GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• The Panel for Educational Policy okayed a $3 million contract for the DOE’s school surveys. (Daily News)
• The panel also approved a new promotion policy for students in fourth and sixth grades. (Post)
• A state charter school committee approved a fifth Harlem Success school yesterday. (Post)
• A teacher accused of sexual misconduct is suing the city over his rubber room stint. (NY1)
• The state plans to apply for Race to the Top funds in the first round of applications. (GothamSchools)
• The Times laments that the RttT rules don’t demand better teachers, only “highly qualified” ones. (Times)
• Tom Carroll reiterates three major initiatives NYS should undertake to get RttT funds. (Daily News)
• Michael Mulgrew said CUNY students have low math skills because of test prep in school. (Daily News)
• A D.C. school wonders what it means to be “turned” so middle-class families attend. (Washington Post)
• Only three people attended a second hearing about relocating Greenwich Village MS. (The Villager)
• Millennium HS’s funding for a gym will vanish unless the city finds space for one. (Downtown Express)
• The head of the Robin Hood Foundation says NYC is better off when bankers get bonuses. (Bloomberg)

• School of One makes Time Magazine’s list of the 50 best inventions 0f 2009.
• Syracuse school district’s books were off by $1.24 million, said State Comptroller DiNapoli.
• A critique of the Hoxby report says the study overestimated the effect of charter schools.
• …and the UFT is pretty thrilled with the analysis showing the Hoxby report’s flaws.
• You can trade your signature on a petition for a baked good at a pro-bake sale rally tomorrow.
• The Race to the Top regs are not good news for arts education, writes Richard Kessler.
• Issues for charter schools, other than the cap, could knock NYS out of RttT.
• Tom Carroll says the data firewall may not exclude NYS from the game, but it’s a strike against it.
• Jay Mathews hung out in Arne Duncan’s office this morning for a Q&A session.
• If popularity is overcrowding 3 Queens’ high schools, building more may not be the answer.
• Some answers for what to do if your students want to know your age and you’d rather not say.

Brushing aside criticism that current state laws could jeopardize New York’s chances at Race to the Top Funds, state officials say they will enter the contest in round one.

On Monday, the State Education Department will release a comprehensive plan to overhaul teacher training, Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch said today. Tisch called the proposal a “very aggressive package” that will be a major element of New York’s Race to the Top application.

The strength of a state’s teacher training program is a heavily weighted component of the final Race to the Top criteria unveiled today. At a speech in New York City last month, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan called for states to better prepare new teachers.

But even with a new teacher training initiative, it remains to be seen whether two controversial state laws — one that bans the use of student test scores in teacher tenure decisions and another that caps the number of charter schools allowed in the state — could derail the state’s application.

In a conference call with reporters today, Duncan emphasized that states with such policies will be at a distinct disadvantage compared to states that are “vigorously challenging the status quo” by eliminating such caps and barriers. Some states are changing their laws to improve their Race to the Top chances, but New York has not. (more…)

Progress reports for the city’s roughly 500 high schools are slated to be released this month, but grades for two Bronx schools will not be among them.

One is Herbert H. Lehman High School, where executive principal Janet Saraceno is under investigation for grade tampering, as I reported last month. The Department of Education also may not release the progress report for John F. Kennedy High School because of missing information and inconsistencies in the data it sent to the department, said DOE spokesman David Cantor.

If the problems with Kennedy’s data are resolved by the time the department releases the reports, the school’s report card will be made public on schedule, Cantor said.

Several other high schools are being examined by the Office of Special Investigations for tampering with students’ Regents scores or inappropriately changing students’ grades after they passed the exam, but their report cards are on track to be released. (more…)

A few years ago, the New York State lottery’s slogan was “Hey, you never know.”  In its original formulation, the slogan sought to motivate New Yorkers to play the lottery, a game of chance, on the grounds that you never know unless you play if you are a winner.  But the slogan is a double entendre when applied to Caroline Hoxby’s highly-publicized study of the effects of attending a charter school in New York City.  Propelled by Hoxby’s forceful claims about the superiority of lottery-based research on charter schools, much of the mainstream media has concluded that we now know definitively that New York City charter schools outperform their traditional counterparts—in spite of the fact that her study has not undergone a rigorous peer review process that might identify problems in the study and ways of addressing them.  Today, however, an equally forceful critique prepared by Sean Reardon of Stanford University argues that Hoxby’s research is anything but definitive.  Citing flaws in the statistical analysis of the report, Reardon writes that it “likely overstates the effects of New York City charter schools on students’ cumulative achievement … It may be that New York City’s charter schools do indeed have positive effects on student achievement, but those effects are likely smaller than the report claims.”

