I wonder how many small schools are allowed to screen. That would be an interesting comparison. Are screened schools being compared to nonscreened? I know the schools in our comparison group (there were large and small, I think) were not screened.

I find your critique of the privatization cabal compelling. I normally don’t think conspirators are smart enough to pull off elaborate plans (i.e, I tend to believe we give them too much credit), but, in this case, the picture you paint of Gates, Broad. etc and their Bloomberg/Klein agents booming behind the curtain makes sense.

I also whole-heartedly agree with your deconstruction of Thomas W. Carroll, who has carte blanche on the op-ed pages of the tabloids. Murdoch and Zuckerman are the megaphone he is using to prop up his anti-union, pro-charter school agenda. Thank you for piercing Carroll’s veil of sanctimony.

Leonie, you are heroic. If sincerity and interest in children were criteria you would be Schools Chancellor–or damn close to it.

By the way, I discovered the research study that Polakow-Suransky bases his defense of School Progress Reports on. It appeared in the Journal of Burmese Neurology and was re-printed in the Review of Non-Significant Findings. The title of the report is: Are There Any Differences in Size between Large and Small Schools? [Just kidding.]

I don’t quite understand your point about small schools and large. It seems clear to me what Shael is saying above, but tell me if I’m getting it wrong. By and large, small and large schools get the same population of students. Many small schools outperform large schools, although some large schools outperform some small schools. This rings true with my own experience as an educator in the city and I appreciate that there isn’t a purely dogmatic response (eg, all small schools are better than all large schools). So while the small schools at Van Arsdale are a success story, we shouldn’t rush to shut down Francis Lewis or other successful large schools.

I don’t think all our graduates are ready for college, and that’s a shame that schools across our country share. I tend to be skeptical of folks who believe it’s because unscrupulous teachers and principals are handing out credits so they can get bonuses. Sure it happens somewhere in this huge system, but get to know NYC teachers and principals. Most of the ones I meet are hard-working and really do want the best for students. They’re not in it for the money.

Maybe one solution would be to track our students through their first year after HS and award high schools points for how well their students do in they year after graduation. That’s a complicated task but would hold teachers and principals accountable for making sure students are college-ready.

The EMS Guide posted on the DOE website with the earlier set of cut scores is dated June 5; while the Aug.6 version has the new cut scores. Meanwhile, the state scores were released on May 7 and June 1, and within days there were multiple reports on how inflated they were.

Or did you mean by saying that “if we could have predicted the future” you would have set different cut scores, meaning if you knew how much ridicule the grades would receive? In essence, theby setting the cut scores differently each year, the DOE controls how many grades of each category will be awarded. Doesn’t that highlight the subjective — and some might say, political — nature of this exercise?

Corporate ed deform, as executed through the vehicle of mayoral control, is about disenfranchisement, the privatization of school governance, and the creation of separate-and-unequal schools. It’s a mirror image of the hyper-polarized society, in which losses are socialized and surpluses are privatized, that is rapidly evolving around us.

The legitimate desires of parents who are desperate to find decent schools for their children are being manipulated, and parents in minority communities are being pitted against each other in a despicable divide-and-conquer effort – masked with civil rights rhetoric – that avoids the need, and the overclass’s refusal, to improve all public schools.

I find it also strange that he should argue on one hand that small schools only slightly outperform the large school according their metric system, yet Joel Klein at every possible opportunity brags about the huge success of the small schools over the large. Why can’t they maintain a consistent line?

Even within this posting, there appears to a be an ambiguous message. First, he says that the system is fair comparing small schools vs. large in the peer indexes because ” Smaller schools perform slightly better on average (though there are many cases of large schools outperforming smaller schools — Francis Lewis, our largest non-specialized high school, earned an A, for example). ” Then he goes on to write that the ”
… The three new small schools on that {Van Arsdale] campus have a collective graduation rate above 80%. The school they replaced had a 35% graduation rate in 2003-04. … It’s implausible to suggest that very modest demographic differences led to a difference of 4-5 points in the graduation rate between 2003-04 and 2008-09. By any standard, this campus is a terrific educational success story.” Either the system is fair that compares large schools against small, or its rigged, to show off the small school’s advantages. You can’t have it both ways.

Moreover, in the first comparison chart, he is comparing small schools against all schools in the system; the second he is comparing the outcomes in terms of the graduation rate of the small schools on the Van Arsdale campus to the previous school — which I would bet you had a very different student body on the whole — w/ far more high-needs students. He says the variance is only 4-5 points, but is he counting the number of ELL students, which is not included in the progress reports? is he counting 8th grade attendance factor, which I dont think the progress reports measure? This sort of sleight of hand that the DOE constantly attempts, mixing up comparison groups in order to build their case. This is also why none of the evaluations of the NYC small schools were considered rigorous enough to show positive results, in the view of the What Works Clearinghouse of the IES — because there was no attempt to fully control for the differential background of the students at the small schools compared to the large schools that they replaced. I dont think many people would doubt that if you take less needy students and give them smaller classes they will do better than high needs students who attend overcrowded schools with large classes. This should not be a surprise to anyone. But whether it serves the cause of equity is another question. And without a more reliable, independent system of measuring student learning than passing Regents exams that are being scored by the teachers and principals at the same schools, as well as credit accumulation through discredited practices like credit recovery and like, I don’t think we can really tell much of anything about what is happening at these schools.

Per the passage in the Fertig book (in which I am the nominal foil for Mr. Liebman), history has proven him not only to be short on follow-through per above, but the “acceleration vs. speed” trap in my coinage, that I and others predicted, is indeed what came to pass.

Liebman’s filibuster that night could not control the march of subsequent facts.

Sweet comeupance would be to MAINTAIN the one-year view as the tests get de-inflated. Or… restate (downgrade) the last two report years based on three years of data, not just current and prior.

And for gawd’s sake, reduce the weights on both “peergroup” and “progress.” (Thinking of ES/MS scoring; HS a bit different.)