GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Sen. Ruben Diaz Sr. delivered a speech in Spanish against no-bid contracts. (GothamSchools)

The circus around the State Senate intensified today as half a dozen senators gathered to complain that Mayor Bloomberg would not meet them at the bargaining table. Immediately afterward, senators confirmed that negotiations are, in fact, ongoing.

“We will not be dictated to, we will be negotiated with,” said Senator Bill Perkins, a persistent critic of mayoral control. Joining Perkins on the steps of City Hall were Sens. Shirley Huntley, Hiram Monserrate, Pedro Espada, Eric Adams, Ruben Diaz Sr., and City Councilman Robert Jackson. All of the senators were among those who supported a failed bill that would have curtailed mayoral control.

After the press conference, Monserrate acknowledged to reporters that negotiations were already in progress. “We’re at the table,” he said. “There are some meetings occurring.”

Those meetings, which began on Monday after mayoral control talks fell apart last week, are being held by Democratic conference leader John Sampson’s staff and deputy schools chancellor Christopher Cerf.

Senators would not discuss the details of the negotiations today, but they reiterated their support for increased parent involvement, funding for art programs, and fixed terms for citywide school board members. A source close to the discussions described the talks as “fragile.” (more…)

The Obama administration’s proposed regulations on a $4.3 billion federal fund for schools would block New York State from receiving any of the money, according to a draft copy of the regulations that I obtained today.

States that block schools from using “data about student achievement” to evaluate teachers would be banned from applying to the fund, called the Race to the Top grant, under the proposed regulations. (The ban is written in a tricky double-negative way, saying that only states that don’t have such a law are eligible to apply for grants.)

The regulations define “student achievement” as “a student’s score on the State’s standardized test,” for subjects that are tested. For subjects that aren’t part of federally required testing regimes, states can propose an alternative measure, including scores on quizzes known as “interim assessments.”

New York State law prohibits principals from using student test scores when deciding whether to give a teacher tenure or not. The law was passed last year after private lobbying by the state teachers’ union, and against loud objections from the Bloomberg administration. (more…)

The Manhattan and Brooklyn borough presidents are turning back on a tacit alliance with Mayor Bloomberg on school governance, demanding that the newly reconstituted Board of Education become emboldened and that the city reconstitute community school boards.

The presidents made the request in a letter to Deputy Mayor and Board of Education President Dennis Walcott today, asking for a Board of Education meeting as early as this August. They wrote:

The political situation in Albany remains unsettled, and while the Senate may return in the fall, experience has sadly shown us that even weeks of negotiation can prove fruitless. We must prepare for the possibility that the stalemate will continue and the Board as presently constituted will be the governing authority of the system and its more than one million children for some months.

The acknowledgment comes 22 days after the Board of Education first met in a scripted eight-minute session during which a majority vote called for the board not to meet again until September.

A third borough president, Ruben Diaz Jr. of the Bronx, endorsed the letter today in a statement, saying he wants to take the challenge a step further:

I would be willing to take their recommendations a step further and demand that the Board of Education meet as soon as possible to vote on each of the issues they have raised.

The three borough presidents alone cannot dictate what the Board of Education does, as they have only 3 of 7 votes. A meeting “as soon as possible” might also be hampered by the fact that Diaz’s appointee, Dolores Fernandez, is on vacation through Aug. 9, according to an e-mail she wrote to GothamSchools. Two other board members were appointed by Mayor Bloomberg, and the other two, appointees of the Staten Island and Queens borough presidents, include Walcott, a deputy mayor, and an ally of the mayor’s.

The full letter from Markowitz and Stringer is here, including a seven-point plan for how to reconstitute the pre-2002 school governance law.

UPDATE: I just spoke to Stringer, who disputed my characterization that he ever had an alliance with Bloomberg. “We never had an alliance,” he said. “We agreed on an approach, and we may all agree with this approach in 24 hours.”

Stringer, a former Assembly member, also predicted that the pre-2002 governance structure could last for “at least a year.” Lawmakers are not scheduled to return to session until January 1, 2010, but major bills like New York City school governance often take an entire session to negotiate. (more…)

Comptroller William Thompson called the letter grades given to city schools “arbitrary” and said he would probably eliminate them if he is elected mayor. Thompson made the remarks in an exclusive interview with GothamSchools today.

The controversial reports assign each school a letter grade using a complicated formula that takes into account student test scores and responses to surveys. Critics of the reports have said that they are not statistically reliable and unfairly stigmatize good schools. Today, Thompson called the reports “foolish.”

