GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Most people have no choice for their children’s school. As a Queen’s parent, I always strove to get my children in the best schools possible, calling in favors to get my son in a high school that we were not zoned for. It would have been so much better if my neighborhood school was as good as the one he went to. And, if he and his friend’s had gone there, that school might not be on the endangered list right now.

This essay should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand the duress under which public education suffers today. The mis-reporting, the misuse of tests, the dictatorship of the uninformed, consultation by the uncommitted, consolidation of the media, governance by special interests and compromised politicians… But cheer up: We’re racing to the top, leaving no child behind, and in New York City, at least, putting the children first.

It’s time to examine the statewide testing program that has so thoroughly devoured education. The testing practices followed here are damaging and the instruments themselves are fatally flawed. I truly believe legal action must be taken to sue SED and test vendor CTB/McGraw-Hill for damages and for delivering such a disastrous program. Otherwise, the number of high-stakes decisions based on spurious test results will continue to grow.

And what of the major media outlets that have built and broken public trust and done significant disservice?

It’s not just that Goldtein is fair, her seems to be the only one actually writing and not just posting copies of what is in the papers. It’s hard for the reporters, any reporters, to get an interview with anyone at the DOE who will talk either on the record or off. I don’t envy the GS reporters their job, but I do wish for more comment from the field that isn’t biased..towards the current system or against it. We need comparisons to successful education not just kvetching about what we have.

Thanks for the kind words Ellen, Akademos and Fred.

And Ellen, consider your typos forgiven. I make horrible, humiliating editing errors sometimes, so I know just how you feel. They make me look like I speak English as a second language, when actually I’m supposed to teach it.

this is a brilliant column. It makes you weep how off track these guys running our educational systems are; and how arrogant they are despite the fact that they are talking out of their behinds.

“even though charters, with fewer English as a Second Language and special education students than those attending neighborhood schools, have still not managed to outperform public schools.”

This is incorrect if you’re talking about NYC; charters there are pretty good, which is why at least two recent studies (by Hoxby and Raymond) find that students do better when they transfer into charters (or as compared to their peers in other public schools).  

“With 100 percent proactive parents, any school ought instantly to rack up better stats than its counterparts.”

You’re ignoring the fact that many parents of charter school students are proactive precisely because their children aren’t doing very well.  That doesn’t translate into a charter school advantage — quite the opposite.  

Stuart,

“You’re ignoring the fact that many parents of charter school students are proactive precisely because their children aren’t doing very well. That doesn’t translate into a charter school advantage — quite the opposite.”

WRONG! Many oft the children left behind in the TPS have the unmotivated parents, who don’t make the effort to do anything for their child educationally.

Sure they will buy them 150 dollar sneakers, and the latest Iphone, Sidekick, or whatever else they use to text with ALL DAY LONG! But the fact that the charter school parents make the effort to get their kids into a “better school” is the “WHOLE BALL GAME.”

If a child has motivated parents who are “on top” of their child’s education, that child will succeed. The problem is that too many inner city public schools are left with all the kids whose parents are “nowhere to be found” when it comes time for their kids education. …. There is NO adult to enter these kids in a charter school lottery.

” their kid’s education.” AHHHH! It’s getting late!

Last year’s RAND paper, which studied several major cities, found that “in all but one case (Chicago reading scores, which are virtually identical to the district-wide average), students switching to charter schools have prior test scores that are BELOW district-wide or statewide averages (though usually the difference is small).”  See http://www.vanderbilt.edu/schoolchoice/conference/papers/Zimmer_COMPLETE.pdf.  

Whatever you want to say about these students’ motivation or their parents’ motivation, it obviously didn’t translate into higher test scores for them while in the traditional public schools.  So it’s hard to see how anyone can just assert, based on nothing, that charter schools overall have some advantage from getting all these lower-scoring kids transferring in.  

Stuart,

Charters, as I’m sure you know, were originally meant to take on the special needs students using and pioneer experimentation with resources, partnerships and methods for that purpose. But not only do they fail to do that, supporters fail to acknowledge the screening and attrition that goes on.

I don’t blame them that much for it. I think any newcomers in this climate are beset with incredible pressures to excel in a larger-than-life, better-than-hoped-for way. It’s a climate of prevalent fraud.

Given the indirect screening, attrition, pressure on staff, turnover, parental contracts, etc., etc., the success rates on those low-bar exams don’t surprise me at all, and, worse, they don’t point to anything new for TPS’s except for their replacement. Great, a new kind of subtly screened school has emerged, like a hybrid of a remedial and prep school, but this is no answer, no breakthrough. It’s an experiment that failed to take place, yet people are fudging the results anyway. What a stupid waste of time. And people are getting this story so wrong.

