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changing of the guard
July 8, 2009
New accountability chief says he’ll carry on Liebman’s legacy
Shael Polakow-Suransky, the city's new accountability chief.
Accountability czar James Liebman is officially leaving the Department of Education, but he isn’t going far. From his office at Columbia University, he will help the city win federal stimulus money to boost the very programs he pioneered during his three-year tenure.
In an interview today, Liebman said he’ll go back to teaching criminal law this fall. But he’ll also help the department put together “the most powerful proposal” for federal innovation funds, he said. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has said that New York City’s accountability and teacher pay initiatives are top candidates for a $650 million grant program meant to spur innovation.
Liebman is leaving behind an accountability system that has divided educators and parents. ”I think [he] has forever changed the way this public school system thinks about accountability and the way public school systems around the country will think bout accountability in the future,” said Eric Nadelstern, the department’s chief schools officer.
But some principals reacting to the news of Liebman’s departure this afternoon showed relief. One laughed joyfully when she saw the city’s press release at an event today. Another jokingly wrote to a fellow principal, ‘No more progress reports?’
Shael Polakow-Suransky, the former principal who is replacing Liebman, said the basic tools created by the accountability office would not change. Those tools include the progress reports, which give each city school a letter grade; the quality reviews that explain how well schools work internally; the periodic tests that students take to generate performance data; the ARIS data warehouse; and the inquiry teams that encourage teachers to use data to improve their work.
“The building blocks are in place, and now we have to figure out how to get people using them well as they do their day-to-day work,” said Polakow-Suransky, who in 2008 participated in the Broad Superintendents Academy, a program meant to turn educators and business leaders into reform-minded administrators. During the last year, he divided his time between Nadelstern’s and Liebman’s offices.
“He’s been part of the thought processes in designing the accountability instruments right from the start,” Nadelstern said. “He understands them deeply, knows where they’re working well and where we need to work on them harder.”
Ann Cook, a principal who has been critical of the department’s accountability push, said it’s promising that Polakow-Suransky came up through the rank of educators. “We need to have a return to a more balanced approach to teaching and learning,” she said.
An oft-cited risk in the accountability system is that it pushes schools to focus their efforts only on what will yield higher test scores. Polakow-Suransky said that risk is a real one. ”It takes time to adopt and understand what this stuff means, and there will be places where people have a knee-jerk instinct to go the easy route,” he said.
“My job is not to intervene at an individual school level and suggest a change, but to provide rich, data-based portraits and qualitative portraits using the quality review so that the folks that are supporting schools can help the school go to its next step,” he said.
Meanwhile, Liebman will return to Columbia after a longer-than-expected leave. “The point has come when I think my work needs to be back in the university, and the university would like my work to be back there,” he said. He added that Columbia is asking faculty members to teach as many courses as they can to reduce costs during the financial crisis.
Liebman is the fourth top official to leave the department in recent weeks. Garth Harries, who most recently studied the system’s special education offerings, began work this week in New Haven, Conn. Linda Wernikoff, the city’s special education chief, and Marcia Lyles, the deputy chancellor for teaching and learning, both left the system at the end of June. Lyles was appointed superintendent of a small city school district in Delaware.
CORRECTION: This post has been corrected to clarify the specific pot of federal funds the Department of Education will apply for — not the Race to the Top funds, which are restricted to states, but a separate $650 million pot that districts can apply for separately.
CORRECTION 2: We originally misquoted Suransky as advocating “database portraits” of students’ learning. In fact, he said “data-based portraits.” (Which makes more sense!)
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July 8th, 2009 9:40 pm
“rich database portaits!” I get it. You dont actually have to visit a school you can just look at the “database portrait” to know how to improve it. The rule of datamatons just goes on and on. Do these people really talk like this?
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July 9th, 2009 12:03 am
It would appear the ‘database portrait’ should be wedded to occasional school visits as suggested by Mr G
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July 9th, 2009 6:14 am
I wonder whether he’ll follow the rich Liebman traditions of literally running from public school parents who want to talk to him, or obviously conflating and distorting statistics to make it appear parents aren’t concerned about class sizes.
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July 9th, 2009 9:36 am
Welcome Sasha! Please keep the Data focused culture at DOE alive and well. without it, we will never know how students, principals, or schools are really performing. I’m sure tweaks are necessary, but at it’s foundation, the more accurate data we have as a school system, the better. People will always fight against closing bad schools, but we need to keep up, if not increase, the pace of closing drop-out factories so all kids have a great opportunity to learn, and all parents have a choice where their kids go to school.
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July 9th, 2009 9:59 am
I think Diane Ravich got it right in saying that Jim Liebman has the best of intentions. While the incident where he is said to have run away from Jane Hirshman’s Time out from Testing petitions seemed a bit silly (for both parties) I have found him to be responsive and thoughtful. Those are skills that are still sadly in short supply at Tweed.
For those observers who feel that one cannot develop effective programs unless one has children currently in the system, Liebman brought additional credibility as a parent - in the parlance of many money managers, at least he was eating his own cooking.
ED Hirsh, an iconic education leader for many, has observed that these bubble tests that many parents so decry are among the more reliable and valid tests we have.
That said, the fundamental flaw, and one that the Department has been either unable to understand or unwilling to address, is the use of the NY State ELA and Math exam scores for purposes for which they were not intended. The critical issue is that the exams are not vertically linked - that is comparable across grade levels. So one cannot compare students scores from one grade to the next higher grade. NY State Ed Dep’t officials know this, external testing experts know this, and (I bet) even people in the Board of Ed’s testing group know this.
Thus the fundamental conceit of the progress reports - that they track an individual child’s progress from 3rd to 4th to 5th grade and so on, is flawed. However fancy one wants to make the mathematics beyond this point, it just doesn’t matter.
As a non-mathematician and non-testing expert, I never expected Liebman to understand this - I saw his role as more sketching the big picture and leaving to other, more qualified folks, the nuts and bolts of implementing the design. But it is a shame that someone as smart, influential, and respected as Liebman did not use this power to demand that a proper progress metric be developed. Surely with the money available to hire all the smart folks working in the office of accountability, this could have been done.
Liebman once told a parent audience that he never intended the progress reviews as the only metric of a school’s quality, There are the qualitative reviews done by the outside experts (and increasingly trained staff from the Board of Ed), comments by outside groups like Inside Schools, and a parents own two eyes and ears that should come to bear. Nevertheless, the Board and City Hall spent significant time, attention, and money on progress reviews that at their core do not measure progress.
As a city, and a nation, we face real challenge in developing good systems that measure student progress, and ultimately a teacher’s role in that progress. It is a shame that as well regarded a system as New York City and as committed a fighter for civil rights as Jim Liebman, couldn’t demand real solutions, instead of talking points for elected officials. And that none of the media watchdogs and bloggers called the Board’s bluff.
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July 10th, 2009 1:29 pm
Re: “database portraits” — spokeman Andy Jacob wrote to clarify that we misquoted Suransky. I did the interview and can attest that he actually said “data-based portraits,” which makes much more sense. We’ve updated the post to clarify this. Apologies for the error.
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