Post a comment about the budget cuts at your school on our interactive comment map. more »
GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools
tuning in
October 26, 2009
Thompson and Cerf debate the next four years for city schools
With little more than a week before the mayoral election, candidate Bill Thompson and Christopher Cerf, an adviser to Mayor Bloomberg’s reelection campaign, touted their future plans for the city’s schools on WNYC today.
Given half an hour each on the Brian Lehrer Show, Thompson and Cerf took questions on school safety, the accountability structure, and what major changes they (or their candidate — Cerf hasn’t said whether he’ll return to the Department of Education after the election) would put in place over the next four years. Throughout the interview, Thompson emphasized his interest in lowering class sizes and shifting school administrators’ focus away from standardized tests. Cerf spoke at length about the importance of using technology to cater to students’ different learning styles. Neither offered clues to how the city would pay for these changes.
Asked by host Brian Lehrer to name the greatest innovation he’d bring to the city’s schools, Thompson had one word: curriculum.
I think we’d like to make sure that schools teach things like reading and writing — we’re seeing a number of our students who can’t write. I think things like science, civics, and history, art and music education, phys ed, those should all be part of a curriculum and we’re seeing them start to disappear. So I think that, given where we’re at these days, that is innovative.
It’s not a question of reducing the number of standardized tests, it’s reducing the focus on them, he said.
Thompson called the current administration’s focus on standardized tests “obsessive.” He noted that recent data from the national math exam showed New York State students’ scores to be flat, whereas students’ scores on the state’s exam have risen in the last several years.
“I think teaching to the test is a phrase that ends conversations rather than begins them,” Cerf said when asked if the schools’ emphasis on testing was having a detrimental effect.
I do believe that teaching test taking skills is not good for the long-term educational interests of children. I believe that focusing on the standards that we’ve decided as a society are important, and focusing on that, and then evaluating the degree they’ve learned those standards, is exactly the right focus.
When a caller said she had quit after 16 years of teaching at a city school because her principal had allegedly fudged students’ test scores and ended suspensions to boost the report card grade, Cerf defended the system. He said that the alternative to the current accountability system was “an absence of accountability for student learning altogether.”
Any system of accountability is going to have occasional problems with it, I think it’s inevitable.
…
I think most of our principals are pretty terrific and I believe they’re getting better and better and better every year. I don’t think the answer to sort of manage the variation in the quality of principals is more top down bureaucracy, more compliance checks, more box checking, more inspectors, more you-better-do-this-or-else. I think that the history of school reform in this country shows that sort of Soviet-style, top down, we know what you ought to do and we’re going to make sure that you do it, doesn’t work. It just doesn’t work.
Cerf said that he and Thompson were in agreement on one major issue: teacher bonuses. Following a segment in which Thompson said he believed in awarding bonuses for student performance on standardized tests to schools rather than individual teachers, Cerf said he agreed.
“That puts us in the middle,” he said.
-
October 26th, 2009 4:17 pm
I think you missed when Thompson added that the bonuses should not be based solely or primarily on standardized test scores, as they are now. $33 million dollars in teacher/principal bonuses based on inflated state test scores this year — what a waste!
-
October 26th, 2009 4:34 pm
Leonie,
Worse than the bonuses being based on inflated state test scores — across a citywide spectrum; my understanding is they were based on School Progress Reports — across a “peer group” spectrum (3:1 weight over citywide spectrum) that moreover is heavily weighted toward the pendulum action of “progress” (60%) over “performance” (25%).Then there’s the silliness of DOE not resetting the spectrum limits, and a good number of schools scoring OUTSIDE the “ranges.”
-
October 26th, 2009 4:38 pm
My comments on the Brian Lehrer show:
Given the rampant manipulation of facts and data by the Bloomberg administration (from overcrowding to student performance to school progress), how will Bloomberg — if re-elected — possibly come clean?
Or… will our kids have to suffer four more years of spin over substance?
Keep it spinning, New York.
