the day came. Oh did I mention he one of 2 Black kida in the school? IF YOU WANT CHANGE LET ME AND THESE KIDS SPEAK!
Leave a Reply
Mapping the Budget Cuts
9 Comments
Subscribe to comments with RSS or TrackBack