Comptroller candidate John Liu and mayoral candidate Tony Avella joined an energized and sometimes raucous crowd of around 70 public school parents, teachers and advocates at the launch event for the Coalition for Public Education, held at the lower Manhattan headquarters of the municipal union District Council 37.

The coalition could be one legacy of this spring’s protracted debate over school governance. That debate was finally settled, at least for the next six years, when Gov. Paterson signed into law a new bill that continues a modified version of mayoral control. Vowing to keep the fight against mayoral control going into the new school year, coalition organizers announced rallies in four boroughs for the first day of school next week.

“The struggle continues on this battle,” said Esmeralda Simmons, director of the Center for Law and Social Justice at Medgar Evers College. “Do not be fooled into thinking that because something has happened in Albany, there’s nothing else that can be done.”

Conference organizers were joined by two of the state legislature’s staunchest mayoral control opponents, Senators Bill Perkins and Eric Adams.

Avella and Frances Villar, another mayoral candidate, also called for greater checks on mayoral power and for the phasing out of the city’s charter schools. Liu and public advocate candidate Norman Siegel made pitches for greater transparency and oversight of the Department of Education.

By the end of the afternoon, small groups of parents, teachers, students and activists had developed broad guidelines for the coalition’s continued work. Most recommendations revolved around the need for an independent parent union and more well-developed teacher training.

But, organizers said, if changes to school governance structure don’t happen soon, they will take increasingly vocal action. Organizers are already planning rallies at four schools around the city on the first day of school, though they have yet to decide the exact locations.

City Council member Charles Barron asked the audience to continue lobbying politicians for change in school governance. But if major change doesn’t come, he said, activists should organize massive nonviolent resistance to schools controlled by the mayor.

More audio highlights from the event are below:

The smooth stylings of the “Say No to Mayoral Control” rap greeted parents and teachers as they arrived at the meeting:

Democratic mayoral candidate Tony Avella said that he would choose the next schools chancellor based on his or her experience as an educator in New York City schools:

Avella also argued that charter schools are a diversion from the real task of improving all of the city’s public schools:

Frances Villar, the 26-year-old Party for Socialism and Liberation mayoral candidate, explained why she also opposes charter schools:

Comptroller candidate John Liu praised the new school governance bill for granting the comptroller greater oversight over Department of Education contracts and said that he was eager to exercise that power:

Public advocate candidate Norman Siegel called for greater oversight of the Department of Education.

New York State Senator Eric Adams discussed the role parent involvement should play under the new school governance structure.

Gbubemi Okotieuro, the associate dean for governmental and external relations at Medgar Evers College and the father of a high school senior, said in an interview today that he would be a dedicated member of the Panel for Educational Policy. Describing himself as a parent who has been heavily involved “behind the scenes” in his son’s education, Okotieuro said he would not shy away from voicing his opinions.

“I’m not looking for a fight, God knows I’m not. But if you don’t want a man who can think for himself, I’m not your man,” he said. “Marty and I had a talk, and I was very clear, if you want me for this appointment, I’m going to do what I believe is right for my own son and the other kids out there.”

The panel, which became legally nonexistent when the state Senate refused to renew mayoral control legislation this summer, is slowly being reconstituted now that the law is back in effect. With Markowitz’s appointment, there is one seat that remains to be filled by Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. A spokesman for Diaz said he was still interviewing candidates for the position.

Okotieuro, who immigrated to the U.S. in 1987 from Nigeria and previously taught urban studies at Queens College, became acquainted with Markowitz through his job at Medgar Evers College.

Aware of the panel’s limited influence — its critics call it a “rubber stamp” for Chancellor Joel Klein’s policies — Okotieuro said the opportunity to become more involved was too important to pass up.

“As a parent with a child who’s been going to the public schools for a while, there’s a feeling that you need to get into the fray and be part of the change as opposed to be just being on the sidelines,” he said. “And I felt it was the good time to do this.”

As an administrator at Medgar Evers, Okotieuro said he has seen graduates of the city’s public schools struggle when faced with college-level work. Now that his own son — a musician at the Brooklyn High School of the Arts — is beginning the college application process, Okotieuro said that he would like to focus on improving city high schools’ college preparation.

