Eva Moskowitz and Randi Weingarten will debate tonight on NY1′s evening news talk show. (GothamSchools‘ Flickr.)

There’s plenty more I’d like to write about today, but right now I am going to pop some popcorn and settle in for the big fight: NY1′s televised debate between Harlem charter school operator Eva Moskowitz and United Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten.

The debate between the two controversial women is set to broadcast live on Dominic Carter’s “Road to City Hall” show, which starts at 7 p.m. It will air again tonight at 10 p.m. You can also listen online at the same times using NY1′s audio stream.

Are you tuning in? Post your reactions in the comments section.

Today, after reading comments defending the KIPP charter schools, Noguera clarified his objection in an e-mail to GothamSchools:

I support KIPP, Achieve[ment] First and any school — charter, private or traditional public — that serves children, especially poor children well. However, I reject the notion that there’s one way to educate poor kids or the idea put forward by David Whitman that you must treat their culture as a problem. I also reject the idea that schools should focus narrowly on achievement and ignore the other needs — social, emotional, etc. PS 28 does it all with a high-need population and even though children do not walk the halls in silence they still receive a good education. 

In his 2008 book, “Sweating the Small Stuff,” David Whitman lauded what he termed “the new paternalism” in urban education: The trend of highly structured schools, such as the KIPP charter schools, teaching not only academic content but a way of behaving that Whitman says represents “traditional, middle-class values.”

In their latest skirmish, the department and the historian have each issued memos refuting the other’s claims about how well the city schools are performing. The DOE’s memo went out by e-mail to all principals; Ravitch’s appears for the first time in this post.

The newest dustup stems from an op/ed Ravitch wrote for the New York Times earlier this month, in which she argued that data show the DOE is incorrect to say schools have improved significantly since Mayor Bloomberg took control of them.

Schools Chancellor Joel Klein immediately fired back against Ravitch in a letter to the editor. But apparently some principals needed more convincing, because Klein wrote in a recent Principals Weekly newsletter that he had heard from “a number” of them with questions about whether Ravitch’s op/ed was accurate. To answer the principals’ questions, Klein said he asked Jennifer Bell-Ellwanger, a senior DOE official who oversees testing, to fact-check Ravitch’s claims. Bell-Ellwanger produced an 8-page memo, dated April 28, rebutting Ravitch point by point. Klein linked to the memo in his most recent e-mail newsletter to principals; I’ve also posted it in full below the jump.

After I shared Bell-Ellwanger’s memo with her, Ravitch composed a long response of her own, noting that her Times op/ed was thoroughly vetted before publication. “The editor at the Times required documentation for every single fact in the article, and I supplied it,” she writes in her response, which I’ve posted just after Bell-Ellwanger’s memo below.

In 2007, Elizabeth reported that the DOE was maintaining a dossier about Ravitch, which it supplied to Kathryn Wylde, the leader of a major city nonprofit organization. Wylde used the information contained in the dossier to write a withering takedown of Ravitch in the New York Post. Ravitch responded then, too, with a Post column of her own. People from across the political spectrum decried the DOE-supported attack against Ravitch, according to a roundup of blog entries posted at the time on the NYC Public School Parents blog.

Jennifer Bell-Elwanger on Diane Ravitch op/ed

Diane Ravitch Response to Jennifer Bell-Elwanger

Six years after Schools Chancellor Joel Klein vowed to crack down on a bureaucratic loophole that allowed principals to hide students’ failure to graduate high school, a new report (PDF) suggests that the loophole remains open and may be growing wider. The report calls for closer study of the students classified as “discharges” — departures from the system, but not dropouts — through steps including a state audit.

The report says that 21 percent of students who entered high school in 2003 both never graduated and were never counted as dropouts, instead falling into a category known as “discharges.” The percentage was up from 17.5 percent among the Class of 2000. The rate is especially high among special education students, and includes a remarkable jump in 2005, when the special education discharge rate shot up to 36 percent from 23 percent in a single year.

Students classified as discharges can include those who left the school system for legitimate reasons, such as moving to another state, deciding to enroll in an outside G.E.D. program, or death. But some advocates have argued that principals can also misuse the discharge code, entering students who simply dropped out in order to inflate their graduation rate artificially.

A recent audit of 12 high schools in New York State by the state comptroller, Thomas DiNapoli, found that high schools classified students as G.E.D. discharges who did not actually enroll in a G.E.D. program. “As a result,” DiNapoli’s audit concluded, “the report cards understated the number and percentage of dropouts and overstated the percentage of graduates for some of the schools we reviewed.” The audit did not probe any New York City high schools.