Reardon is careful to point out that it’s not possible, based on the information provided in Hoxby’s report and associated documents, to judge the extent of the bias in Hoxby’s estimates of charter school effects on student achievement.  More than anything, he calls for reserving judgment until more information about the study, its data and methods are available, and until the study has undergone rigorous peer review.  Until then, he maintains, it would be unwise to rely on the statistics reported in the study, and the inferences Hoxby and her colleagues draw about charter school effects in New York City.     

Here I’ll mention two of the features of Reardon’s critique that I find particularly persuasive.  The first is that Hoxby used an inappropriate set of statistical models to analyze the data, which likely distorts the charter school effects.  You might be surprised to learn that Hoxby used statistical models at all.  If her results are based on comparing students who won a charter school lottery with students who lost the lottery, and the lottery was fair, balanced and random, why would a model be needed?  It seems like the charter school effect would simply be the difference in the outcomes observed for the lottery winners and the lottery losers.  But comparing lottery winners and losers isn’t really estimating an individual causal effect, because an individual student can’t simultaneously be enrolled in a charter school and a traditional public school.  Even in the context of a lottery, or any other kind of study that can capitalize on a randomization process, such as a clinical drug trial, statistical models come into play to allow for inferences about cause-and-effect relationships.  These inferences are always made in relation to a particular statistical model, and all such models have assumptions. (more…)

• Final Race to the Top rules including a scoring system. (Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post)
• Teachers will have to make cost concessions if they want pay raises, a new budget report says. (Post)
• Tom Carroll says this is a good opportunity for Mayor Bloomberg to “go to the mat” on merit pay. (Post)
• The DOE is upset that an arbitrator might have fallen asleep during an incompetence hearing. (Times)
• Kids at city colleges can’t do basic math, and some are questioning the city’s response. (Daily News)
• City colleges were not alone among 2-year colleges in not being able to take everyone this year. (Times)
• Marley Kaplan, founder of Chess-in-the-Schools, left banking to promote chess to city kids. (Times)
• An N.C. school planned to raise money by letting students pay to boost their grades. (AP)
• Chicago has adopted what looks like NYC’s HS admissions matching system. (Chicago Sun-Times)

• Roland Fryer’s new paper concludes the Harlem Children’s Zone model can close the achievement gap.
• Randi Weingarten praised the final RttT regulations, saying they ensure that teachers are included.
• Peter Murphy says that Washington is sending New York “mixed messages” on the competition.
• A city teacher complains that old-fashioned bulletin boards take higher priority than technology skills.
• Jay Mathews wants you to tell him what he should ask Arne Duncan tomorrow.
• What do novice teachers need to succeed? A new study says “grit,” but is it enough?
• A Nobel prize-winning economist says the benefits of Head Start might not be as great as once thought.
• The DOE and state environmental dept. tested the soil beneath two Inwood schools and say it’s safe.
• After the UFT, the city’s next round of contract negotiations will be with DC 37.

The U.S. Department of Education released final guidelines for its $4.3 billion Race to the Top grant program this evening, leaving a provision that could ban New York State from applying for the funds still intact.

States that bar districts from using test scores to evaluate teachers and principals are ineligible for the fund. The language of the requirement remains exactly the same as in the draft rules released in July. The draft proposal sparked a debate about whether a New York State provision that bars using student data in teacher tenure decisions will exclude the state from the competition for grant money.

However, the final criteria does provide more context on how student data should be used to evaluate teachers and principals than did the draft proposal. The regulations call for states to develop evaluation methods that use student test scores as a “significant factor” in rating teachers and principals, but notes that it should be one factor among several categories for which teachers should be judged. (more…)