It’s no surprise that the State Education Department and the Board of Regents have taken up the cause of ensuring an equitable distribution of highly-qualified teachers across New York State.  The key justification for such a goal is the fact that the K-12 education system is shortchanging our children.  Although some students are highly successful, many more are not, and the problems are concentrated in urban school systems serving large numbers of poor children of color. 

If that’s the problem, is improving the education of teachers the solution?  It’s certainly part of the solution, given what we know about the centrality of teaching to student learning.  But it’s by no means the entire solution, as a great many other forces shape student outcomes.  For example, a great teacher can’t compensate for a child coming to school hungry, and great teaching of an out-of-date curriculum only results in great mastery of out-of-date knowledge.  I trust that Chancellor Tisch and Commissioner Steiner are not seduced by claims that the single most important determinant of a child’s achievement is the quality of his or her teachers, because that’s simply not true.  Family background continues to be the dominant factor.  But the quality of teachers is, at least in theory, something that is manipulable via education policy initiatives, and it’s a lot more tractable than addressing the fact that one in five children under the age of 18 in New York State live below the poverty line.

So if we redefine the problem as too few students in New York State are taught by highly qualified teachers, then what’s the solution?  The recent proposal brought by the State Education Department to the Board of Regents offers five recommendations.  In some ways, this package of proposals is a straightforward extension of trends that have shaped the course of public education in the U.S. over the past two decades:  a heightened concern for holding school systems, schools and teachers accountable for student outcomes, with more oversight by the federal government and the state;  an expansion of the role of markets in the operation of public schooling, coupled with the belief that market forces will reward successful enterprises, and drive the unsuccessful out of business;  and a targeted deregulation that allows some institutions to strike a bargain for increased autonomy in exchange for increased accountability to the state.

There’s not a whole lot of evidence that these kinds of policy reforms have led to better educational outcomes for children in the U.S.  It’s challenging to show that accountability systems such as No Child Left Behind or state-level initiatives have led to substantially higher achievement;  and the charter schools spawned by the expansion of markets have, by most accounts, included some great successes and some abject failures, with little overall impact on student performance across the country.  So I am not optimistic that the proposed reforms will result in sharp improvements in teaching and learning in public schools in New York State. 

As is often the case with public policy, the devil is in the details, and I’d like to take a couple of minutes to mention two things that I’m worried about.  The first is the heightened attention to classroom effectiveness in both performance-based assessments for teacher certification, and in the assessment of the institutions which offer teacher preparation programs.  I worry that the State Education Department and the Board of Regents will be obliged to rely on an overly-narrow set of measures of classroom effectiveness, due to the constraints of time, money, and technology. 

Portfolio assessments, including lesson plans, videotapes of teaching practice, collections of student work, and candidate self-assessments are a promising direction, and there are some existing models that may be useful to guide the design of such assessments.  I’d be happier if there were more evidence that the implementation of portfolio assessments resulted in better teaching and learning, and if there were a more explicit theory of how having assessments produces better teaching. 

But it’s striking that the recommendations single out value-added student assessment data as components of both the portfolios of candidates for professional certification and of the profiles of certifying institutions.  Simply put, the technology for using value-added student assessment data for these purposes is not ready for prime time, and likely will not be for many years to come.

One major obstacle is the lack of reliable and valid measures of student performance that can serve as the basis for value-added assessments of teacher effectiveness.  When the 2009 New York State results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress were released last month, they showed a flat level of performance at odds with the sharp growth observed on the New York State exams at every grade level in English Language Arts and mathematics over the past several years.  Commissioner Steiner and Chancellor Tisch have both expressed concern that the state’s testing system is not telling us what we need to know about the academic performance of New York State’s children and youth.  The tests and test items have become predictable over time, and some grade-level standards have never appeared on the exams.  There are, for example, 48 eighth-grade math standards.  This year, just seven standards made up 50% of the points on the eighth-grade exam. 

The state assessment system is broken, and it can’t be fixed overnight.  I strongly urge the Commissioner and Chancellor to take the time to develop a new assessment system that more accurately measures students’ mastery of school subjects, and that is designed to measure changes in students’ learning over time.  And, if the objective is to use the assessment system to evaluate teachers, schools, school districts, and institutions of higher education, it’s important to build that objective into the design of the assessments, rather than using them for a purpose for which they were never designed in the first place. 

The technology for test design is surprisingly complex and fragile, and we do ourselves no favors by assuming that we can just whip up a test overnight. 

The Regents exams, which I assume would be central to measures of value-added effectiveness at the secondary level, are problematic in their own right.  I don’t understand why the State Education Department has high school students’ Regents exams scored by the teachers at their own schools.  One big idea that the Freakonomics school probably has right is that people respond to incentives.  And there are powerful incentives for schools to maximize students’ scores on Regents exams in ways that compromise the validity of those scores.  We see the fruits of this when students go off to college and find that they are unprepared for college-level work.

So in essence, I’m saying to Commissioner Steiner and Chancellor Tisch, “Clean up the state assessment system — and take the time to do it right.  Then we can talk about value-added assessment.”

