GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• Teachers say heavy-handed principals need to deliver extra on student performance. (Jay Mathews)
• Schools in Texas get credit for boosting scores even if a student gets no answers right. (Rick Casey)
• Steven Brill is writing “a narrative about the so-called education reform movement. (Alexander Russo)
• Whatever happened to carefree summers, asks the mom of a rising first-grader. (Insideschools)
• Teacher dispatches from the weekend’s American Federation of Teachers convention. (Twitter)
• Bill Gates, the convention’s keynote speaker, is “the most dangerous man in America.” (Leonie Haimson)
• A hotly anticipated anti-Race to the Top resolution never made it to the floor. (Teacher Beat)
• The new national edu-stats chief is an NYU prof who studies privatization. (Inside School Research)
• Early childhood expert Sara Mead’s new blog launched with a look at lessons from Singapore. (EdWeek)
• What Spain’s World Cup victory has to say about education reform. (Flypaper)

So many schools are getting turned around, restructured, or intervened-upon these days that parents have added a new phobia to their list: the school-closure fever.

Parents at a Bronx elementary school recently scheduled a protest demanding that their school not be shut down and their principal keep his job. They also wrote a blog post. But the school is not actually scheduled for closure at all.

The Bronx’s P.S. 73 is one of 47 schools in the city who haven’t made the annual progress on their test scores required by the federal No Child Left Behind Act for five years running. The schools are assigned a “Joint Intervention Team,” a group of city and state officials who visit the school and recommend how to improve it.

The intervention teams can recommend that a principal be removed or a school be phased out, but they can also make less dramatic suggestions to change how the school is run. And it’s likely to be three more months before the team issues its recommendations on P.S. 73, DOE spokesman Jack Zarin-Rosenfeld said. (more…)

A reader recently drew my attention to a deceptively unassuming chart that the city often uses to defend its heavy reliance on state tests.

The chart shows how neatly eighth graders’ scores on the tests predict their future academic success. The higher the score they get, the better their shot at graduating high school with a Regents diploma — the only kind that will count come 2014.

But the reader pointed out that the chart also includes a more frightening statistic: Students who score at a level considered proficient by every measure, a 3 out of possible 4, only have a 55% shot of getting a Regents diploma.

(more…)

Selections from the 2009 fifth-grade social studies test.

The principal who allowed her fifth-graders to re-take parts of the state social studies test told the Times that she had a good reason for doing so. The students, she said, had somehow failed to answer entire sections of the test.

How is that possible? While the Department of Education prepares an official investigation, we thought we’d look at the test itself.

A low-stakes annual exam that’s the first in a battery of social studies tests that students take between fifth and eighth grade, the 2009 test is divided into two booklets. Booklet 1 has multiple choice questions and questions that require short written answers. Booklet 2 has “document-based questions” that require short written answers and an essay. The existence of each booklet and all three parts is clearly stamped on the front page of Booklet 1.

Here’s each booklet in turn: (more…)

News from New York City:

• The principal of Queens’ PS 86 let students answer state test questions a week after the test. (Times)
• Large education nonprofits and local colleges have applied to open new charter schools. (Post)
• Private school tuition for special needs students is a growing expense for the city. (Wall Street Journal)
• Some hiring restrictions for teachers have been relaxed. (GothamSchools, WNYC)
• A major donor wants each SUNY school to be able to set its own tuition. (Times)
• Parents fought for air-conditioned school buses for special needs students and won. (NY1)
• State Sen. Bill Perkins’ main opponent, pro-charter Basil Smikle, has raised $130,000. (Post)
• A real estate developer has given more than $1 million for students’ summer jobs. (Wall Street Journal)
• The Post says any administrator who lets a no-show student graduate should be fired.
• The Post praises Gov. Paterson for vetoing a funding bill that would have capped charter school aid.

And beyond:

• The Gates Foundation continues to play a major role in setting the education agenda. (Washington Post)
• A New Jersey school tossed test prep to boost diversity and test scores. (Wall Street Journal)
• The head of Britain’s schools inspectors says bad teachers can be good for students. (Mirror UK)
• Teach for America continues to attract far more students from top colleges than it can accept. (Times)
• Computers in the home might actually hurt poor students’ performance, a study says. (Times)
• Sacramento’s superintendent is making his schools look and feel more corporate. (Sacramento Bee)