Two persistent critics of the Bloomberg administration compiled the report: the executive director of Class Size Matters, Leonie Haimson, and a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University, Jennifer Jennings. Jennings was the author of the now-defunct Eduwonkette blog, whose analysis of New York City education data became (as I reported) a thorn in the Bloomberg administration’s side. The report is being released at a press conference this morning held by a third critic, the city’s public advocate, Betsy Gotbaum.

City school officials were already disputing the report’s claims yesterday, before it had been released. About 90 percent of high school discharges are for students who are enrolling at a private school or moving out of the city, DOE spokesman Andrew Jacob said. The financial firm Ernst & Young includes in its annual audit of the city’s graduation numbers an examination of whether schools properly documented that students enrolled where they said they would, Jacob added. And he said that the slightly higher number of discharges in 2007 represents a fluctuation, not a trend, with the DOE’s internal numbers indicating that the number of discharges dropped in 2008.

In an interview last night that was embargoed until the formal release of the report today, Jennings, the report’s lead author, said that the report is part of her dissertation, which looks at the effects of accountability policies. She said that the report should not be seen as a critique of the Bloomberg administration. Rather, she theorized that the federal No Child Left Behind law might have given principals an incentive to use the “discharge” code to inflate their graduation rates artificially.

One highlighted point in the report is a sharp rise in the percentage of first-year high school students who are discharged. Jennings speculated that the rise could be a result of a policy in NCLB that exempts principals from being held accountable for students who have not been at a school for more than five months.

She said the report’s main purpose is to call attention to students who may be being overlooked — and to urge policymakers to study who they are and why they are leaving. “It’s a problem that hasn’t been solved,” Jennings said. “But for the benefit of the 20,000 or some kids who are discharged every year, it’d be great to know.”

There’s tons more information in this report; we’ll pull out other interesting parts as we find them.

Test results from Harlem's KIPP STAR College Prep Charter School, where students on average outperformed their district but not always the state. Graph from 2008 KIPP annual report.

Critics of KIPP charter schools have accused the national charter school chain of being opaque about how much money it spends and what kinds of students it serves. But KIPP says it’s committed to transparency, and so every year it releases a comprehensive report about its fundraising and planning efforts, and about how each of its schools is performing. The report about 2008 just went online today.

The report covers some familiar data points about how students at the city’s four KIPP schools are outperforming students at other schools in their districts on state tests. But it also includes the less often publicized fact that not all KIPP schools in New York always beat state test averages.

And while KIPP’s New York City schools have recently been at the center of a renewed battle over teachers unions in charter schools, the report card doesn’t get into politics, instead providing an overview of KIPP’s plans for growth and profiles of each of the organization’s 66 schools across the country. The profiles include pictures of each school leader, the demographic breakdown of students, per-pupil funding figures, and state reading and math test results. The section about the city’s KIPP schools begins on page 84.

Also of interest, particularly if you’ve been following along with Ken Hirsh’s hunt for financial information about charter schools, is the list of foundations and individuals that gave to KIPP during the 2007-2008 school year, broken down by gift size. You can find that at the very end of the report.

Benjamin’s copy of the report, which recommends that lawmakers place substantial checks on mayoral control when the school governance structure expires June 30, is easier to read than the one I just trashed. But the version I was working with looked about as muddled as debate over the report has been since it was first revealed in the Post yesterday. At issue is whose opinions the report contains and whether the report was meant to be released this week at all.

Gail Robinson at the Gotham Gazette wrote yesterday that her copy of the leaked report didn’t indicate anywhere that it was a draft version. But City Hall, which condemned the recommendations, told the Post that it considered the report to be in draft form, and Senate Majority Leader Malcolm Smith’s office said the report doesn’t reflect his position on mayoral control. Later yesterday, Dilan, one of the two chairs of the school governance task force convened by Smith, issued a statement saying that the leaked report represented only his own opinions, not those of his fellow committee members. 

This afternoon, I called the office of State Sen. Shirley Huntley, the task force’s other chair, to find out how her position compared to Dilan’s. A spokeswoman who works in Smith’s office, Selvena Brooks, returned my call on Huntley’s behalf. “The task force is still convening hearings,” Brooks told me. “She feels it’s a bit premature to make recommendations.”

At least one more public hearing is scheduled for this spring, Brooks told me. I’ll add it to the GothamSchools calendar as soon as I can confirm the date and location.

Draft Report- Task Force on New York City School Governance[1]

A City Council source told Liz yesterday that the executive budget proposal Mayor Bloomberg is scheduled to reveal on Friday is likely to contain substantial school budget cuts.