Eight is more than enough. And when it comes to class sizes, so is TWENTY-eight. Or more.
http://www.wnyc.org/shows/bl/episodes/2009/10/26/segments/143146
**
Just listened to the Thompson and Cerf segments.
Thompson focused on meaningful testing, meaningful data, and overcrowding. Nuts and bolts.
Cerf focused on teacher quality, technology. Smoke and mirrors. The “Standards Movement” has nada to do with skewing the break points in the tests and School Progress Report Grades! Is the new standard: “Everyone gets an A” until election day?
Cerf talking about reducing class size under Bloomberg and Klein? Bloomberg reduced overcrowding? And up is down! Where’s the fact-checking on this hooey?
http://www.wnyc.org/shows/bl/episodes/2009/10/26/segments/143147 -
October 26th, 2009 6:08 pm
The Gotham Schools post includes a major news announcement buried in the last paragraph. One of the big issues in the UFT contract, which expires October 31st, was whether Bloomberg would push the envelope and advocate performance pay that pays good teachers more than bad teachers in similar positions, rather than awarding performance bonuses to all members of a school regardless of individual merit. Chris Cerf has just indicated that Bloomberg has thrown in the towel on this issue. Bloomberg has studiously avoided leaking any details of the City’s negotiations with the UFT, so this disclosure was surprising, but undoubtedly calculated.
-
October 26th, 2009 6:29 pm
Tom, you must know that teachers would never approve of something like this - it would eviscerate the contract - and therefore there was no “towel” to throw in. Raising such an issue is useful when Bloomberg and Klein want to distract the tabloid editors from the cheating, social promotion, and test-data manipulation that’s taking place in the schools and get them to line up behind him. But since he’s got the media overwhelmingly on his side, he probably realizes there’s no point in pushing non-serious proposals such as this one.
-
October 26th, 2009 9:12 pm
Boy, poor NPR, they can’t win. Are they in Bloomklein’s pocket too? Are they part of the conspiracy?
-
October 27th, 2009 3:30 pm
Tom is a good friend and one of the wisest analysts of school reform around. On this one, however, he completely missed the boat. His view that my comments yesterday were a calculated leak of the content of a labor negotiation and/or a harbinger of the Administration’s substantive positions is 100% inaccurate — although I am complimented by the cunning strategic skills he would apparently attribute to me. Similarly, his suggestion that my comments about NYC’s teacher bonus program constituted news — much less a “cave in” is equally inaccurate. Under NYC’s program, a pool of money is awarded to a school on the basis of schoolwide progress in improving student achievement. At that point, a compensation committee at the school level decides how to make individual awards. Tom would prefer that the program be limited to individual merit-based awards, regardless of the school’s progress as a whole — a perfectly sensible, if predictable, position for those who come at this issue “from the right.” We just do not happen to share it. In our view, a hybrid system that encourages school wide collaboration towards elevating student achievement, while enabling individual-based awards is the better approach. No “cave in” here, Tom; just a different point of view.
-
October 27th, 2009 4:26 pm
Mr. Cerf,
As long as you — and the paid DOE Truth Squad lurkers (many of whom are quite nice in person) — are here…
I imagine I’m not the only GS regular who’d be interested in your views on many a school-related topic. But let’s focus on just one. And with the election in less than a week, it’s not the nuances of the UFT contract.Since we’re already on “schoolwide progress,” I’d be interested in your views on the School Progress Reports (SPR) on which I understand they are based, and on which City Council Member Robert Jackson’s Education Committee is holding a hearing this Friday, October 30. Timely.
Do you have an explanation for how 87% of schools got A’s, and another 11% got B’s, this cycle?
Holy smokes! Are the schools really THAT good? Were your policies (while at DOE) THAT productive?
Will 87% of those schools get bonuses?How is it that 98% of schools in 2008-2009 can get A’s or B’s… but 1,500 teachers got an “Unsatisfactory” rating? (Look up “Scarlett Letter” in the GS “search” box.)