Though he supports some of Klein’s policies, he said wants to see less of an emphasis placed on test scores, more art programs, and more avenues for parental involvement.

“It’s very difficult to me to tell me that I cannot come over the school once in a while just check in on my kid, just give him $10 for lunch, as an excuse to see the young man. Those sorts of things matter,” he said, adding that he visits his son’s school about once a week.

Mayor Bloomberg has said that the panel’s first order of business will be voting on his proposed plan to end social promotion for fourth and sixth graders. Markowitz has not taken a position on the issue, and Okotieuro said he would reserve judgment until hearing others’ opinions.

Miss Brave, a second-grade teacher, writes on her blog:

Now, I am all about the lists and charts and organizational tools, but I’m already frustrated by ARIS. Maybe it’s because I’ve got second graders, so there’s not exactly that much data to go on, but almost every single data field on my students was blank, and the ones that were there are cryptic. My new student from another school has an IEP, but I can’t tell what’s on it. Several of my students have “health alerts,” but I don’t know what they are. And a handful have “closed 407s,” which (because I am a huge dork) I had to research to find out what exactly that meant. (As far as I can tell, it means they were absent a lot, and the DOE investigated.) This is my third year in the system, and I don’t see how I’ll ever keep pace with all the acronyms and numbered abbreviations.

But all the tools we use at my school to measure student progress –running records and Everyday Math assessments and checklists and such — don’t factor into ARIS. So pretty much all I get out of it is a list of 27 names and a record of how many days they were absent. Which doesn’t do much to help ease my anxiety of what it will be like when those 27 squirmy bodies are filling my new classroom.

• City principals are hiring ad agencies to boost their schools’ profiles. (Post)
• Even with their options limited, some principals are choosing not to fill positions. (GothamSchools, Times)
• A teacher who just left the city says the city schools would benefit from tracking by ability. (Daily News)
• Fewer city schools are considering failing under NCLB, thanks to higher state test scores. (Daily News)
• Just 10 city schools were named “persistently dangerous” by the state, the lowest number ever. (Post)
• Brooklyn’s PS 35 was removed from the state’s lists of dangerous schools and failing ones. (Post)
• A school safety agent appears to be using his work shirt to skirt city parking rules. (Post)
• Concern persists about the new home for Bronx Early College Academy. (Riverdale Press)

And beyond:

• Jay Mathews reminds us that going back to school is just a human construct. (Washington Post)
• Two scholars say claims that top students benefit from NCLB aren’t supported by the data. (Times)
• New Orleans’ charter schools, with 60 percent of students, are seeing higher test scores. (USA Today)
• More disputes over who should pay for special ed services are ending up in court. (Washington Post)
• The new trend in reading classes (including in NYC) is letting students select their own books. (Times)
• The Times says the Obama administration must “hold the line” against teachers unions on RttP.
• Eli Broad says his philanthropy helped unseat unions as education authorities. (Wall Street Journal)

See you back here next week, when we’ll be back on a regular posting schedule. Have a good weekend!

Teaching Fellows who haven’t been hired by a school by Sept. 18 can sign on for six more weeks of “extended pre-service training,” paid for by the city, as part of an arrangement developed even before the hiring freeze was announced in May. Accepted Fellows learned about the extension option this spring, before they agreed to join the program.

Fellows who participate will earn $250 a week in exchange for four days of practice teaching. They’ll also get to attend the program’s required graduate program for free during that time. But they won’t be offered health insurance or other benefits, according to Ann Forte, a Department of Education spokeswoman. Unlike TFA, the Teaching Fellows program won’t involve home-cooked meals, Forte said.

The short-term, low-pay program for unplaced Fellows follows a fight last year over how long Fellows without jobs should be entitled to a salary. In the past, Teaching Fellows began drawing a teacher’s salary when school started but agreed to be removed from the education department’s payroll if they did not find a permanent position by the beginning of December. Last year, tighter hiring conditions caused a larger-than-usual number of new Fellows to face termination, and the teachers union filed a grievance contending that the Fellows were protected from firing by the union’s contract. After arbitration, the city agreed to continue paying the Fellows through the end of the first semester, when a small number were fired.

Here’s the explanation of the extension program that was sent to accepted Fellows this spring: 

Mayor Michael Bloomberg is offering to open up. Photo via Wikimedia commons.