But a DOE spokeswoman said the budget situation remains “fluid,” making a briefing for principals today impractical. “We’re just waiting until we have a better sense of what the actual numbers look like,” said Ann Forte of the DOE. She said the event would be rescheduled, but no time has yet been set and it is unlikely that the DOE will be able to brief principals before Bloomberg is scheduled to present his budget on Friday.

Right now, the DOE is frantically reaching out to principals to let them know that they shouldn’t come to Manhattan’s Norman Thomas High School later this afternoon after all. Forte said the department is contacting principals by phone and e-mail, and network leaders from external school support organizations are also trying to spread the word about the cancellation.

Pedro Noguera and Joel Klein appeared at a panel together last month about the achievement gap, sponsored by Channel 13. (GothamSchools)

Pedro Noguera, the NYU professor and all-around authority on urban schools, had lunch with Chancellor Joel Klein the other day. The two aren’t natural candidates for a lunch date: Noguera is a co-founder of the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education, a national effort to rival Klein’s Education Equality Project. But they had recently spoken on a panel together and found that they agreed about a lot. So they decided to have lunch.

There, Noguera urged Klein to visit an elementary school in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, PS 28, which Noguera said epitomized his thoughts on what makes a strong urban school. Noguera said that its extended school day (some children stay until 5:45 p.m.), social services, professional development for teachers, and focus on emotional as well as academic growth have helped it become an impressive school, despite being challenged by serving a large number of homeless students.

Klein visited the school “the very next day,” Noguera told me in a telephone interview. It made an impression on him, too, and soon he wrote a memo to all principals in the city urging them to visit PS 28 (The memo was included in the April 7 Principals’ Weekly newsletter, and is reproduced below.)

But Noguera told me on the telephone that he was struck by what Klein’s memo emphasized about the school — and what it did not say. Namely, Klein talked about the importance of a strong principal and of analyzing students’ test scores, but not about addressing children’s non-academic needs, the focus of the other programs Noguera admired.

Here’s what Klein wrote to principals:

I met a leader, Sadie Silver, and a school community that is committed to showing that all children can learn at high levels. Teachers at the school use ARIS to access student demographic and assessment information whenever they need it. They also know how to use that data effectively – one of the core pillars of Children First.

The school has engaged parents and its surrounding community to an unusual extent. For example, it uses reports from ARIS to provide parents with information about their students’ progress. The principal has also created a blog on ARIS Connect to share insights on new learning to motivate the entire school community.

“He focused on the wrong thing!” Noguera told me on the telephone. “I told him to look at the full picture, all of the things that they were doing. I sat in on a session that was how teachers can respond to the social-emotional needs of kids. A lot of people are stuck on this idea that there’s only one way to go about educating urban kids: It’s the KIPP way, it’s very regimented. I mean, this school, it’s not like that at all, and it’s doing a great job.”

The school wrote its own memo, at Klein’s request, for other principals to read, which I’ve uploaded here. The memo also focuses heavily on accountability practices that Klein implemented, including the ARIS data warehouse and Acuity tests meant to diagnose students’ strengths and weaknesses.

Told of Noguera’s critique, a spokesman for Klein, David Cantor, said, “The school’s doing all kinds of great things with community outreach and engagement, but the principal told him that data-driven instruction was at the heart of her academic program.”

That, of course, didn’t stop former Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings from declaring victory.  Remember the good old days, when politicians left office gracefully and didn’t try to rehabilitate themselves by rewriting history in the first 100 days of a new administration? Sam Dillon’s New York Times article quotes former Madame Secretary as saying, “It’s not an accident that we’re seeing the most improvement where N.C.L.B. has focused most vigorously … The law focuses on math and reading in grades three through eight – it’s not about high schools. So these results are affirming of our accountability type approach.”

Ah, skoolboy sees.  The requirement that all schools be judged on whether they are making Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), and not just elementary and middle schools—that’s just for symmetry, not because anyone wanted to hold high schools accountable for student performance.  The requirement of testing reading and math at least once in grades 10 through 12—how did that ever slip through?  And a gentle reminder, Madame Secretary:  The 92% of the 17-year-olds in the 2008 NAEP sample who attended public schools, and showed no significant change in reading or math performance?  They all were subject to several years of NCLB accountability in their middle school years.

But I want to emphasize that my ridiculing of Madame Secretary’s efforts to vindicate NCLB isn’t based on the NAEP long-term trend data.  Those data simply don’t tell us much about recent trends in students’ academic performance under contemporary content standards, and are ill-equipped to inform debates about which features of NCLB have been beneficial, and which have not.  There’s plenty of other evidence out there to draw upon.

