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Raise your hand if you know what the state’s 450-page Race to the Top application actually says. Besides, of course, “We raised the cap on charter schools and came up with a new way to evaluate teachers.”

Here’s a quick-and-dirty guide to what the application actually proposes, including some details about the proposal that I hadn’t heard before I read it. The application is divided into four main goals. You can find more background on Race to the Top here, and a copy of the state’s second round application is here.

Making better tests and curriculum:

National reading and math curriculum standards are coming, and New York education officials plan to opt in to them. The state wants to spend $26 million to write curriculum based on the new standards, which will show up in classrooms beginning in February 2012. Another $40 million would be used to create new tests, including a way to judge kindergartners through third-graders’ progress in learning to read. Students would start to take initial versions of those tests in January 2012. The final versions of exams based on the new standards would be due in 2015.

Building new databases to track student progress:

By “data systems,” the state means a program that can track students’ academic progress from the very beginning of their education to the end. The state wants to spend $50 million in Race to the Top funds to help build a program that will be used state-wide. Another $10 million would go toward linking information from grade schools to information from New York’s colleges and universities. The application describes a future data system that sounds a lot like ARIS, the city’s $81 million data system launched in 2008. (more…)

I was very interested to read the UFT’s latest report on charter school attrition in middle schools, as I’ve had trouble finding reliable statistics to track charter school students from year to year. The UFT report claims that state test data provides a fairly accurate method to track charter school attrition-that is, the number of students that leave a charter school. However, the report doesn’t provide data on the number of students that a particular charter school decides to hold back, or “retain.” Therefore, it can only provide information on testing cohort attrition — that is, the number of students that vanish from a testing group from year to year.

I augmented the state test data with the numbers on retained students, which are available from the Basic Education Data System. (For more on BEDS, see this post.) The UFT report states:

If students are being left back, then their entrance into the cohort of the lower grade should be reflected in the size of that cohort. That cohort might grow, for example. What happens instead, however, is that those cohorts too are generally shrinking as students move up in grades. Since the cohorts into which the vanishing students would be assigned are themselves shrinking, retention seems unlikely to be the major factor in cohort attrition.

I confirmed with Jackie Bennett, the author of the UFT report, that she did not look at the BEDS data on retained students. This means that she couldn’t consider retention from earlier grades that would reduce the numbers in these same cohorts. I found that when you consider the number of students retained each year in each grade, the majority of testing cohort attrition actually is due to retention of large numbers of students in both fifth and sixth grade. (more…)

When I initially heard that the state exams were pushed to April and May I was excited. It seemed like a good move to give teachers more time to prepare their students and therefore it’d provide a more accurate assessment of the teaching/learning accomplished in a year. With 14 school days left though and no sign of test scores coming in, my enthusiasm’s waned a bit. The best we can expect (any day now!) is the cut-off scores, a simple list of who passed and who failed. The release of the actual performance scale scores (i.e. 2.19 or 3.76) have been delayed until late July.

This all wouldn’t be such a big deal if these scores weren’t the sole basis of whether my students pass or fail. And therein lies the problem. Because I’m supposed to be preparing promotion-in-doubt folders for my students who didn’t pass the test, and I don’t know who these students are. For those who don’t know, promotion-in-doubt folders are extensive folders of student work that provide evidence that a student deserves to pass even though he failed the state exams. Which brings me to the second major issue. Several of my students don’t deserve to pass.

Now it’s not for lack of effort on their part. And it’s not for lack of progress. All of my students made at least a year’s worth of progress in reading and math. However, when you’re starting the third grade reading at a kindergarten level, a year’s worth of progress doesn’t prepare you for the fourth grade. In fact, it doesn’t even make you ready for the third grade. With little regard for this reality, it’s been made clear to me that nobody plans to hold any of my students back if it can be avoided at all. (more…)

• Students protested against looming Metrocard cuts at Mayor Bloomberg’s subway station. (NY1)
• High poverty schools received less stimulus money per student than wealthier schools. (WNYC)
• Dozens of students at PS 212 in the Bronx didn’t get required ESL classes until March. (Daily News)
• PS 163 on the Upper West Side admitted too many students but now will add a class. (Daily News)
• U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan praised New York State’s Race to the Top changes. (Post)
• Bronx Science teachers plan to rally against their administrators at the mayor’s house. (Daily News)
• A proposed law on Long Island would fine principals $1,000 if they fail to stop bullying. (Post)
• Stuyvesant HS students have had to take down their lists of fellow students “to tap.” (Post)

