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The data on city schools’ English Language Arts scores keeps churning out. The Department of Education has just published Excel files sorting scores by school, grade level, special education status, gender, race and ethnicity, and English proficiency from 2006 to this year. A spokesman says that figures on charter schools are on the way. In the meantime, here’s a document from the state charter school lobbyists with every charter school in the city’s proficiency rates.

In New York City, charter schools out-performed traditional public schools on the test, and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein congratulated the schools on the high scores today at a press conference in Manhattan.

Among the top scorers are two charter schools we’ve followed here: Harlem Success Academy 1 in Manhattan, notable for its founder, Eva Moskowitz, who has regularly challenged the role of teachers unions, and Renaissance Charter School in Queens, notable in part because its teachers and administrators are represented by unions. (more…)

This piece of news slipped through the cracks last month, but it seems newly relevant in light of Mayor Bloomberg’s visit to the Oval Office yesterday: In the wake of gushing visits by Arne Duncan, Obama’s new education secretary, to New York City schools, Betsy Gotbaum, the city’s public advocate, sent Duncan a cautionary note last month.

“While we both agree generally that the Mayor should retain control of the school system, I would caution against focusing too much on the data provided by the Department of Education,” Gotbaum wrote to Duncan in a letter dated April 27. “I have always said that it is a fundamental flaw that the current system gives the Mayor and the Chancellor an incentive to present information in a positive light.”

Gotbaum, who first reported the letter on her blog, enclosed a copy of the report on school governance that she commissioned and the accompanying book, which was published by the Brookings Institution.

For what it’s worth, a slightly curious thing about the visit to D.C. yesterday is that only three men entered the Oval Office with President Obama: the Rev. Al Sharpton; Newt Gingrich, the former House majority leader, and Michael Bloomberg. Joel Klein, who is a co-creator of the Education Equality Project with Sharpton, appeared later with the men outside the White House to speak to reporters, but he did not enter the Oval Office.

Gotbaum’s full letter is after the jump:

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In New York:

• Officials are encouraging outside teachers promised jobs not to give up hope. (GothamSchools)
• Obama is open to endorsing a NYC mayoral candidate, maybe Thompson. (Daily News, Times)
• Governor Paterson said he wants to preserve mayoral control after adding parent input. (Post)
• Joe Williams says don’t tweak mayoral control; instead, hold mayor’s “feet to the fire” better.
• Test scores are up moderately, and the achievement gap is narrowing. (GothamSchools)
• Surprisingly, city middle schools made the largest gains on proficiency scores. (Post)
• Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse have all made larger gains than NYC since 2006. (Times)
• A high school teacher says students coming to her don’t seem to be getting smarter. (Daily News)
• The News editorial board says the reading scores make the case for retaining mayoral control.
• Aaron Pallas says don’t make judgments about the scores until we see NAEP data.
• The teachers unions spent $6.6 million last year on lobbying, including 20 lobbyists. (Post)
• Bob Kerrey is stepping down as president of the New School, which he expanded and shook. (Times)
• A Scarsdale mother apologized for dropping her children on the street and driving away. (AP)

Beyond:

• Obama’s proposed budget is seen as a signal that he “wants teaching shaken up.” (Wash Post)
• The budget also includes no more funds for abstinence-only education. (Daily News)
• David Brooks reports on a Roland Fryer study of Harlem Children’s Zone charter schools.
• The Washington Post edit board says that D.C. charters get the short end of the funding stick.
• Josh Greenman says, on education, Obama is “filled with the siren song of the new school.”

Yesterday, New York released the results of the 2009 English Language Arts (ELA) assessment administered in January to students in grades 3 through 8 across the state.  Overall, there was a sizeable increase from 2008 to 2009 in the percentage of students who achieved the standard of proficiency in ELA, from 68% of all students in grades 3 through 8 in 2008 to 77% in 2009.  In contrast, the scale scores which underlie the proficiency standards did not increase as much, rising an average of four points across the six grades in 2009, just one point more than the increase observed in 2008.