But beyond the many questions about value-added effects on students’ test scores, we should be asking, how do we assess a teacher’s contributions to other learning outcomes?  Surely we care about more than test scores.  What are good measures of a teacher’s contributions to preparing students to be competent citizens in our democracy?  How much are the Board of Regents and the State Education Department willing to invest in creating measures that will capture how well teachers teach students to think, question and act?

A brief vignette may reveal the challenge.  It’s January, and Ms. Bilsky, a fourth-grade teacher in the Bronx, is teaching a math lesson.  The subject is geometry, and the lesson is about how to classify angles as either acute or obtuse.  The topic is a standard from the state’s math core curriculum.  In the middle of the lesson, Rashid, a boy in the class, audibly aims a racial slur at his classmate Javier.  Ms. Bilsky hears it, but she chooses to ignore it, instead plowing ahead with the lesson.  At the end of the year, the students in Ms. Bilsky’s class did a bit better on the state math assessment than the students in other fourth-grade classrooms in the Bronx.

Now, is that good teaching? 

The value-added assessment will tell us that it is good teaching.  

And a teacher preparation program sending a cohort of Ms. Bilsky’s out into the field might look pretty good too.  But I think we should demand more of our teachers and our teacher preparation programs than simply raising students’ test scores.  And I think we should demand more of the New York State Education Department in developing measures that can capture a broader array of outcomes of good teaching.  I do not doubt that it will be difficult to do so;  important things often are.        

The second issue I want to discuss is the proposal to pilot a new teacher certification model that would enable providers other than institutions of higher education to offer teacher preparation programs, with the Board of Regents awarding Master’s degrees to the candidates who complete these programs.  I am deeply troubled by this prospect, because it seems to be a serious threat to the very nature of graduate education.  Currently, state regulations require that most graduate-level courses in certification programs be offered by full-time faculty holding terminal degrees, with the assumption that these faculty are scholars of the subjects they teach.  Now, we all know that there are schools of education, and other professional schools, around the state, where the quality of research may not be very high, and the contribution to a body of knowledge about real-world practice may not be very great.  But the explicit decoupling of the production of knowledge from the preparation of practitioners is, in my view, a very bad idea.  And one might wonder whether other occupations regulated by the state will be far behind.  Will health clinics be authorized to prepare physicians?  Will mental health facilities train psychologists? 

Moreover, I suspect that a proposal such as this might tax the capacity of the State Education Department to offer appropriate oversight.  Would the Department have to devote staff to ensure that these pilot programs met existing criteria for preparation — libraries, facilities and physical space, qualified faculty, relationships with local schools and field placements, curricula and syllabi, and so on?  Or would these pilot programs not have to meet the state’s existing standards?

I think what’s most baffling in this proposal is the awarding of a Master’s degree by the Board of Regents.  Why is it necessary for the state’s recognition of completion of a teacher preparation program to be coupled with a Master’s degree?  Neither No Child Left Behind nor the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act requires that a highly-qualified teacher have a master’s degree, and there are plenty of undergraduate education programs around the state of New York that lead to teacher certification.  Having the Board of Regents award degrees that are widely understood to be the province of accredited institutions of higher education in a sense turns the State Education Department into a giant ed school.  Doesn’t the Department have enough problems, without tarring it with that particular brush?

In a speech in Washington, D.C., last week, Bloomberg called on Tisch and Steiner to ratify the common standards “as soon as possible and without material alteration.”

“As much as I respect the mayor, I have to disagree with him,” Tisch said, saying that instead, New York should adopt standards that are tougher than the national bar. “We will reserve the right to increase the rigor of the standards and be at the top of the heap and not at the bottom of the heap,” she said.

Tisch made the comment alongside state education commissioner David Steiner on a panel at Columbia University’s Teachers College. The two were there to discuss the state’s education agenda and its bid for the competitive Race to the Top fund. And while Tisch did not address Bloomberg’s other proposals to make the state more attractive to federal grantmakers, she said that the state is in a strongly competitive position now.

Tisch and Steiner also emphasized that their education plans are being developed independently of the Obama administration, and the two agendas may not entirely align.

One significant difference of opinion between federal and state priorities is in regard to the charter cap. The Obama administration has encouraged states to shed their caps. Tisch and Steiner stated again tonight, as they have before, that the cap encourages competition so that only the highest quality charters may open.

“We have not tailored our sails to the winds of Race to the Top,” Steiner said. “Where there is overlap — and there is considerable overlap — we welcome it.”

But pushing an agenda that differs significantly from federal priorities might be easier said than done in a fiscal climate that Steiner acknowledged was like a “tsunami.”

Steiner said that the state education department has already sustained an 11 percent budget cut, and this year school districts relied on $700 million in stimulus support that likely will not come again next year.

Preliminary data from this fall shows that average kindergarten class sizes citywide grew from 20.7 last year to 21.7 this year. Though its schools do not have the largest classes, Brooklyn saw the largest jump from last year in class size across all grades in K-8, while Manhattan saw the greatest spike in enrollment.

The rising class sizes come against a backdrop of big investments by the state into reducing class size.