Responding to the national push for more transparent government, the Bloomberg administration is opening up some of its datasets for easier public consumption. The only question is what data the city will throw up on the new Web site.

The city is taking suggestions starting Monday, and the nonprofit that houses GothamSchools, The Open Planning Project, is part of the push to send those in. We will be helping TOPP fill out what are called RFEI’s, or requests for expressions of interest, this coming Monday.

With the deadline breathing down our necks, on our staycation no less!, we need your help. Our wish list includes information on outside contracts the Department of Education holds, school-by-school budget documents, and school accountability information organized in easy-to-search Excel spreadsheets rather than individual PDF’s.

What should we add? Please name names of specific documents, and please don’t be shy with ideas. Info on how to submit your own RFEI is here.

Despite halving the size of this year’s cohort and directing many teachers to charter schools, TFA still hasn’t found jobs for 118 of its 300-odd new teachers, according to an e-mail sent to graduates of the program yesterday. While TFA officials “continue to be optimistic” that the Department of Education’s freeze on outside hires will be lifted, they anticipate that “a substantial number” of new corps members will remain jobless when the school year begins, the e-mail said.

The organization is putting together additional training for the unplaced teachers, according to the e-mail from Jemina Bernard, director of the program’s New York region. It is also asking the more than 2,000 graduates of the program who live in the city to provide “social and cultural opportunities,” such as home-cooked meals and walking tours, between now and the end of October for the new teachers. ”I want to be very clear how critical this period of time is for our 2009 corps and how extremely important it is that we come together as a family to fully support them,” Bernard wrote.

Teach for America told its new members this spring that they would be guaranteed a salary for 40 business days after the start of classes, even if they hadn’t found a position. The city’s Teaching Fellows program, which like Teach for America offers training and a path to certification for aspiring teachers, is offering no such guarantee, unlike in past years. The 700 new fellows received a stipend for their summer training but will not be paid again until they land a job at a school. More than half of the new fellows are now eligible for teaching jobs, but many are not. 

Bernard’s complete e-mail is below:

Dear [graduate],

I hope this e-mail finds you well.

As you’ve likely read in our recent alumni updates, the New York regional placement team is continuing to work tirelessly to place our 300+ incoming 2009 corps members. Although we continue to be optimistic about securing additional placements, we still have 118 corps members who have yet to be placed. Since the school year is now less than two weeks away, we believe it is very likely that we will have a substantial number of our corps members who do not receive their placements until after the first few weeks of school.

With that in mind, we’re asking for your help in ensuring that corps members who are not placed by the first day of school feel supported and welcomed into both our Teach For America family and the region at large. Our professional development team is creating a menu of workshops, observations and assistantships to build understandings of school contexts for these corps members. We’d like to leverage our strong alumni base in order to provide additional social and cultural opportunities to the 2009 corps members so that, despite the challenges they’ve faced even before they enter the classroom, they develop into our most motivated, inspired, and cohesive corps yet.

We’re searching for alumni who are willing to host activities during the first two months of the school year for yet-to-be placed 2009 corps members. Alumni will be given wide discretion in determining what types of activities they’re willing and able to organize: host six corps members in your apartment for a dinner party, lead a walking tour of your favorite neighborhood in upper Manhattan, start a book club … whatever inspires you and brings our corps members together!

I want to be very clear how critical this period of time is for our 2009 corps and how extremely important it is that we come together as a family to fully support them. If you’re able to organize and host an event between now and the end of October, please let us know by completing the short survey here.

Thank you for your continued dedication to our cause and our corps. And if you haven’t yet met members of the 2009 corps, prepare to be inspired!

All my best,

Jemina R. Bernard
Teach For America • New York

The recently-released NYU study of the New York City Principal Leadership Academy comparing graduates of the Aspiring Principals Program to other new NYC principals is, in my view, bungled by design.  This is not a knock on the authors, each of whom I know and respect a great deal.  Rather, it reflects the fact that the NYU researchers were brought in to study the Aspiring Principals Program of the Leadership Academy long after critical design decisions about how to evaluate the impact of the program were made—either by omission or commission.

The three key limitations I raise here pertain to selection mechanisms that ideally would have been observed by the researchers.  The inability to understand and model these selection processes undermines the objective of isolating the effect of the Aspiring Principals Program on student outcomes.  (See the comments of Sean Corcoran, lead author of the report, on selection issues here.)

