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• State Senate Democrats were happy to take credit for NY being a RttT finalist. (State of Politics)
• Hawaii and Arizona were the surprise finalist picks. (Politics K-12)
• Florida & New Jersey have really fought with their unions, but they made the cut. (edReformer)
• The RttT finalist announcement could affect common standards adoption. (Quick and the Ed)
• There’s debate over whether the Obama admin has spent all its edu political capital. (WashPost)
• 200 of the highest scoring 1000 students on the G&T exam live in district two. (InsideSchools)
• Kim Gittleson maps which NY districts are home to the most G&T students. (Curious2)
• From RttT’s beginning, to the finalist announcement, a look at where states stand. (Hechinger Report)
• TFA members teaching multiple grades & subjects are more likely to leave teaching. (Teacher Beat)
• Which came first? Unprofessional teachers or condescending principals? (Mrs. Mimi)
• Brooklyn teacher Jemal Graham will be a Teaching Ambassador Fellow next year. (Examiner)
• And a New York Observer editorial says NY can’t afford to have bad teachers in classrooms

Even as they celebrated New York’s Race to the Top finalist status today, state education officials warned that reforms won’t happen without a win.

In recent months, state officials have committed to changing teacher evaluations, creating new databases to track students’ grades and scores, revamping standards, and upgrading tests. But those changes can’t happen unless New York takes home the $700 million it asked for in its Race to the Top application, Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch told me today.

“The reform agenda is very contingent upon an infusion of these federal dollars that are earmarked for reform efforts,” Tisch said.

For a cash-strapped education department in a state whose budget is now nearly four months late, it’s not clear where the money to fund costly reform initiatives will come from without federal backing. And New York is not alone among states whose budgets may not support the changes they have promised or even enacted into law.

But speaking to reporters today, Duncan said that states should carry out their reform plans even if they don’t receive Race to the Top funds. (more…)

New York State is releasing the results of the 2010 state assessments in reading and math tomorrow.  We’re told that the 2010 tests were more difficult than those in previous years, and less predictable, the first steps towards a new assessment system that provides a realistic picture of student proficiency.  Testing experts such as Dan Koretz, Jennifer Jennings and Howard Everson presented evidence to the Board of Regents that being judged proficient on the state’s tests in grades three through eight or on the Regents exams did not always predict later success in high school or in college.  This evidence strongly suggested that the threshold for proficiency was set too low;  students who were classified as proficient in eighth-grade math had only a 30% chance of earning a Regents score of 80, which many colleges in the state judge to be the bare minimum for college readiness, had a high chance of scoring below 500 on the SAT, and were likely to be placed in remedial classes if they entered college.  And, based on this chart prepared by the NYC Department of Education, of uncertain provenance, a student who is at the minimum threshold for proficiency on the eighth-grade tests has only about a 55% chance of earning a Regents diploma in high school, the state’s minimum standard for high school graduation for all students who entered 9^th grade in 2008 or later.

 Last week, the Board of Regents voted to adjust the cut scores that determine proficiency on the state’s readingand math assessments in grades through eight.  They didn’t say by how much, but we have a clue from Merryl Tisch’s assertion that the “inflation rate” on the state tests has been about 20% in recent years. Twenty percent of what is not clear.  But I’m going to assume that the cut score for Level 3, which represents proficiency in a subject at a particular grade level, is going to rise substantially at all grades for both reading and math.  What are the likely consequences?

 We’ll see tomorrow, but here’s my prediction, focusing on eighth-grade math.  First, I’m assuming that the distribution of scale scores for 2010 will be the same as it was for 2009.  If the tests were more difficult in 2010, the average scale score might go down a bit;  if students were actually learning more in 2010 than in 2009, the average scale score might go up a bit.  For my little prediction exercise, I’m assuming that these two things cancel each other out. (more…)

The head of the charter school office at the Department of Education, Michael Duffy, recently announced his decision to leave the government to work for Victory Schools, Inc. Victory Schools is a for-profit Educational Management Organization (EMO) that runs seven of the nine for-profit charter schools that are currently open in New York City. Duffy’s move attracted attention to the company’s business plans, which were complicated by the new charter school law passed in May that barred for-profit charter operators from opening more schools in the state. (The company might become a nonprofit to keep growing.) But Victory Schools’ performance has been left out of the discussion.

I decided to compare Victory Schools’ performance against that of its for-profit and not-for-profit charter school competitors in the city by looking at both the amount that the schools spent per pupil on management fees and their 2008-2009 progress report raw scores, which I then ranked independent of the DOE’s letter grades. (These grades were sharply questioned during the 2008-2009 school year.) I found that the five Victory Schools that had progress report scores in 2008-2009 placed in the bottom 35 percent of all charter schools and in the bottom 20 percent of schools citywide. Two schools — the NYC Charter High School for Architecture, Engineering, and Construction Industries and the Bronx Global Learning Institute for Girls — were too new to get a progress report score. Both, however, received evaluations of “underdeveloped” from the city.

These middling performance numbers come despite the fact that the seven schools paid around $2,163 per pupil to Victory Schools for the company’s services. (more…)

This just in, via the U.S. Education Department’s Twitter feed: New York is one of the 19 finalists in the second round of the Race to the Top competition.

New York was one of 16 finalists in the first round of competition, but then came in 15th in the final scoring. Only two states, Delaware and Tennessee, won grants in the first round of the contest.

For this round, Education Secretary Arne Duncan has said that there are likely to be 10 to 15 winners of the competitive grant money. New York could be in a better position to win the $700 million grant this round after legislative wrangling last spring resulted in a new teacher evaluation system and a lift on the number of charter schools allowed to open statewide.

The other finalists are: Arizona, California, Colorado, Washington, D.C., Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and South Carolina.

In a few minutes, Duncan will formally announce the finalists during a speech at the National Press Club. We’ll have more on the announcement later in the afternoon.

Over half the states have now agreed to implement the Common Core standards as their own. I think it is now time to think about how quickly we can expect these standards to be met.

We are told that Common Core is a high quality, rigorous set of standards for K-12 education, far more challenging and explicit than what most states have been using as their own standards. I am going to accept that that is true.

If states could immediately begin to implement Common Core in the classroom (i.e. if we had the curriculum, unit plans, materials and lesson plans ready for September), there would still be problems. There is no way that today’s students are ready for those more rigorous standards. Today’s 12th graders obviously are not up to the high bar that Common Core sets for 11th grade work, because last year they were only operating at the level set by their states’ lower standards. So, next year’s graduates will not be up to the level of Common Core.

Similarly, next year’s 11th graders are not ready for Common Core’s highly rigorous 11th grade work, because their 10th grade work was only at the level of their states’ less rigorous old standards. And if they can’t do 11th grade Common Core level work this year, then they will not be able to do Common Core 12th grade work the following year. So, the high school graduating cohort of 2012 will not be up to Common Core’s standards. (more…)

• A debate over the name of a new South Bronx school has stoked underlying community tension. (Times)
• Buffalo school and union officials say the new evaluations will better support teachers. (Buffalo News)
• Civil rights groups, including the NAACP, are criticizing President Obama’s education reform goals. (AP)
• The D.C. teachers union plans to sue the city on behalf of 241 fired teachers. (Washington Examiner)
• William McGurn: The rise of school choice in D.C. helped Rhee pressure the teachers union. (WSJ)
• Ed. Sec. Arne Duncan encouraged Detroit voters to support mayoral control. (Detroit Free Press)