In a Powerpoint presentation created by the city’s Department of Education, officials noted that the city’s ability to lower class size in the coming years would be further compromised by upcoming budget cuts.

“Continued decline in fiscal resources will significantly reduce the capacity of schools to meet annual class size targets in the future,” the report said.

Last year, the first year that the DOE reported increasing class sizes since Mayor Bloomberg took control of the schools in 2002, average class sizes grew by fractions of a point. Kindergarten classes increased from an average of 20.6 students to 20.7. This year, the increases were substantially larger in every grade.

Executive director of Class Size Matters, Leonie Haimson, has distilled some of the data into the following chart. It shows that Queens and Staten Island have the largest average K-3 and 4-8 classes respectively.

What’s more, Bloomberg’s directive could have undesirable unintended consequences, Bloomfield writes:

Rather than hastening their exit, the mayor has created a legal loophole for ineffective teachers to remain in classrooms.  What the mayor has actually done is to hand every failing teacher, already on the chopping block based on principals’ prior determinations, a ready argument that his or her tenure was denied on illegal grounds.

Mayor Bloomberg’s fuss-and-feathers over use of student performance data in teacher tenure decisions is a short-lived diversion, like his presidential run during a previous lame duck period. Legal authority for his position is questionable and of little practical consequence. At best, under current law, he has one year to try to work his will but no principal’s tenure decision will change based on this new edict. Weakened by his slim re-election margin, Bloomberg’s tantrum is an understandable political strategy to appear politically strong. But our education plight is too important to be distracted by this sideshow.

The mayor invokes that portion of New York State Education Law § 3012-b as added by Chapter 57 of the Laws of 2007 which permits principals to make teacher tenure determinations based on “an evaluation of the extent to which the teacher successfully utilized analysis of available student performance data” and the more elastic “assessment of the teacher’s performance by the teacher’s building administrator.” The law was clarified by Chapter 57 of the Laws of 2008 to prohibit use of student test scores to grant or deny tenure. But even if the earlier version is found to permit use of test data for current tenure evaluations, State Education Commissioner’s Regulation § 100.2(o)(2)(iii) appears to prevent this use unless included in probationary teachers’ “professional performance review plan,” a formal document that must be developed “in collaboration with teachers … selected by the [Chancellor] with the advice of their respective peers.” Collective bargaining issues also exist as a change in the terms and conditions of employment. As a result, it is doubtful that the mayor’s unilateral analysis has much legal weight.

Rather than hastening their exit, the mayor has created a legal loophole for ineffective teachers to remain in classrooms.  What the mayor has actually done is to hand every failing teacher, already on the chopping block based on principals’ prior determinations, a ready argument that his or her tenure was denied on illegal grounds. Principals already know who they want to fire and have developed their own grounds to deny tenure. At best, test scores will provide an additional, controversial excuse. And those who principals want to keep will surely not be fired on the basis of test scores alone. This grandstanding —Bloomberg didn’t even let the chancellor announce the move, so impatient was he to garner public credit — will thus have the reverse effect of its purported intent. The mayor has made martyrs of the system’s dross.

Test scores from the first few years of a teacher’s career are relatively meaningless anyway. Even if some test scores, interpreted correctly, turn out to be valid measures of long term teacher quality, our current three year tenure clock is too short to make that determination. How can a fair evaluation be made from test scores during the first year on the job? Other data such as classroom management, content knowledge, and the ability to improve will be more determinative of retention. So the second year becomes the benchmark to compare to the third year, if the testing calendar allows. But this permits insufficient data for a studied tenure determination. Other measures, especially classroom observations which I strongly encouraged in my last column, are more likely to provide usable information. The mayor seemed to admit as much in his recent Washington speech but continues to give principals too little time to practice what he preaches.

In sum, the mayor has picked the wrong battle. Nonetheless, if he really wants to use student test data to evaluate teachers for tenure, his first step should first be in Albany, convincing legislators to adopt a probationary period of at least five years, effectively extending the period for at will termination and giving slow starters a chance to prove their mettle. Five years’ experience would allow for meaningful, long-term evaluation of teachers’ growth and the justifiable reward of tenure that would follow.

“When we see an actual proposal in writing we will take appropriate action,” Mulgrew said in an emailed statement. “The new state Commissioner of Education says the state tests are a broken measurement. Are these the tests the Mayor wants to use as a tool to evaluate teachers?”

Mulgrew also specifically challenged Bloomberg’s effort to make changes that could also made through the teachers union contract, which the union and the city are currently negotiating.

“These issues could have been — and still could be — resolved with better management and hard work, not legislation,” Mulgrew said. “His other proposals deserve thoughtful review by the Legislature, which has demonstrated appropriate skepticism in the past about mayoral initiatives like the failed West Side stadium plan and congestion pricing.”

But Bloomberg’s speech today was a strong signal that the mayor could try to bypass talks with the union and go directly to the state legislature to achieve his goals. The mayor also offered another get-tough tactic: A threat to sue the state if the legislature does not eliminate the charter school cap provide public funding for charter school buildings.