Let’s start with selection into the program itself.  We know precious little about either the individuals selected into the Aspiring Principals Program or those who self-select into becoming principals in the comparison group.  To be sure, they can be compared on race, age, years of teaching experience, and a couple of other variables, but there’s no information about the personal qualities of the APP and comparison principals—and these personal qualities might be relevant to their subsequent success as principals.  This concern is heightened by the fact that the Aspiring Principals Program is highly selective.  For example, the 2003 cohort of Aspiring Principals consisted of 90 individuals culled from 400 applications;  the number of applications ballooned to 1,200 in 2004, which means that fewer than one in 10 applicants was selected for the program.  The analysis cannot even rule out the uncomfortable possibility that some of the members of the comparison principal group applied to the APP and were rejected because the program administrators predicted that they would be unsuccessful.  There’s really no way to establish that the APP and comparison principal groups were equivalent on things that might matter for their success at the time that the groups were selected.

Next, there’s the selection of the schools that APP and comparison principals were chosen to lead.  The NYU report documents that APP principals were placed in different kinds of schools than comparison principals—schools that were smaller, lower-performing, and on a downward trajectory, with higher concentrations of Black students, and more likely to be located in the Bronx.  Other than the stated mission of the Leadership Academy to place APP principals in hard-to-staff schools, we have little to go on to document the process of assigning principals to schools.  The fact that APP and comparison principals wound up in different kinds of schools greatly complicates an understanding of the impact of the program, because there is a risk that the differences in outcomes which are observed are as much a function of the features of the schools in which principals were placed as the changes in principals’ behaviors attributable to exposure to the APP.  The NYU researchers do the best they can to address this by looking at the performance trajectories of schools pre- and post-arrival of the APP and comparison principals, but there are many unanswered questions.  Suppose, for example, that a school was on a downward trajectory for two years before an APP principal took over.  Might we expect such a school to trend upward just by chance, given what we know about year-to-year fluctuations in school-level test performance?  If so, the slight advances observed in schools led by APP graduates relative to comparison principals might be due to differences in the schools they led, and not to the impact of the APP.  The question here is whether there is a sufficient number of schools led by APP graduates and schools led by comparison principals with similar trajectories prior to the arrival of the new principal to rule out this possibility.             

And third, there’s the issue of selection out of both the APP group and the comparison principal group—what is often referred to as sample attrition.  Of the 147 graduates of the APP in the 2004 and 2005 cohorts (82% of the approximately 180 entrants to the program in those two years), 120 served as a principal for some time in a DOE school.  Of these, 15 switched schools, a few served as a principal and transferred to another DOE position, a couple were promoted, and some left the DOE after serving as a principal.  There are 86 APP graduates of the original 147, or 59% of the graduates, included in the analysis.

The study does not address the attrition either from the APP group or from the comparison group.  (We know next to nothing about the comparison principals who started and didn’t persist in the same school for three years, and thus were vanquished from the study.)  Were the 34 APP graduates who started as principals but didn’t meet the three-year tenure requirement of the study unsuccessful and counseled out (or kicked upstairs)?  How did they differ from the 86 APP graduates who represent the core sample analyzed in the study?  Understanding the impact of a program requires an understanding of who leaves the “treatment” group as well as who leaves the comparison group, and why.  

Finally, I can’t end this post without commenting on the limits of assessing the Aspiring Principals Program primarily on the basis of the state test scores achieved by students (for the elementary/middle schools).  The fact that such test scores are often available—although never for students below grade 3!—and are at the center of the city’s accountability system does not justify the decision to exclude virtually every other measure of principal performance that might be relevant.  Does the principal support students’ social and emotional development?  Or preparation for citizenship in our complex democracy?  Does s/he support the teachers’ learning, and ambitious teaching practices?  Does s/he promote collaborative problem-solving among the staff and stakeholders of the school?  Does s/he manage resources efficiently to support the instructional mission of the school?  Does s/he act with integrity?  These are just some of the desirable features of a skilled principal that the NYU evaluation of the Aspiring Principals Program was unable to address.  Through no fault of the researchers.