Is there even the slightest bit of correlation between which schools those 1,500 teachers teach at… and their school’s grade?Last year, 2007-2008, 83% of schools got A’s or B’s. Have our schools gotten 15% better in one year?
The inaugural year, 2006-2007 60% of schools got A’s or B’s. Have our schools gotten 38% better in two years?
At the other end, what were the policies that caused the percent of the schools getting D’s or F’s to shrink from 13% to 5% to 0.6%? Or is that a manifestation of school closings? How many schools were only in the D/F cellar ONE year?
Do you have an explanation for how a school’s SPR grade in one year has ZERO predictive value toward its grade the next year? Do schools really fluctuate that much?
What did the ones who swung UP by more than one letter do RIGHT? What did the ones (albeit a rare few this year) who swung DOWN do wrong?Tying the last few points together, how can DOE justify closing ANY school… when next year it could get an “A”?
Amidst rampant grade inflation on the “performance” metric (already two-fold between the tests getting easier and the cut scores getting moved), isn’t weighting 60% on “progress” simply double-counting “acceleration”?
Does anyone really believe 98% of our schools deserve A’s and B’s? This is random money being assigned by a random letter generator. If anything, it is hush money to discourage DOE employees from declaring the Emperor’s New Grading Scheme deserves an “F”. Snicker in private, collect the golden goose-egg.
Last, would you rather your own kids were in a “B” school on a citywide spectrum (25% of the weight in the overall grade), or an “A” school on a randomly-chosen peer group spectrum (75% weight)?
I’ve heard of roosters taking credit for the sunrise. But only in NYC do they take credit for digitally-enhanced Photoshop versions thereof. And roosters aren’t even running for office, so their incentive to paint glowing pictures isn’t quite as clear.
$85M buys a lot of crowing. And those bogus basis bonuses are calculated to mute any clucking.
-
October 27th, 2009 4:45 pm
On Chris Cerf’s comments, I will concede based on my exchange with him today that he clearly did not intend to make news with his comments on performance pay. What the comments make clear, though, is that Mayor Bloomberg is comfortable with the performance pay provisions of the existing contract. This is news because it is the first indication of what Bloomberg’s stance on this issue would be in the current negotiations, negotiations in which he could have chosen to be much bolder.
I have no problem with school-wide bonuses. In fact, I praised Denver and Houston, which provide schoolwide bonuses when a school performs well. But I also believe that in such schools a teacher who is exceptional should get paid more than a teacher who is average or below average.
That is not a right or left issue as Chris cutely tries to suggest, while staking out the “center” for himself. D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty and D.C. Superintendent Michelle Rhee are making the case for individual merit pay and neither are right-wingers.
And as for his reference to school-based labor-management committees being free to award merit as they see fit, Chris knows the union position on this issue and thus the outcome of that process.
The real issue is why is the Mayor — with $12 billion in his pocket, a Type A personality, and the election all but won — being timid? This is the time to swing for the fences.
The Mayor has done much that is admirable on education, and as Chris Cerf knows I have praised the Mayor repeatedly for his accomplishments. But, the 165-page contract as written is the number one constraint that will stop Joel Klein and Michael Bloomberg from taking reform to the next level — not because this will make wonks happy but because it will enable them to do right by children.
The Mayor fought hard to get mayoral control. But the Mayor is not really in control if he can’t pay good teachers better than bad teachers, has to corral incompetent teachers in rubber rooms, and pay teachers who aren’t teaching indefinitely in Absent Teacher Reserves (ATRs). These are contractual issues. And that’s why this round of negotiations matters.
-
October 28th, 2009 9:47 pm
“…. a hybrid system that encourages school wide collaboration towards elevating student achievement, while enabling individual-based awards….”
Some day, but not too soon I bet, someone at the DOE will stop speaking educorp….. I just wonder who will be brave enough to start.
Leave a Reply
Mapping the Budget Cuts
10 Comments
Subscribe to comments with RSS or TrackBack