In his speech today, the mayor also invoked the power of the president. Speaking alongside U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, Bloomberg pitched the changes as a way to bring the state closer in line to Obama administration education goals and strengthen the state’s application for a share of a $4.3 billion federal stimulus fund.

In addition to his announcement about the tenure law, Bloomberg asked state lawmakers to change rules on hiring and firing teachers, which he said would help the state attract better teachers and more quickly remove ineffective teachers.

The tenure law, passed last year after heavy lobbying from the city and state teachers unions, bars the use of student test scores as a factor in teacher tenure decisions.

But the mayor pointed out this morning that the rules apply only to teachers who began work after July 2008. Teachers up for tenure this year were hired in 2007 and so are not subject to the provisions, Bloomberg argued. If legislators allow the law to expire on schedule this June, then it will never have applied to any teacher.

Right now, 1,200 teachers are receiving regular paychecks and benefits even though they don’t hold full-time positions in the city schools. Bloomberg is proposing to make it easier to move those teachers off the payroll.

Bloomberg also targeted the “rubber rooms,” which hold teachers accused of offenses ranging from incompetence to abuse.  A backlog of accused teachers means the rubber room is clogged with people waiting for a verdict on whether they can go back into the classroom.

Bloomberg said that his proposals should not come as a surprise to the union.

“I didn’t consult with them, but they certainly know my views that we should use all means that we have to evaluate who the better teachers are, promote them, and pay them more if we can,” Bloomberg said.

Speaking to reporters after the panel, Bloomberg refused to elaborate on whether he was seeking legislative change as an alternative to pushing for these measures in contract negotiations, saying that the city does not negotiate union contracts in public. But Bloomberg acknowledged that some of today’s proposals would likely also come up in negotiations.

“To the extent that the contract will cover reforms we need in the school system overall, we will be discussing that,” he said.

1. Cut scores: Contrary to Leonie Haimson’s allegation, we did not determine the percentage of A grades after learning the results of the 2009 state tests. The cut scores for the elementary and middle school progress reports were set in September 2008 and communicated to principals in the Sept. 23, 2008, mailing of Principals’ Weekly (pasted at the end of this post) — long before the state tests were even administered. The two educator guides Ms. Haimson cites correspond to different years — one is for the 2007-08 progress report and the other is an updated version for the 2008-09 progress report.

We raised the cut scores significantly from 2007-08 to 2008-09 to reflect the progress schools had made. However, the gains our schools achieved in 2008-09 surpassed anything we had seen during the last few years. Had we been able to forecast this growth, we would have set the cut scores even higher.

2. Multiple years of data — We use three years of data to establish benchmarks for comparing schools’ performance and progress. Put another way, the range of scores that determine each school’s peer group are based on three years of achievement data.

That said, we look only the most recent year’s results when determining progress report grades because it is critical that schools focus on their students’ achievement every single year. Using three years of results would allow schools that performed well for one or two years to mask poor results in a third year. Also, our high school progress reports are based on hundreds — and in many cases thousands — of individual student-level outcomes across multiple measures for each school. In this regard, we are very comfortable with the level of statistical rigor reflected in the results.

3. Small schools vs. large schools — In my original post, I explained why we do not control for a school’s size when determining peer groups and also provided data showing that on average the new small schools opened under Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein have outperformed all other schools on the progress report. This data is not inconsistent with the fact that many other schools — large schools as well as small schools opened prior to this administration — also performed well.

In addition, data do not support the claim that small schools serve less challenging populations. In fact, as the chart below shows, small schools serve more challenging populations in every high-need demographic category with the exception of special education, where there is parity. Small schools are not always better than large schools, but small schools in New York City are more likely to be successful with high-need students. Based on my experience as a teacher and a principal, I would argue that this has a lot to do with the size of the principal’s class. In a small school, the leader is likely to be supervising only 30 teachers, compared to large schools where there are often 150+ teachers. The small school structure has fewer administrative layers, making it much easier to know and support each teacher’s individual needs-which in turn enables teachers to do the same for their students.

4. Class size — Class size is not correlated with progress report score. As the chart below shows, the average class size at schools receiving each letter grade on the high school progress report varies little.

This is not to say that adjusting groupings of students and teachers should be ignored as a possible strategy to increase teacher effectiveness and student achievement. Again, in my own experience as a high school principal, I found that a powerful way to increase the effectiveness of my teachers was to reduce the total number of students for whom each of my teachers was responsible throughout the day and week. As UCLA Professor William Ouchi has demonstrated, when teachers’ total student load decreases, student performance increases.

5. Credits and Regents — Passing five Regents Exams and earning 44 course credits are the core requirements defined by New York State for graduation, and the New York City accountability system is based on these measures. Failing to measure credit accumulation would return us to a system where principals are not accountable for student learning.

Unfortunately, there have always been charges of cheating in our system, which are dealt with when they are substantiated. The vast majority of school leaders and teachers approach this part of their work professionally and report it when they see a colleague do otherwise. Staff from New York State and New York City randomly monitor the administration and scoring of Regents examinations. As with the Grades 3-8 Math and ELA examinations, any reports of mis-administration or security breaches are immediately reported for appropriate action. Schools where such reports have been made receive additional monitoring during the scoring and administration process.