In New York City, the results were even more striking, with the percentage of students in grade 3 through 8 who reached the standard of proficiency in ELA rising from 58% in 2008 to 69% in 2009, an increase of 11 percentage points.  The increase in sixth grade is astonishingly large;  whereas 53% of New York City sixth-graders attained the proficiency standard in 2008, 73% did so in 2009, a whopping increase of 20 percentage points.  Taken at face value, figures such as these suggest that students’ English Language Arts achievement increased dramatically from 2008 to 2009.  Some observers, including me, worry that the increases exceed the gains in student learning that could reasonably be expected from changes in instruction occurring over the course of a single year.  The changes could reflect the kind of score inflation that testing expert Dan Koretz wrote about in his recent book Measuring Up. 

There are multiple ways to look at the distribution of ELA performance in 2008 and 2009, and other approaches yield a different estimate of the magnitude of the gains.  The percentage of students meeting the proficiency standard represents a binary threshold—a student is either above the bar or below it.  If you believe that the proficiency standard means something beyond the context of a particular test, then increasing the number and percentage of students who achieve that standard is an important accomplishment.  But the percentage of students who meet the standard tells you very little about the performance of low-achieving students who are well below the proficiency bar, and very little about the performance of high-achieving students who are well above the proficiency bar.  The average scale score takes into account the performance of all students who take the state ELA test, and changes in average scale scores over time may be as meaningful, and perhaps more so, than changes in proficiency rates. (more…)

• Barack Obama is not endorsing Bloomberg for mayor — not yet, anyway.
• Beth Fertig notes that test scores rose across the state, not just in New York City.
• Richard Kessler says that attrition and even layoffs could mean schools lose art teachers.
• Questions about Obama’s proposed budget, like: How will that merit pay square with local resistance?
• Charlie Barone predicts that charter-wary New Jersey could get boxed out of Race to the Top funds.
• Teach For America is slated to get $15 million in Obama’s budget, which seems to be a first.
• John Merrow’s latest Michelle Rhee report asks how media stardom is affecting her leadership.
• Peter Goodman wonders if it’s possible to merge peer-review with value-added models.
• A teacher is watching three of his classes transition to “lockdown.”
• An interview with the author of “Never Work Harder Than Your Students.”
• Arne Duncan will be Katie Couric’s date to the White House correspondents dinner.
• Promoting a Spanish GED as a good alternative for those who speak the language.
• In some districts, teachers can be fired for not paying their union dues, Antonucci reminds us.
• Jim Shelton, of the Obama administration and formerly Gates, talks “common standards.”
• Ken Hirsh says that the hiring freeze is bad for the city.

Among those who could be most affected by the new teacher hiring freeze are teachers who haven’t yet set foot inside a city classroom.

The group includes nearly 1,000 college seniors, recent graduates, and career-changers who had been accepted to Teach for America and the New York City Teaching Fellows programs, which select and train uncertified teachers and then help them find positions at city schools. It also includes potentially hundreds of other experienced teachers with unofficial job offers for the fall in hand, at least two of whom have already severed current jobs and a lease in preparation for the move.

All of their plans to teach at city schools in the fall were thrown into question yesterday when school officials announced that principals will have to give preference to teachers who are already on the public school system’s payroll when hiring from now on. School officials are encouraging these teachers to hold out hope for finding a spot, but the teachers say they are skeptical.

Teach For America and Teaching Fellows participants are still being invited to train this summer, but unlike in the past, they are not being guaranteed a paycheck if they don’t land a job in a school. School officials are also telling experienced teachers who had been promised places at schools for the fall to hold out hope, but at least one such teacher said yesterday that he feels left in the lurch.

Chris Timberlake, a fourth-grade teacher in Hampton, Va., thought until last night that he had nailed down plans to begin teaching in the city this fall, along with his wife, who is also a teacher. “We had always wanted to move to the big city,” Timberlake told me. “We wanted to be the change agents, and this was the year we were going to do it.” (more…)

There’s no video (that I know about) of the conversation that happened inside the White House today, but the education leaders who emerged today after talking about their ideas for closing the achievement gap spilled all as soon as they got outside. Politico has video.