Now, principals on the sidelines are learning from watching the fight, according to a report by a Columbia University journalism student. Kyla Calvert, one of the students behind the Web site about the Department of Education’s no-bid contracts, just published a report on a class Web site about how principals and parents are responding to increased competition among schools. From Calvert’s article:

”I agree with the philosophy that competition breeds excellence,” said Charles DeBerry, principal of P.S. 76, a school with about 370 students in Kindergarten through sixth grade.

“But color copies are expensive. One of these costs me $.25,” DeBerry said, holding up a simple brochure created by some of his staff members. “I look at the things the charter schools are sending out and there’s just no way I can compete with them.”

The number of kindergartners at PS 76 is down by a third this year, DeBerry told Calvert. Because only four children zoned for his school enrolled in a charter school this fall, DeBerry speculated that students who used to attend come to PS 76 from outside its zone are now enrolling in charter schools instead. The shift in attendance patterns has caused him to change the way he thinks about student enrollment, DeBerry said:

“I have opened my eyes to the things we need to do to stay in business and offer services to kids,” DeBerry said. “We have to advertise. If we do not recruit kids and allow our registration to dwindle it will be seen as parents not electing to send their kids here. That was a lesson learned after the events at P.S. 241 for me.”

An April 8 memo from the city’s budget director asked the DOE to cut 1.5 percent from its proposed operating budget through layoffs or attrition. The cuts will come on top of $251 million that the mayor proposed slashing from the DOE when he first released a 2010 budget plan, in January. The DOE has already revised its budget down $1.9 billion in the last year, down over 10 percent. This new 1.5 percent cut would chop off about $260 million more.

The city cuts will be much more manageable thanks to an influx of federal stimulus dollars to the city schools. But a City Council source said that, as currently proposed, they will still be dramatic.

“There’s huge, gigantic cuts proposed in the city’s school budget, and unless there’s some miraculous turnaround in the economic forecast, I don’t think anyone expects an increase in city funds going to schools,” the source said.

Ann Forte, a DOE spokeswoman, said school officials will brief principals on the financial situation tomorrow. Forte said the funding situation is “fluid,” since a few months remain before the City Council could choose to allocate more funds to the DOE in its June budget. The city budget must be finalized by July 1, the beginning of the city’s new fiscal year.

Schools Chancellor Joel Klein told City Council members last month that he was worried about having to lay off as many as 2,000 city teachers if the state didn’t channel sufficient federal stimulus money to the city schools. An April 1 City Council report on the mayor’s January proposed budget said the state’s revised budget, buoyed by stimulus dollars, would prevent teacher layoffs.

Thanks in part to the New York Freedom of Information Law, I was able to get copies of almost all of the financial audits for the school year ending in 2008.  The key page in the audit is called the “Statement of Activities”.  Here is a pdf with these statements for the 58 charter schools in my sample.  Here is a workbook with my calculations for these schools.

Overall, the total amount of philanthropic contributions for the 58 schools was $25,511,490.  The total enrollment was 17,680.  This comes out to a per pupil calculation of $1,443 (as compared to $1,175 for my 990-based 2006-07 calculation).  The average school philanthropy per pupil was $1,654 (as compared to $1,366).  The median school was $1,081 (as compared to $697).  

Some of this difference represents growth from one year to the next.  Most, though, is attributable to differences in the reporting methodology.  In particular, the 990’s do not generally include in-kind donations and the audits do.  (I had assumed otherwise in the comment section of the prior post!)  Also, I made a change mentioned in the notes below that affect the median calculation.

I encourage charter school operators and other readers to help me to further improve these calculations.

Here are some additional notes:

1. I subtracted out Kipp To College costs because these amounts are not used for current students.  This is their alumni program.
2. I averaged across KIPP and Achievement First schools for per pupil philanthropy.  These schools route disproportionate amounts of their philanthropy through one school.  If I didn’t make this change, the total average would be the same, the average school would be 8% higher and the median school would be 29% lower.
3. The data is missing for Bronx Charter School for the Arts because I have a bad copy of the Statement of Activities.
4. I removed  The New York Center for Autism.
5. I included restricted funds.
6. I included in-kind donations.
7. I included fundraising but did not subtract out fundraising expenses.

Except, apparently, the American auto industry.

Here’s part of a recent New Yorker story about Detroit’s collapse that caught my eye (transcribed and emphasized by me, rather than cut and paste, because the magazine doesn’t make that possible):

The situation that Corker referred to was the industry’s infamous ‘jobs bank’ program, which dated back to an agreement that G.M. had made with its workers in 1984. … The U.A.W., sensing potential job losses, won a contract provision designed to discourage layoffs: displaced workers were shifted to a jobs bank, drawing full benefits and nearly full pay. They were not obliged to seek other jobs, and, as the Detroit News reported a few years ago, many of them spent their days working on crossword puzzles at the local union hall.