Regarding credit recovery, our schools follow the state’s guidelines for awarding these credits. When a student doesn’t pass a required course or doesn’t complete all of the necessary coursework, the student must make up that work; this is the practice we refer to as “credit recovery” and it is a sensible and longstanding practice in schools nationwide. Credit recovery can be achieved in several ways, including retaking an entire course during the school year or attending summer school. In addition, as the State Education Department recently explained: “Sometimes students may come close to passing a course and may have deficiencies only in certain clearly defined areas of knowledge and skill. In those cases, it may not be necessary for the student to retake the entire course. Instead, the student might be permitted to make up those deficiencies, master the appropriate standards, and receive credit.” Like any other process, credit recovery can be abused. This abuse hurts students and is cause for disciplinary action. To that end, we have been working with the state to establish clear guidelines and processes for credit recovery. In October, the Board of Regents adopted a policy for making up course credit and directed districts to draft regulations to implement that policy. We will continue to work with the state to implement the policy and regulations in New York City.

Finally, I’d like to echo the suggestion that we focus our efforts on preparing our students for college. We are beginning to work on the complicated task of tracking students’ performance through their first years after high school and look forward to using this kind of data in the future to increase the rigor of the progress reports.

***

From the Sept. 23, 2008, Principals’ Weekly:

2008-09 Progress Report Cut Scores Elementary and middle schools

When they released elementary and middle school Progress Reports last week, Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein celebrated the accomplishments of schools in increasing student progress across New York City and noted that those gains, along with the work that remains to be done, make it appropriate to raise the bar – something we said we would do as Progress Report grades rise. We are setting new cut scores that elementary, middle, and K-8 schools need to achieve to earn a grade of A, B, C, or D on next year’s Progress Report. The new cut scores are as follows:

A – Progress Report score of 68+
B – Progress Report score from 54 to 67.9
C – Progress Report score from 43 to 53.9
D – Progress Report score from 33 to 42.9
F – Progress Report score less than 33

In the October release of the ITT, schools will receive a new Progress Report data file that contains the school’s Progress Report “modeler.” These new cut scores will be built into the modeler to allow schools to run scenarios that help them forecast how they may perform on next year’s Progress Report using these new cut scores.

Speaking at the Center for American Progress, Bloomberg asked Schools Chancellor Joel Klein to follow a new interpretation of the state law that bans the use of student performance in tenure decisions. The law only applies to teachers hired after July 1, 2008, Bloomberg said. Teachers up for tenure this year, who were hired in 2007, are not subject to the rule, according to this interpretation, and so will be evaluated using their students’ test score progress as a factor.

The announcement came as the mayor called on Albany to enact a number of legislative changes, including mandating school districts to evaluate teachers with student performance data and eliminating the charter cap, that would make New York State more competitive in its Race to the Top application.

Much more to come; the full press release accompanying the mayor’s announcement, and the text of his comments this morning, are below the jump.

MAYOR BLOOMBERG CHALLENGES ALBANY TO LIFT SEVEN ROADBLOCKS PREVENTING NEW YORK FROM WINNING THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION’S ‘RACE TO THE TOP’ EDUCATION REFORM COMPETITION

Mayor’s Proposals Could Net New York City More than $150 million of the $5 Billion Federal Program

Directs Chancellor to Start Using Student Performance Data Immediately to Help Make Teacher Tenure Decisions

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg today urged New York State education officials and the State Legislature to implement seven specific measures that will enable New York State to compete effectively for hundreds of millions of dollars that are available through the Obama Administration’s Race to the Top education reform program. The new program will grant $5 billion to states that move to adopt high standards; develop strong data systems that measure student growth and provide feedback to teachers; recruit, develop, reward, and retain effective teachers and principals; and turn around low-achieving schools. The Mayor also announced that he has instructed City Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein to begin using student performance data immediately to inform teacher tenure decisions. The Mayor delivered his remarks at an event hosted by the Washington-based Center for American Progress, where he appeared with U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Education Trust President Kati Haycock.

The Mayor urged State education officials and the State Legislature to take the following steps, each of which would add points to the State’s Race to the Top application score card – and, therefore, millions of dollars to City and State coffers. The Mayor’s proposals, which together could net the City more than $150 million in badly-needed federal funds, are:

• Mandate all school districts in New York State develop teacher evaluation systems that use student performance data as one of multiple sources of input.

• Use State Education Department discretionary grants to attract and retain high-performing math, science, and special needs teachers in low-income schools.

• End “last-in, first-out” rules requiring principals to layoff or excess the newest teachers, even if they are among the best teachers, and instead allow principals to make such decisions based on merit.

• Streamline the process for removing bad teachers from the classroom and the payroll, ending the ‘Rubber Room’ as we know it.

• Ratify the nationwide Common Core Standards as soon as possible and without material alteration.

• Eliminate the charter school cap and provide facilities funding for charter schools.

• Impose a one-year limit on the time teachers can remain in an “excess pool,” as was done in Chicago, saving $55 million annually and enabling the City to close and replace the lowest performing 10 percent of its schools.