“Information about schools is important,” Thompson told me. “I think that we’ve seen how arbitrary these letter grades are and I probably would not keep letter grades.” (more…)

• Comptroller Bill Thompson, a mayoral candidate, critiqued the DOE again. (GothamSchools, Daily News)
• Casting doubt on the DOE’s success could be Thompson’s linchpin campaign strategy. (Times)
• Mayor Bloomberg defended Schools Chancellor Joel Klein against Thompson’s attacks. (NY1)
• Klein is emerging as an election-year target for critics of the administration. (Daily News)
• The Daily News says Thompson is “out of control” with his audits, which didn’t reveal wrongdoing.
• Schools are getting federal funding to boost technology, but not to hire teachers. (Wall Street Journal)
• Several new Web sites offer educational games for kids. (Wall Street Journal)
• Chicago Magazine‘s profile of Arne Duncan’s replacement, Ron Huberman, is finally online.
• Government meddling in oversight bodies caused England’s test snafus, a report found. (Times Online)
• School budgets are likely to be worse next year, at least in Chicago. (Sun-Times)

• A leaked draft of national standards, courtesy of Robert Pondiscio, who says the standards are DOA.
• Analysis of Pondiscio’s biases, and a reminder that the standards are only in draft form.
• There’s an investigation afoot into Chicago’s selective schools enrollment procedures. Why? 
• Andy Rotherham says up with Bill Gates’s data boost, down with his hurricane protection plan.
• Aaron Pallas says school comparison Web sites are doomed because they depend on bad data.
• New arrivals to the city can sign up now to take the specialized high school exam.
• Why doesn’t Bill Gates talk about racial integration in schools? Dana Goldstein asks.
• John Thompson calls for a more honest conversation about the pressures of being a principal. 
• Bronx teacher JD2718 analyzes Comptroller Thompson’s audit of how students are cleared to graduate.
• In Baltimore, the thought that state tests are becoming less relevant because they are so easy to pass.
• Federal spending often gets squandered, according to a new report.
• Assessments don’t have to be scary, a teacher says in her fourth installment of advice for newbies.
• Reformers need to leave the coasts and push into America’s heartland, Mike Petrilli concludes.
• Is the increased U-rating rate due to a push for quality or due to vindictive, incompetent principals?

City schoolchildren will need to boost their test-taking endurance before next spring, when students in grades 3 through 8 take two state tests just four school days apart.

A revised exam schedule released by the state today dramatically condenses the testing timeline. It also halves the length of time alloted to scoring, eliciting concern from educators statewide about how schools will manage the new schedule.

The state announced last month that it would be moving state English language arts and math tests, previously given in January and March, closer to the end of the school year. City schools officials said then that they had lobbied for the change but hoped that the two tests would be separated by at least some time.

The schedule released today separates the two tests by just four school days. (more…)

For the second day in a row, the city’s comptroller has released an audit questioning the validity of the city’s education data. And for the second day in a row, political jockeying initially overshadowed the report’s content.

At a press conference this morning, Comptroller Bill Thompson, who is running for mayor, said the audit of testing oversight revealed that the Department of Education had allowed “an environment ripe for cheating.” ”We found that the Department of Education has engaged in sloppy and unprofessional practices that encourage cheating and data manipulation,” he said.

But the report did not find new instances of cheating.

The audit focuses on the role played by testing monitors in overseeing the math and English Language Arts, or ELA, tests given to elementary school students in 2008. These monitors, employed by the DOE, make unannounced visits to schools on testing days to ensure that protocols are being followed. Thompson’s audit deems the monitoring system “inadequate.”

The report suggests that the DOE is not thoroughly monitoring its monitors. (more…)

Comptroller William Thompson is releasing his second education audit in two days right now, this time focusing on testing conditions and oversight in the city schools. Also for the second time in two days, the comptroller has barred a Department of Education spokesman from his announcement.

Today’s audit exposes “major flaws in testing by the New York City Department of Education,” Thompson’s office said in a press announcement this morning. But the audit says, “Our observations conducted at the sample schools on the day of testing did not reveal any instances of cheating.”

Today’s report is already drawing some of the same criticism from the city as yesterday’s audit, about how city schools qualify students for graduation. That audit found sloppy record-keeping at many city schools but no clear evidence of grade-tampering. City officials charged that Thompson conducted the graduation audit for political, rather than professional, reasons. As the city comptroller, Thompson’s job is to audit official city statistics. But he is also the main challenger to Mayor Bloomberg’s reelection bid.

DOE press chief David Cantor leveled the first complaints about today’s audit just minutes after the press conference began — a press conference that he was not attending after being kicked out by a member of Thompson’s staff. (more…)

Nowadays, it seems like anybody with a fast server, some GIS software, and some links to federal and state education databases can put up a website comparing schools.  Among the latest entries to the school comparison derby is schooldigger.com, a service of Claarware LLC, billed as “The Web’s Easiest and Most Useful K-12 Search and Comparison Tool for Parents.”  Schooldigger’s title evokes the imagery of digging into the interior of schools to see what makes them tick.

 The rhetoric on schooldigger’s website is typical.  The site purports to rank schools within states from best to worst.  “Other sites charge over $20 a month for this service!” the site exclaims, but schooldigger does it for free.  For New York, the rankings are based on the sum of the average percent proficient in English and math across tested grades.  The rankings of schools are aggregated to enable cities and districts to be ranked as well.  Schools, cities and districts in the 90^th to 100^th percentiles of the distribution get five stars;  those in the 70^th to 90^th percentiles get four stars;  those in the 50^th to 70^th percentiles get three stars;  the ones in the 30^th to 50^th percentiles receive two stars;  those in the 10^th to the 30^th percentiles get one star;  and those in the bottom 10% of the distribution receive 0 stars.   

 Sites such as schooldigger may have some interesting bells and whistles, but they can never adequately address the question that I think is of greatest interest to parents:  How would my child fare in this school, as compared to another school?  If this is, indeed, the question, then school comparison websites are doomed to provide poor and potentially misleading answers. (more…)