And finally-finally:  Although clearly beyond the purview of the NYU project, I am hoping that someone is engaged in a cost-effectiveness analysis of the Aspiring Principals Program.  There’s considerable attrition at various stages up to the desired outcome of a sustained stint as an NYC principal, and the results obtained in the NYU study do not show that students in schools led by an APP graduate have much better outcomes than students in schools led by comparison principals.  A careful cost-effectiveness analysis would juxtapose the student outcomes observed in the two groups with the cost of preparing individuals in the two groups.  There may well be direct and indirect costs associated with preparing principals who do not go through the APP.  We know that the costs of taking an individual through the APP are substantial, perhaps in excess of $150,000.  Do the small and mixed differences in student outcomes favoring APP graduates observed in the NYU study justify investments of this magnitude?

Just about 300 of the teachers in the Absent Teacher Reserve found new jobs in the last month. That leaves about 2,000 ATRs on the Department of Education’s payroll with just weeks before school starts. And their chances of finding a spot might be tough: Though the system has 1,800 openings, some principals are signaling they are hoping to fill their spots with outside teachers, rather than hire jobless teachers from within the department.

At a hiring fair in Queens on Tuesday night, principals snapped up eligible teachers in minutes, reported a teacher named Jenn in a comment at GothamSchools.

But other principals appear to be hanging onto the hope that they’ll soon be able to have their pick of aspiring teachers, despite Schools Chancellor Joel Klein’s warning that the freeze would not be lifted soon. We heard from a new teacher who was invited on a staff retreat by a principal who isn’t allowed to hire her. And at least one School Support Organization sent an e-mail to its principals outlining the steps they would need to take to hire new teachers in the event that the city decided to allow new hires on a case-by-case basis.

The city currently has no plans to allow principals to lobby for case-by-case exemptions from the freeze, according to Ann Forte, a Department of Education spokeswoman. Instead, she said, the department expects to see accelerated hiring from within its teaching ranks in the next few weeks. ”It’s not unusual for principals to do a lot of hiring in the last weeks of August,” she said.

About 350 teachers whose jobs had been eliminated found positions since the end of July, when there were more than 2,300 teachers and about 2,400 vacant positions, Forte said. The hiring freeze is meant not to eliminate the ATR pool but to prevent it from growing above its size last year, when there were about 1,100 teachers in the pool.

The freeze was relaxed in one new area this week: Schools with gifted programs can now appeal to hire teachers from outside the system, according to a note that appeared this week on the Principals’ Portal, the department’s Web site for school leaders. Gifted education is not a separate license area, but teachers must have special certification to teach in a gifted program, according to Forte. Previous changes have allowed principals to look outside the system for special education and most science teachers.

The data show that the numbers of black and Hispanic students in the city is not rising. The black population has been declining while the Hispanic population is also declining, though less rapidly. The number of Asian students in city schools is rising. This is according to both city figures on public school enrollment and Census estimates on the size of the school-aged population.*

I spent several months last year exploring the public school enrollment data, which contains all kinds of mysteries (one: white enrollment in public schools has declined while the white school-aged population, by Census estimates, which are imperfect, is rising). Alas I only completed my digging just as the New York Sun was closing, and it’s never seen the light of day — until now!

Here’s a chart I put together last year, using city data, followed by a chart using the Census’s school-aged population estimates:

*The demographer consensus is that Census estimates must be examined with a grain of salt. Though the Census does publish estimates of population data every year, splicing those by race or some other variable (like borough) makes the sample smaller, which in turn makes the margin of error larger. So be careful with this data.

UPDATE: Per the request of a reader, the two graphs now use a similar key, color-wise. Also an earlier version of the post didn’t include the full legend for the first graph. Now it does.

I don’t think that we should pay too much attention to single-year changes in test scores of any kind, and especially the SAT, which commenter CarolineSF points out are taken by a self-selected group of high school students.  But this year’s snapshot nevertheless reveals some hard truths about the performance of New York City’s high school students.

Let’s address the representativeness issue first.  Is there evidence that the rising numbers of Black and Hispanic students taking the SAT reflects a dramatic change in the kinds of students who are taking the SAT?  Can we explain the falling average Black and Hispanic SAT scores as reflecting a new group of low-performing NYC high school students striving to get into college? 