The following are Mayor Bloomberg’s remarks as delivered at the Center for American Progress.

“Arne, thank you and good morning everyone. Great to see you, Kati thank you for coming. I’m joined by Dennis Walcott, our Deputy Mayor for Education, as well as Joel Klein, our great Chancellor. I’m sure everyone here is thinking about turkey and pumpkin pie, and that’s fine. Tonight I’ll be watching the balloons being blown up. You can watch it on television. It’s an incredible experience. I actually can’t imagine as much hot air in one place, although this is Washington, so perhaps.

“It’s always a pleasure to be in the nation’s capital, particularly since this is the only city whose basketball team is doing as badly as New York’s, so I feel right at home. I ride the subway every day, and the only time anybody has ever yelled at me was one time as I was getting off a big, hulking guy looked at me, glared at me, and screamed: ‘Fix the Knicks!’ There are some things even a mayor can’t do.

“Before President Obama took office earlier this year, Rahm Emanuel told us that we should – quote – ‘Never allow a serious crisis to go to waste.’

“And so the President is not only working to stabilize the financial markets and save the auto industry from immediate collapse; he focused on the long-term economic challenges, including the auto industry’s public sector equivalent, and that is our school system.

“If you think about it, both the auto industry and our school system were built for another era.  Both were very slow to adapt to changing times. And neither can compete in the 21^st century without major structural reforms that place consumers at the center of their operations. In the case of our schools, the consumers are the children.  Not the politicians.  Not the labor unions.  And not the ideologues.  Schools exist to ensure that children learn – as much as possible, as well as possible.

“And for the first time, I will say, the federal government is telling states through its ‘Race to the Top’ program: Discard policies that impede learning and adopt policies that promote learning – or forfeit federal funding.

“As Arne had said a number of times, ‘A state can’t enter Race to the Top if it prohibits schools from using student achievement data to evaluate teachers and that’s why California just repealed its prohibition on doing so.’

“In New York, the State Legislature passed a law last year that actually tells principals: You can evaluate teachers on any criteria you want – just not on student achievement data. That’s like saying to hospitals: You can evaluate heart surgeons on any criteria you want – just not patient survival rates! You really can’t make this up!  Thankfully, the law in New York is set to expire this June – but that is not enough.

“We will urge the State not just to prohibit but to require all districts to create data-driven systems to comprehensively evaluate teachers and principals.  And we want New York City to lead the way. As it turns out our lawyers now tell us after a very close reading of New York’s law, the current law does not actually stop us from using student data to evaluate teachers who are up for tenure this particular school year, because the way it was written it covers only teachers hired after July 1^st of 2008, and those are not up this year.

“So today, I’ve directed our schools Chancellor, Joel Klein, to ensure that principals actually use student achievement data to help evaluate teachers who are up for tenure this year. It is an aggressive policy, but our obligation is to take care of our kids. And we’ll also begin creating our own comprehensive evaluation system that includes classroom reviews and student achievement data.

“Now, we all know that great teaching is reflected in more than test scores – but we certainly should never dismiss quantitative data in favor of subjective opinions that fit a predetermined conclusion. That might make all of us feel good, but it really doesn’t help our children.

“Using data to help evaluate teachers and principals will get a state into the Race to the Top, but as Secretary Duncan has repeatedly said, unless states take other major steps, they’re not going to get very far off the starting line.

“And for New York City, that’s worrisome from a short-term budget perspective, because in this economic environment, we cannot afford to leave federal money on the table. And it’s even more worrisome from a long-term economic perspective.  Any state that sits out the Race to the Top will lose jobs and revenues just as surely as car companies that sat out the race to build affordable hybrids, not to mention shortchanging our kids on the education they need to compete in an increasingly global and technological world.

“Today, I just want to take a few minutes to walk you through six other steps that New York should take to compete in the Race to the Top – and the more steps we take, the more likely we think we’ll be able to receive hundreds of millions of dollars in new funding that can only go to improve our system.

“The six steps fall into two broad categories: attracting and retaining more great teachers, and creating more great schools. And Mr. Secretary, I hope you hold all states accountable for submitting an application that achieves both. The time for excuses is over and this really is our nation’s future and it is in your hands. We will play our part, you can rest assured.

“The evaluation system that New York City is going to create will lay the foundation for each of the first three steps, including step one: paying higher salaries for higher-performing teachers and principals and for those with skills that are in the greatest demand.

“In New York City, over the last eight years we’ve raised teacher salaries by 43 percent, and veteran teachers in New York City now make more than $100,000 a year. I’ve always believed that if you want the best, you’ve got to pay for it and we really are improving the quality of teaching in New York City and the quality of those who are providing the service. We’ve also adopted, you should know, a bonus program – in partnership with our labor unions – that rewards teachers and principals in schools that meet their benchmarks.

“But sadly, like most places, New York City has difficulty attracting science and math teachers, because they have so many other career options that pay more.  And we’re also prohibited from paying the highest-performing teachers more money. This kind of lock-step pay scale is what you see in factory assembly lines – but teachers, we think, are professionals certified by the State!  And we need to pay based on skills, not just seniority – and we’ll start by demanding that our State Education Department changes the way it awards incentive pay.

