GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• National NAEP results are mixed. (Christian Science Monitor, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Times)
• The UFT has given money to state politicians making decisions about mayoral control. (Post)
• After vowing to find its own home, a new charter school now wants public school space. (Daily News)
• After sustained opposition, a Queens middle school principal has resigned. (Daily News)
• A city public school is closed today after swine flu was suspected there. (WNYC)
• The role of a school nurse in identifying swine flu is good for school nurses everywhere. (Times)
• Parents say the DOE hasn’t handled a spike in overcrowding very well. (NY1)
• A school bus driver was charged with sexually abusing one of his 9-year-old passengers. (Post, Times)
• Some teachers think AP courses are getting worse as they expand, a survey found. (Washington Post)
• Sol Stern says the influence of a Brazilian educator has hurt U.S. education schools. (City Journal)

Tuesday marked the release of the 2008 wave of data from the long-term trend component of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).  NAEP has been around since about 1970, and the long-term trend component has been administered every few years to 9-, 13-, and 17-year-olds since 1971.  The long-term trend data are best at charting changes over long periods of time, as the content and format of the test items in reading and math have been relatively stable over the nearly four decades since the federal government began tracking student achievement at the national level.  The flip side of this is that the test is not closely aligned with the contemporary curricular frameworks in reading and math devised by states or by the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB).  For this reason, the NAEP long-term trend data are a poor basis for a referendum on the successes of failures of No Child Left Behind—or any other recent education policy reform.

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.” (more…)

• Ken Hirsh prepared a giant data dump about charter school finances; check out his numbers.
• Aaron Pallas warns against research findings that report progress in terms of months of learning.
• New NAEP scores are out, and younger kids are doing better. But the achievement gap isn’t gone.
• Stephen Colbert’s newest DonorsChoose promotion: Give to schools with lots of military families.
• Andy Rotherham says the Moskowitz-Weingarten matchup should be on pay-per-view.
• A teacher speculates about why his colleagues sometimes favor boys over girls, or vice versa.
• Charter schools aren’t the only ones with public lotteries. District 3 had a lottery, too.
• Dan Koretz argues for more attention to statistical validity in Obama’s education reforms.
• More city schools are reporting suspected cases of swine flu. 
• The McKinsey study about GDP lost to the achievement gap is being used politically, Diane Ravitch says.

Harlem’s school choice wars reached a new height this spring when the Department of Education moved to replace PS 194 and PS 241, zoned elementary schools, with charter schools, saying that local families were electing not to enroll at the zoned schools anyway. A lawsuit stymied that change, but the battle raged on — and is set to continue on Thursday night with a televised showdown between charter school operator Eva Moskowitz and union president Randi Weingarten.

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. (more…)

School principals and reporters will be briefed on the Department of Education’s financial situation tomorrow — and the outlook is likely to include “huge, gigantic cuts,” according to a City Council source. The briefing will come one day before Mayor Bloomberg is scheduled to release his 2010 budget proposal.

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. (more…)

In an earlier post, I reviewed some philanthropy statistics for New York City charter schools.  The information came from IRS filings (“Form 990”).  However,  annual charter school financial audits are better and more timely sources for this data.  The audits are available about six months earlier than the Form 990’s.  Also, the audits present the information in a clearer fashion.

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).   (more…)

City school officials are fond of complaining about the holding pens where teachers who are either unable to find jobs in the system or who are accused of incompetence sit, receiving full pay but not working, sometimes for as long as three years. I’ve often heard critics say that these pens, known as the rubber rooms and the Absent Teacher Reserve, would never be tolerated in any other industry.

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.

On Friday, I began talking about what counts as a big effect.  Turns out I’m reinventing the wheel, as there is an excellent paper by Carolyn Hill and her colleagues at Manpower Development Research Corporation on this topic, entitled “Empirical Benchmarks for Interpreting Effect Sizes in Research.”  But I’ll press onward nevertheless.

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. (more…)

• A report commissioned by State Sen. Malcolm Smith is set to call for big checks on mayoral control. (Post)
• At Brooklyn’s PS 37, a student leads the school band after the school lost its music teacher. (Daily News)
• Kids at IS 61 on Staten Island painted the school cafeteria tables as a public art project. (NY1)
• The DOE says it’s years away from completing a 4-year-old plan to install GPS in school buses. (WNYC)
• The Daily News asks why the Bronx teacher who caused trouble on Friday wasn’t fired years ago.
• The city has found too-high levels of a toxin at 19 schools but hasn’t cleaned them yet. (Daily News)
• The proposed addition for PS 8 would add seven classrooms but not a gym. (Brooklyn Paper)
• Study: Kids who take medication for ADD do better on standardized tests than kids who don’t. (AP)
• Baltimore’s charter schools have less challenging students than other city schools. (Baltimore Sun)
• The otherwise modern principal of a South Carolina elementary school paddles misbehaving kids. (Time)

• Someone e-mailed a list of principals and assistant principals a screed against Bloomberg’s reforms.
• The debate over leadership at PS 20 in Clinton Hill continues on The Local, the New York Times blog.
• The Gates and Broad foundations are announcing that they are funding a union-sponsored project.
• At the Quick and the Ed, a warning for Michelle Rhee based on Chancellor Klein’s struggles.
• JD2718, a chapter leader himself, offers some insights about his colleague “who lost it” on Friday.
• Reading The Freedom Writers’ Diary, a teacher says working miracles would cause her to quit.
• At Ed in the Apple, Peter Goodman calls for clearer state regulations on credit accumulation.
• Ed Sec Arne Duncan told math teachers he wants them to be paid more.
• A special education teacher praises Google’s new program that’s intended to help people with autism.
• The UFT isn’t the only organization that gives money to people who push its agenda; the city does too.
• A math question: How much pizza can you buy for $3 million. The answer from San Jose: Not much.
• I removed a story that I posted last week after I found out that a student gave me bad information.
• A report about the effectiveness of vouchers was based on a selective reading of data, an academic says.