I compared the number of Black, Hispanic, white and Asian students who took the SAT in 2008 to the number of 2008 high school graduates, as calculated in the New York State graduation rate for the 2004 NYC 9^th-grade cohort.  The 10,196 Black SAT-takers in 2008 represented 77% of the number of Black high school graduates in the 2004 9th-grade cohort.  The similar number of Hispanic test-takers in 2008 represented 79% of Hispanic high school graduates in that cohort.  (The percentages for white and Asian students were 78% and 93%, respectively.)

What this implies is that, as of 2008, it was already the case that the vast majority of Black and Hispanic students New York City on track to graduate from high school were taking the SAT.  And these percentages likely increased in 2009.  Nationally, about two-thirds of SAT-takers are high school seniors, and the New York City data, as I understand them, are for all SAT-takers, not just seniors.  Nevertheless, the implication is that most college-eligible minority students in New York City are already taking the SAT.  For this reason, it’s hard to make the argument that a new influx of low-performing Black and Hispanic youth accounts for the declines in SAT scores among Black and Hispanic youth in NYC and for NYC overall.

Two other key points:  For each of the four major racial/ethnic groups, New York City students perform more poorly on the SAT than do students across the nation.  The first figure below shows that, on all three components of the SAT—critical reading, mathematics and writing—Asian, Black, Hispanic and white youth in New York City score lower than their counterparts elsewhere.  (The scale of the bars is standard deviation units, but the bars are also labeled with the number of points separating NYC from the nation overall.)  The gaps are smallest for white and Black students, and somewhat larger for Hispanic and Asian students.  Hispanic youth in New York City score about .4 standard deviations below Hispanics across the country, or about 45 points lower on each of the three sections of the SAT.  Asian students in NYC score about 50 points lower on the critical reading and writing sections than Asian students across the country, and about 25 points lower in math.

The second figure shows the magnitude of the achievement gap within New York City.  The columns represent the distance of a racial/ethnic group’s mean score from the citywide average, in standard deviation units.  Each column also is labeled with the number of SAT points separating a group from the citywide average.  For example, the first column in the left panel indicates that Asian SAT-takers in NYC in 2009 scored 9 points above the citywide average in critical reading.

The achievement gap separating Black and Hispanic youth in New York City from white and Asian youth on the SAT is humongous.  The smallest distance among these groups is the 56 points separating Black and Asian youth in critical reading performance.  The largest gap is the 151 point difference in the average performance of Blacks and Asians.  If we limit ourselves to whites as a comparison—as the Bloomberg/Klein administration routinely does, even though there are approximately equal numbers of white and Asian children in the New York City public schools—the gaps are huge:  94 and 99 points, respectively, separating Black and Hispanic SAT-takers from white test-takers on critical reading;  115 and 108 points, respectively, for mathematics;  and 103 and 108 points, respectively, for writing.

Results such as these are prima facie evidence that the achievement gap distancing Black and Hispanic youth from their white and Asian counterparts in New York City is large and unrelenting.  The challenge of creating equal educational opportunity for all in New York City will take a lot more than boosting the percentage of minority students who are rated proficient on state ELA and math tests.

• A deal between the city and the UFT will allow parent-paid aides to return this year. (Times)
• Early screening for gifted programs means admission is essentially random, a columnist argues. (Times)
• A city high school with a maritime focus is moving to Governor’s Island for the fall. (AP)
• The New Yorker looks at the city’s “rubber rooms,” where teachers under investigation sit and wait.
• The first study of the Leadership Academy shows some promising results. (GothamSchools, Post, Times)
• City students’ SAT scores are dropping; more are taking the tests. (Post, GothamSchools, Daily News)
• A student helped her Staten Island teacher win a back-to-school wardrobe makeover. (Daily News)
• Juan Gonzalez criticizes the city’s protocol for dealing with H1N1 in schools. (Daily News)
• The city charter school that pays its teachers $125,000 is about to open. (Christian Science Monitor)
• The city’s six community colleges posted a 2-year graduation rate of 2.3 percent in 2008. (Post)

And beyond:

• Michelle Rhee’s latest initiative is a 200-page document of expectations for teachers. (Washington Post)
• Educators, including some from the city, weigh in on Obama’s education policy pushes. (Times)
• Most Americans say they support Obama’s education agenda, a new poll found. (Bloomberg News)
• Los Angeles’s school board voted to give control of up to 250 schools to outside operators. (L.A. Times)
• In some places, people are trying to get their school districts to stop selling student data. (USA Today)
• Most school districts are using federal stimulus money in mundane ways. (Christian Science Monitor)
• Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson wants to adopt NYC’s school grading system. (Sacramento Press)
• Jay Mathews describes how a blind bureaucracy almost cost a top teacher his job. (Washington Post)

Data courtesy of the city Department of Education.