You might notice some splices in the video above. Here are Bloomberg’s unabridged comments, courtesy of the city Department of Education:

Today happened to be particularly fortuitous; the State of New York released the test scores in English for how well different counties in New York are doing. And thanks to hard work by people like Merryl Tisch, the Chancellor of the New York State Board of Regents; Joel Klein, who’s with me today, our great Schools Chancellor; Ernie Logan, the head of the Principals Union; Randi Weingarten, the head of the Teachers Union; my Deputy Mayor, Dennis Walcott; and 120,000 people that work for the New York City Department of Education. What they’ve done, and the results came out again today, is nothing short of amazing and exactly what this country needs. (more…)

A screenshot (including a caption) from today's online press conference about state test scores, featuring State Education Commissioner Richard Mills and Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch.

More students across New York State scored proficient on the state reading and writing test this year than ever before, and gains by black and Hispanic students drove the improvements. The difference between white and black students’ average scores is now at 18 points, down from 28 in 2006.

More students in New York City scored proficient, too; proficiency rose 18 percentage points to 69 percent from 51 percent in 2006. According to the city Department of Education, the difference between the percentage of black and Hispanic children who scored proficient on the test and the percentage of white students who did now stands at 22 percentage points, down from more than 29 three years ago.

State school leaders described the gains across New York as “moderate” because much of the increases were driven by a greater proportion of children just squeaking past the proficiency cutoff, State Education Commissioner Richard Mills explained during a press conference this morning.

The difference comes from looking at the actual scale scores students received, rather than the percentage of students deemed proficient. Scale scores are considered the most statistically useful way to evaluate test score gains. (Aaron Pallas has written about this on GothamSchools.)

Mills explained the distinction by providing three ways to look at this year’s sixth-grade scores. The first is by looking purely at what proportion of students in the grade tested at basic proficiency. According to that metric, 81 percent of this year’s sixth-graders met proficiency, compared to 60.4 percent of sixth-graders in 2006, the first year of a new statewide curriculum and testing program.

Looking at proficiency over time, 69 percent of children in 3rd grade in 2006 met standards; those are the same children who posted an 81 percent proficiency rating as sixth-graders this year. But the scale scores of that same cohort of children actually dropped slightly over the same period, from 669 to 667. (more…)

As I have written in the past (here and here), there is an excess supply of people that want to teach in New York City.  Back in November, on a panel at a Teach For America alumni summit, Vicki Bernstein, the Executive Director of Teacher Recruitment and Quality for the DOE,  confirmed this fact and pointed out the upside of the situation: schools could be more selective in future teacher placements.

For most traditional public schools, that upside disappeared yesterday.

As GothamSchools reported, Chancellor Klein’s latest memo instructs principals to restrict their teacher hiring to “existing DOE staff, as opposed to people from outside the system.”  This includes informal commitments already made to prospective candidates: “You should reach out to these people and tell them that they will have to wait; those jobs might not actually be there and that you are unable to hire them at this time.  We are making no commitment to candidates, including Teach for America and Teaching Fellows candidates…” (more…)

In just a little while, we’ll have some analysis of the newly released state English language arts test scores, which show that children in grades 3 through 8 are, on average, more proficient in reading and writing than they were last year, by 7 percentage points. But first we need your help sorting through the numbers morass! (State Education Department Commissioner Richard Mills wasn’t lying when he said at a press conference today, “We’re going to give you more data than you’ve ever seen before.”)

The broadcast of today’s state press conference, as well as the slide show that Mills presented there, is now online. The state also made available an enormous PDF of every single school’s proficiency breakdowns and scale scores, by grade. And for the really ambitious armchair data analysts, there’s also a 5-megabyte Microsoft Access database of all of the state’s raw data.

I’ve posted the state’s full press release, which touts “steady, moderate growth” across the state, after the jump. Feel free to leave a comment with your insights about the data dump. (more…)