“We want to see that money go to where it’s needed the most: to math, science, and special need teachers in low-income schools who receive high ratings on comprehensive evaluations. This would benefit students, schools, teachers, and our Race to the Top application – and rest assured, we will beat the drum among the public to make sure that this happens.

“The second reform that our new evaluation system would make possible – step number two – is ending a layoff policy called, ‘last-in, first out.’ Right now, as everybody knows, State law typically mandates that if layoffs have to be made, the newest teachers are the first to go – even if they are among the best teachers. The only thing worse than having to lay off teachers would be laying off great teachers instead of failing teachers. Remember who this system’s supposed to work for: the students, not its employees. With a transparent new evaluation system, principals will have the knowledge to make layoffs based on merit – but the ability to do so only if the State Legislature gives us the authority to do so, and so we will pressure them to get that authority.

“Third, our evaluation system will also give us the ability to identify the lowest-performing teachers, but it’s also a key criteria for Race to the Top funding. In New York City, removing bad teachers from the classroom is extremely difficult – and moving them off the payroll is even harder. When a teacher is removed from the classroom for multiple negative reviews, or for breaking the law, he or she can go to something known as the ‘rubber room.’ It is basically a suspension hall for teachers – with full pay. Believe it or not, we’re still paying teachers in New York City who have been in the rubber room for seven years – and counting.  Seven years!  This is the public’s money and this is the money that would otherwise go to pay those teachers who are helping our children. This is an absurd and outrageous abuse of tenure – and we’ve got to work with the State representatives to fix it.

“But let me be clear: We are not proposing an end to tenure. We are only proposing that our State Legislature streamline the process for removing failing teachers from classrooms and put an end to the ‘rubber rooms’ as we know it. Now, to ensure that students have more great teachers and more great schools, we are going to take a few more steps.

“Step number four in our list of six is the most important and that is raising standards. I believe that the federal government should require states to adopt a single national standard for all students and all subjects. But as Bill Bennett, one of Arne’s predecessors, once told me the reason we don’t have national testing is that conservatives hate anything with the word ‘national’ in it, and the liberals hate anything with the word ‘testing’ in it.

“Race to the Top very pragmatically skirts this ideological divide by incentivizing states to adopt a Common Core Standard – and I’m glad to say that New York State has signed up to be part of that. When the standards are completed next year, there will undoubtedly be pressure to water them down.  And so today, Chancellor Klein and I are sending a letter to our State Board of Regents urging it to ratify the standards, without material alterations.

“In New York City, we’ve built all of our reforms around raising standards and holding everyone accountable for results. That’s why our kids have made enormous progress on State exams, especially when compared to the rest of the state. The Chancellor of our Board of Regents, Merryl Tisch, has been a great champion of raising standards, which account for 14 percent of a state’s Race to the Top application – and we’ll give her all the support we can to raise them as high as she can get done.

“The fifth step we’ve got to take is lifting restrictions on growth of charter schools. This fall, a Stanford University study showed that charter school students in Harlem have performed at nearly the same level as students in suburban Scarsdale – one of the wealthiest districts in the whole country. No wonder the waiting list for charter schools in New York City is upwards of 40,000 children.

“I’m committing to open 100 new charter schools over the next four years – but we do need the State Legislature to lift the cap, just as Illinois and Louisiana have recently done, because we’re about to hit it.

“Arne has said that states with any cap will lose points in the Race to the Top, and I think he’s absolutely right to do so. We’ll also urge the State Legislature to provide charter schools with funding for facilities, just as New York City is doing for other schools. Charter schools are public schools – people forget that – and all public school children deserve to share in the resources that the State has.  To not do so is an outrage, and if the State doesn’t get this done, I’ve directed Chancellor Klein to sue, and see if we can’t get it done in the courts.

“The sixth and final major step that Race to the Top challenges us to take is turning around our lowest-performing schools. Since 2003, we’ve closed 91 schools in New York City — and the new schools that have replaced them have graduation rates 15 points above the citywide average.

“Secretary Duncan has challenged states to turn around their lowest-performing 5 percent of schools.  Arne: We’ll see your 5 percent — and we’re going to double it. Our goal is to turn around the lowest performing 10 percent of city schools over the next four years — by closing them down, and bringing in new leadership, and holding everyone accountable for success.

“But — and this is important — the only way that we can achieve that goal is to reform something called the ‘Absent Teacher Reserve Pool.’ Right now, when we close a school, some teachers don’t get hired back on, and many find jobs elsewhere.  But — some teachers do get hired back on, and many find jobs elsewhere, but some don’t. Those teachers can go to a reserve pool — and stay on the payroll indefinitely. When you combine the reserve pool with the rubber room, it’s costing us more than $100 million a year of monies that don’t produce better education for our kids. We just can’t keep wasting that kind of money. And — as Arne can tell us — Chicago has a one-year limit for displaced teachers — and we’ll urge our State Legislature to adopt the same.