As promised, here’s some more detail on who takes the SAT in the city — broken down by race and painted as a picture over time.

The number of black students taking the SAT is now at 10,438, up from 6,763 in 2002. The increase among Hispanic students is even more pronounced: From 5,400 in 2002 to 11,414 in 2009. Scores for both groups in 2009 were stuck in the low 400′s on each subject matter. That would make about an 825 out of 1600 on the old scale, which included just math and reading and no writing.

Also, curiously, the number of white students taking the SAT dropped in the city this year (though it’s still above the 2002 number) as in America. On the 1600 math-and-reading scale, white students this year scored 1,031 on average.

And everyone seems to score about the same on the new writing test as on the math and reading test.

But, like we keep (unconvincingly?) saying, we’re on blog-vacation! So please help us out by pointing out the trends you see in the comments. (And check out Caroline’s point about not putting too much stock in changes in the overall averages.)
NYCsat Demographics 2002-09

Some highlights: Public advocate hopeful Mark Green suggests the next mayor should find a new chancellor, though he doesn’t like the word “fire.” The only Republican candidate for comptroller, Joe Mendola, supports efforts to stop the growth of charter schools. And Daniel Dromm, the public school teacher running for City Council in Jackson Heights, says he supports alternative certification programs such as Teach for America.

The information comes from surveys we sent to each contender in competitive races. The survey (read it here) asks candidates for their thoughts on the growth of charter schools, how tenure decisions should be made, and whether Schools Chancellor Joel Klein should be fired.

We’ll be adding to our repository of surveys as we receive more. Candidates, send your completed surveys to tips@gothamschools.org!

We had a more diverse pool of test-takers than last year — more black and Hispanic students took both the SAT and AP exams, and more passed the AP; lower SAT scores on average since last year; and a higher (though still dismally low) number of students passing the AP exams.

The city Department of Education summed up the results in a PDF (embedded below the jump). I asked for a more specific breakdown — average scores from past years and average scores broken down by race — and will provide that when it arrives. You can read the national results here and the New York results here. (Would that we already had the forthcoming IBO education team to give us the straight story from the get-go!)
NYC College Board Results 2009

Bill de Blasio. Photo by William Alatriste (via Flickr)

To whet your appetite for our soon-to-come slew of candidate questionnaires, here’s an education manifesto that public advocate contender Bill de Blasio is releasing today.

According to de Blasio’s press secretary, Gwen Rocco, the policy plan is based on the campaign’s research about “what the public advocate can actually do.” If elected, de Blasio will hold monthly education hearings in each borough, make even more school data available online, and convene a “Commission on the Future of Education.” He also says he’ll post graduation rates that note how many students used “credit recovery” programs to earn their diplomas.

The 11-page plan is after the jump:

The report concludes that graduates of the Leadership Academy took especially tough jobs, stopped their schools from getting worse, and posted reading test score gains that outpaced those made at other schools with new principals. In math, schools led by Leadership Academy graduates improved but not significantly more than other schools. And the study looked at too few high schools to conclude anything about the effect of Leadership Academy principals there.

The report’s authors, three professors at New York University, say more research is needed to identify what about the Leadership Academy graduates allowed their schools to make comparatively more progress in reading. They emphasize that the Leadership Academy, which fast-tracks educators into school administration, selects applicants that it believes will make successful principals, so the study could not cast light on how well the program prepares the average prospective principal.

The report was paid for by foundations that helped fund the academy before it moved onto the public dollar last year, Broad and Dell.

EdWeek has more detail about the report, which is posted in full after the jump:

And now we’re going to turn down the volume for a week before school starts. As the president does, we do! We’ll be back in full force the next week, with some updates on our plans for the new school year. In the meantime check in for election coverage, Community updates, and heartwarming photo ops from our vacation.