• Gov. Paterson is not including education cuts in his emergency budget legislation next week.
• City Room ranks city charter schools by their admission rates, highlighting the five choosiest.
• InsideSchools looks at all the reasons a student could be banned from a graduation ceremony.
• David Bloomfield: allowing organizations to certify teachers will create more unmonitored diploma mills.
• In his first year, a teacher used to hear students whine, “I want to go home.” Now it’s not the norm.
• A troubled student-turned-journalist wonders if School of One could have helped him.
• Jay Mathews suggests an antidote to competition for celebrity graduation speakers: let teachers speak.
• A teacher says giving partial credit on a test is reasonable, the problem is when the test is politicized.
• Rick Hess says his fellow edu-reformers need to get over their fear of criticism and questioning.
• A Harvard professor says a recent conference about merit pay left him unconvinced about its power.
• New Jersey has jettisoned the idea of offering a teacher retirement incentive to save money.
• Formerly in charge of RttT, Joanne Weiss is moving up to become Duncan’s chief of staff.
• Detroit’s mayor has an uphill battle to win mayoral control partly because the city has already tried it.
• And P.S. 22′s famed chorus won a the Webby Artist of the Year award.

Some of New York City’s signature educational programs — including its principal training academies and school-based teams that examine student data — could go statewide if New York wins nearly $700 million in Race to the Top funds.

The state is arguing in its Race to the Top application that it can accomplish Obama administration educational goals by replicating city programs around New York.  That could be a smart strategy, as U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has called New York City a model for how the federal government should spend its education funds. But city programs the state wants to duplicate include some of its most controversial.

Here are some of the programs that could get cloned, along with the justification provided in the state’s Race to the Top application:

Leadership Academies:

New York will use $6 million in RTTT funds to replicate the successful Rochester and New York City Leadership Academies. Eleven more RTTT Management Team-coordinated Academies are planned, so that all regions of the State — including the remaining three large city districts — will be served…. The Academies will serve more than 700 principals in New York (about 15 percent overall) by Fall 2011. When all Academies are fully operational, school leaders will have access to research-based PD that is focused on the use of student data to improve student achievement and growth. (more…)

Teacher preparation programs long ago abandoned (if they ever embraced) theory-centric instruction in favor of research-based clinical methods. Further, they have championed a middle way independent of the changeable pedagogical and curriculum priorities promoted by individual districts and funders. While popular practices are often addressed, either unilaterally or in partnership with outside entities, education schools’ academic independence protects them from being swamped by political and financial forces driving others.

Now comes a pronouncement from the New York State Board of Regents and the State Education Department commissioner that higher education will no longer be the sole route to teacher and leadership certification. The Regents, who appoint the commissioner, are themselves appointed by our state legislature, that dysfunctional body more famous for patronage than policy competence.

Not surprisingly, then, the Regents have rejected the fundamental role of independent inquiry in professional preparation in favor of faster, cheaper methods based on proprietary ownership. Whether these programs are run by non-profit, for-profit, or school district organizations, their aim will be to brand grads with a particular skill set, antithetical to preparing able, agile, open-minded professionals for long-term teaching effectiveness. (more…)

Camsie Matis

A teacher at a Manhattan secondary school is one of 103 teachers across the country — two from New York State — to win a federal award for math and science teaching.

A math teacher at East Side Community School, Camsie Matis, today received the Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching, which comes with a $10,000 check. Matis has taught math and science for a decade and helped open the Bronx’s New Day Academy before returning to teach at the Lower East Side school. She’s currently on leave for a year serving a fellowship at the National Science Foundation.

I used to laugh earlier in the year when some of the kids would say things like, “I wish we had school til 5 everyday,” or “I wish we stayed at school ’til 10!” I wasn’t totally sure they were sincere, but in any case I admired their enthusiasm, feined or otherwise, for learning. I wasn’t laughing today though when one of those same students grumbled during our math block, “I want to go home.”

It’s not the first time I’ve heard these words, but it’s the first time I’ve heard them in a long while. In my first year of teaching I heard it constantly. Most of the students let me know several times a day they wanted to be anywhere but in my classroom. I couldn’t blame them, I pretty much felt the same way.

But my classroom today is a completely different place than my classroom during my first month of teaching. Sure it’s June, and my classroom resembles a sauna, but we all seem to be having a good time anyway. So it hit especially hard when a student who used to be one of the most “school-crazy” pulled a 180 on me. It seems to be part of bigger trend in the student’s attitude and effort, so I’ll try not to take it too personally. At the same time it’s worth trying to see how I can incorporate more games, art, and music into our final weeks of learning.

• The city’s proposal to save on school lunches will reduce the number of options. (Wall Street Journal)
• Seniors at Stuyvesant High School have publicly listed the classmates they’d like “to tap.” (Post)
• Budget cuts are closing public day care programs without alternatives for the children. (Daily News)
• The Post says it’s wrong to say the city schools are doing better on the basis of test scores.
• The Harbor School students’ dive with Fabian Cousteau began a long oyster-planting season. (NY1)
• The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a case about No Child Left Behind’s unfunded mandates. (AP)
• Speaking to Kalamazoo high school graduates, President Obama pushed a no-excuses agenda. (Times)