As always, well said, Arthur.

Unfortunately, we live in an Age of Impunity, and facts no longer matter. Look up the characteristics of what Americans used to condescendingly call “banana republics” and you will see something that looks remarkably similar to home: disregard for facts, impunity, and the few profiting off the immiseration of the many.

As for “value-added” evaluation models, the fact that they are bogus is the least of their shortcomings. After all, education has been infested with false panaceas for decades. No, the real issue with this is revealed by the language itself, and what it illustrates about the social vandals who are busy taking over and cannibalizing public education.

According to Wikipedia, the term value-added represents “the difference between the sale price of a product and the cost of materials to produce it.” The website investorwords.com defines it as, “The enhancement added to a product or service by a company before the product is offered to customers.”

There it is, in all its B-School depravity. The children are clearly viewed as products – early on in the BloomKlein regime, Jack Welch insisted on speaking of students as “products” – and commodities being prepared for “purchase” (read “future employment”) by “customers” (read “employers”). While corporate ed deformers lie about almost everything, they can be inadvertently honest and revealing in their choice of language, as we see here.

Of course this would be the model the hedge funders, private equity players and their captive elected officials would impose: it is the perfect expression of their worldview, serving their material and ideological interests so well.

The real question is, does it serve the interests of children, parents, teachers and society as a whole? The closer you are to the classroom, the more you are aware of its falsity and viciousness.

reposted so that it can be addressed:

Last year’s RAND paper, which studied several major cities, found that “in all but one case (Chicago reading scores, which are virtually identical to the district-wide average), students switching to charter schools have prior test scores that are BELOW district-wide or statewide averages (though usually the difference is small).”  See http://www.vanderbilt.edu/schoolchoice/conference/papers/Zimmer_COMPLETE.pdf.  
Whatever you want to say about these students’ motivation or their parents’ motivation, it obviously didn’t translate into higher test scores for them while in the traditional public schools.  So it’s hard to see how anyone can just assert, based on nothing, that charter schools overall have some advantage from getting all these lower-scoring kids transferring in.  

Get the data, if you can, on the charters in the news in NYC, the exemplar schools.

Is there data on how many of the charter schools in those states studied were actually taking in primarily high needs students, like they were originally meant to?

To Mr. Goldstein,

The deficiency you discuss in this article, the proclivity to accept what is presented in the news as fact without looking attempting to substantiate it, goes beyond the subject of education, and yet, in some ways, roots directly to education.

Twelve years and up of being told to listen to those in authority because they have the answers, to keep back questions (for the sake of expediency), to fear making mistakes or be judged incompetent (exams and grades), to memorize rather than take time to fully understand (again for the sake of expediency).

Is it any wonder that adults have problems with judgment, and other critical thinking skills?

As for you second point: Yes, having a proactive parents makes a difference, but even among the proactive, not everyone is equally equipped.

EFM,

More importantly, why should anyone have to regularly sweat fact-checking the NY Times, for example, and discount qualifiers due to immoderate slants outside of editorials? May as well skip reading articles altogether and just research. And any entities behind such major and damaging breaches of public trust should be taken down mercilessly, as in criminal suits and people behind bars. Billions or no billions.

I think you have an important voice, however, you also have a vested interest as a unionized teacher. You also have a following of like-minded people. I always think it’s good to question the media and anything one reads. You are now part of it, so I hope you are equally as willing to listen to questions and not get defensive when someone disagrees with you.

EFM,

Thanks for your kind words, and I agree completely that teachers have a role beyond what you described. One of the toughest things I have to do is open up kids accustomed to being quiet and never asking questions in class. When you’re teaching language, you really need to make kids speak, and it’s a tall order when they’ve been trained all their lives to sit down and shut up. I certainly expect better than that from my own child’s teachers.

With nearly 3 decades of teaching under my belt, I can count the number of colleagues who didn’t have the primary goal of teaching kids how to think first and foremost in their minds. Everything else must be secondary. And even more importantly, there are different ways to accomplish that task because everyone thinks differently and everyone thinks about thinking differently. Sounds silly until, you begin to see the change in students that are coming through now who have only been exposed to the narrow minded teach for the bubble test mentality that has been foisted on us in the name of reform. These kids have zero ability to actually take the standardized test content and apply it. I shudder to imagine today’s graduates going on to work for BP. They’d actually do a worse job than those bozos. We are ensuring the demise of this nation which has been built on technological advancement and problem solving but damn, their test scores will be 5% higher