“Now all of the reforms that Secretary Duncan and I have talked about today share something in common: They make sense! They are not Democratic ideas or Republican ideas.  They are common sense ideas.  And the way you make progress in government is by combining common sense with political courage, which the Obama Administration is doing.

“The Race to the Top is challenging the education establishment in a way that I think has never happened before, and New York City is ready, willing, and able to help the charge. The year ahead will tell us a lot about whether we’re going to bring our schools into the 21^st century, or whether our schools — and our students — are going to be left clinging to the 20^th century, as more and more countries pass us by.

“The President and Secretary Duncan have set the bar high – and if they keep the bar high, and if they keep the bar high, we really can give our children more great teachers, and more great schools.

“They deserve it. Parents demand it — both here as well as in Korea.  And it’s up to us here to deliver it.  So thank you very much, and now you’re going to hear from Kati Haycock. She is the President of the Education Trust, and she is well worth listening to. Kati?”

On Monday, the DOE sent a list of 15 approved charter schools to the State Education Department for final authorization, leaving it and other school boards with only three new charters available.

State law limits the number of charter schools to 200 and there are currently 164 charters operating around the state. Of the 36 remaining new charters available, half may be authorized by the State University of New York. The other half may be authorized by the New York City Schools Chancellor or other local school boards and then approved by the state Board of Regents.

“From our perspective, we’ve approved 15 applications and submitted them to the state and if the cap is not lifted, we will not be submitting any more,” Ann Forte, a spokeswoman for the DOE, said.

This leaves three charters remaining for other local school boards or the State Education Department to approve and 18 charters left to be authorized by SUNY. In a report released earlier this week, the New York City Charter School Center estimated that about 40 charter school operators would compete for those remaining spots.

The question of whether to raise the cap on charter schools, or to remove it entirely, has been hotly debated in recent months. States with charter caps are at a disadvantage in the competition for the $4.3 billion Race to the Top grant funds, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has said. Charter school advocates argue that the cap encourages school operators to open schools elsewhere.

State education commissioner David Steiner and Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch have argued that the cap prevents charter school authorizers from acting recklessly. Steiner and Tisch have said that a state-wide cap allows charters to expand at a measured pace and ensures that only the best schools will be opened.

At the party, on Dec. 9, we’ll also officially kick off our first-ever fundraising drive, which you can read more about here. Become a supporter and join the community of readers who believe that improving education requires high-quality education journalism.

Please note: Donations are welcome and can be made here. But you don’t have to donate to come to our party!

Mayor Bloomberg has ordered the Department of Education to cut its budget by 1.5 percent for the current fiscal year and to schedule another 2.5 percent cut for the fiscal year that begins in July. State aid to city schools is also sure to be reduced, even if Gov. Paterson doesn’t get the steep midyear cuts he’s pushing.

Individual schools haven’t learned yet how much they’ll have to cut. But we want to know what’s at risk at schools across the city. So we’re renewing our call for budget cut casualties on the interactive comment map that we first launched in June, where principals, teachers, and parents described “devastating” cuts to teaching staffs, arts programs, and after school offerings. 

Head over to the map and leave a comment explaining what might be next to go at your school.

Last week, the Sacramento G.O.P. accused Rhee of helping her fiance, Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson, run “damage control” as he campaigns for reelection.

Read on for KJ’s note:

From: Kevin Johnson <kevin@kevinjonhnsonformayor.com>
Date: Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 2:55 PM
Subject: Vote Kevin Huffman for America’s Next Great Pundit
To:

Vote Kevin Huffman for America’s Next Great Pundit My friend Kevin Huffman works at Teach For America and is one of two finalists in the Washington Post’s “reality contest” to find America’s Next Great Pundit.  The winner will get a weekly column in the Washington Post for 13 weeks. At a time when states are preparing to compete for $4 billion in “Race to the Top” funding for our schools, it’s critical to have someone like Kevin helping to lead the national conversation. Please take 30 seconds to vote for Kevin now. Since the polls are only open on the Post website until 8 pm Eastern, every vote counts.  Thanks for your support! —– Join Mayor Johnson on Facebook and Twitter

The memo specifically named the tenure law, which bans school districts from using student data as a factor in teacher tenure decisions, as the reason New York was struck from the list.

The foundation had vowed in August to give 15 states $250,000 each to hire consultants to help with applications, and New York was on the official list. But when the foundation extended its offer of aid to any state meeting its criteria, Gates director of education Vicki Phillips said New York would no longer be eligible until it makes “explicit progress on…removing barriers to linking student and teacher data.”

UPDATE: Christopher Williams, spokesman for the Gates Foundation, told me Phillips’ memo referred to New York’s chances at future foundation initiatives. “It means we probably won’t be making a lot of grants unless the law is changed,” he said. But the foundation is not cutting the state off from the aid it is receiving to help build its Race the Top application, he said.

State education officials have insisted that state law is not a barrier to matching teachers to student test scores. “We evaluate teachers on the basis of student achievement every year in New York,” Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch told me in an interview earlier this month.

The memo was first reported by Michele McNeil at EdWeek’s Politics K-12 blog.