Obviously, this isn’t a perfect comparison, since, in schools, it can be a very tricky thing to figure out which workers to keep and which to lay off. While some teachers inside the rubber rooms are probably truly incompetent, others could be — as teachers union activists will say — innocent victims of principal harassment.

Here’s a reproduction of the original Detroit News story.

Last month, the federal Institute for Education Sciences released the third-year report on the evaluation of the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program, which provides vouchers for K-12 children and youth in the DC Public Schools who win a lottery to attend a private school.  The key outcomes in the study were scale scores on the Stanford Achievement Test (SAT-9) in reading and mathematics.  (Scale scores are converted from “raw” scores based on the number of correct responses to the test.)  The evaluators found that, after three years, students who were offered a voucher scored 4.46 points higher on the SAT-9 reading test, which represented an effect size of .13.  This effect was statistically different from zero.  Interestingly, the impact of being offered a voucher on reading scores was not reliably different from zero for male students.  In mathematics, there was no evidence of a positive effect of being offered a voucher:  after three years, students offered vouchers scored .81 points higher on the SAT-9 math test, an effect that was not statistically different from zero, and which corresponded to an effect size of .03.

Based on how these effect sizes equate with percentile changes, these are pretty small effects, and the presence of an asterisk denoting statistical significance for the effect of being offered a voucher on reading scores for girls alone, and no effects on math scores for either boys or girls, doesn’t justify the political spectacle that surrounds the program.  After three years, the net movement in reading for voucher students starting at around the 34^th percentile nationally is about five percentiles;  in math, it’s about one percentile.  Anyone who thinks that effects of this size are altering the life trajectories of DC children is kidding himself.   

Part of the hoopla stems from another way in which the size of the voucher effect is being reported:  months and years of additional learning.  The overall effect of 4.5 scale score points in reading is reported as equivalent to 3.1 months of additional learning for members of the treatment group, and the 5.3 point scale score gain for those who actually used the voucher is reported as 3.7 additional months of learning.  The Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page, always good with math, rounded this up to “Children attending private schools with the aid of the scholarships are reading nearly a half-grade ahead of their peers who did not receive vouchers.”

Where do numbers like this come from?  They hinge on the fact that the SAT-9 is vertically-equated across grades K-12, which means that a common scale is used for the forms of the test that are administered at different grades.  Using the same scale across grades facilitates the measurement of growth over time.  Although a given scale score is supposed to represent the same level of proficiency regardless of what grade a student is in, the reality is that the skills tested at widely-differing grade levels don’t overlap much, so that a given scale score in the third grade may represent a different set of content skills than that same scale score in the seventh grade.  (It’s for this reason that the oft-cited claim that, based on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, white students in the 12th grade are, on average, four years ahead of their African American peers is unsupportable.  Although there is a single NAEP scale, a given score represents different competencies in eighth grade than that same score does in the 12^th grade.)  Vertically-equated scale scores in adjacent grades are much more credible than score in grades that are far apart.

The DC evaluation report states that the conversion to months of learning is based on dividing the impact effect size by the effect size of the weighted average annual increase in scale scores for the control group.  In other words, if control group students gain 10 points a year, on average, on the SAT-9 reading test, and the group using a voucher scored 5 points higher than the control group, then the voucher group is 5/10 = .5 years, or 4.5 months, ahead of the control group.    

 What this implies is that if a test shows relatively small gains in performance from one year to the next, then a given effect will look like a larger difference, in terms of months or years of learning gains, than if that test shows relatively large changes over time.  Hill and her colleagues show that, for most nationally-normed tests, the largest changes over time occur in the earliest elementary grades, and get progressively smaller as students move into secondary school.  This could mean that students simply learn less in high school than they do in elementary school.  But it might also mean that tests with a common scale aren’t very good at picking up changes over time in the content of what is taught or learned.  The reason that the effects of using the voucher in the DC study appear relatively large in terms of months or years of learning is that there wasn’t much evidence of learning in the control group population—much less learning than is implied by the national norms on the SAT-9 test or students’ scores on DC’s own Comprehensive Assessment System (DC-CAS).     

The moral to the story:  when the effects of an intervention are reported in terms of months or years of learning gains, treat the numbers with a healthy dose of skepticism.  The magnitude of an effect size has to be placed into a meaningful context, which includes knowledge of what Hill et al. refer to as the “natural growth for its target population.”

Tomorrow I’ll have a few more things to say about the DC study, and some anomalies in the scores that I find troubling.