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.

“Race to the Top is an important pot of money, but there are many other sources coming from us,” Duncan said, referring to another $7 billion the department plans to make available in the coming months. “And obviously thinking through, if these are truly priorities, even in tough budget times, how you’ll help to reallocate local resources behind these efforts is hugely important.”

Tisch said that she agreed that states should not be dependent on federal dollars. “But we need to understand, the New York State taxpayers are quite clearly tapped out, and they are looking to the federal government for help,” she said.

“I think that New York State really did significantly well in terms of meeting [Race to the Top's requirements] and I believe that we can, should and will be rewarded,” she said. “But make no mistake — dollar amounts matter.”

Duncan also praised New York today for its efforts to bring state policy into line with federal reform goals. ”I think New York’s come a heck of a long way,” he said.

But other states also boosted their odds by changing education policies, he said. The 19 finalists named today all submitted applications that scored more than 400 points on the federal education department’s 500-point evaluation rubric. (You can read the competition guidelines and rubric here.) Overall, the average score of finalists in the second round was 25 points higher than the first round finalists’ average score, Duncan said.

Duncan has said that in the second round he will likely fund the grant proposals of between 10 and 15 winning states. Together, the 19 finalists have asked for a total of $6.2 billion in grant funding — almost twice as much as the $3.4 billion in the Race to the Top fund that remains to be awarded.

“My goal is not to fund every state,” Duncan said. “My goal is to fund as many strong applications as we can.”

In the competition’s next step, New York will send a team to Washington to present the state’s application to a panel of judges during the week of August 9. Tisch said that she would announce her appointments to that team tomorrow.

As in the first round, Duncan said today that the presentations will be an important part of the final judging, as reviewers gauge whether state education leaders have the capacity to put the plans they proposed into practice. During the first round, New York was one of three finalist states who lost points in the interview round, largely because judges questioned whether proposed reforms would reach every school district in the state.

(Update: this post has been changed to clarify the jump in average points between the first and second round.)

 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.

 We don’t know where the NYSED will set the cut score for Level 3, but let’s assume that it’s 675.  This is a challenging standard, but one that predicts a probability of 80% of scoring 80 or higher on the Math A regents exam and, according to the NYC chart, predicts a probability of obtaining a Regents diploma of 81%.

 Here’s how things looked in 2009:  Across the state, 80% of students were judged proficient in eighth-grade math.  The percentages varied by racial/ethnic group, with the highest percentage (92%) recorded for Asian students, and the lowest (63%) for Black students.  89% of white students were met the standard for proficiency in eighth-grade math, as did 69% of Latino students.

 Here’s what I predict:  Across the state, 50% of students will be classified as proficient in eighth-grade math.  The proficiency rate for Asian students will fall to 73%;  for white students to 60%; for Latino students to 35%;  and for Black students to 29%. 

But perhaps a proficiency cutoff of 675 is too hard for the Regents and the State Education Department to stomach, as they will have to live with the political fallout of plummeting proficiency rates.  Perhaps they will increase the cutoff from 650 to 670.  This would still be a substantial increase, and proficiency in eighth grade would still mean a lot more than it does today.  What would the prediction look like then?

 If the cut score for Level 3 for eighth-grade math were to rise to 670, I predict the following:  Across the state, 56% of students will be classified as proficient in eighth-grade math.  The proficiency rate for Asian students will be 77%;  for white students, 66%;  for Latino students, 41%;  and for Black students, 35%.

 Calculating the achievement gap using group differences in average scale scores, which is what Jennifer Jennings and I have argued for in the past, would not be affected by the shift in the proficiency cutoff.  But for those who calculate the achievement gap in “points” (I’m talking to you, New York City Department of Education), the increase in the cutoff is destined to increase the achievement gap—even if the score distributions for the groups stay the same. 

 For New York State as a whole, the 2009 achievement gap in eighth-grade math, calculated as differences in group proficiency rates, was 26 percentage points for the white-Black difference, and 20 percentage points for the white-Latino difference.  (And, for completeness, the gap between Asian and Black students was 29 percentage points, and between Asian and Latino students 23 percentage points.)  If the state moves the proficiency cutoff to 675, the white-Black difference will rise from 26 percentage points to 31 percentage points, and the white-Latino difference from 20 percentage points to 25 percentage points.  The same increase would be observed if the state increases the proficiency threshold to 670.

  Tomorrow, we’ll see whether I’m a good prognosticator … or whether I should quit my day job and become a meteorologist instead.

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. This is 17 percent of these charter schools’ per pupil revenues from the state. The other two for-profit operated charter schools in New York City, Harriet Tubman Charter School and Brooklyn Excelsior Charter School, have idiosyncratic payment agreements with their operators — Edison Schools and National Heritage Academies, respectively — that make it difficult to incorporate them into this analysis. (Harriet Tubman paid around 16 percent of their per pupil funding to Edison Schools, the EMO that the school hired, but it owes Edison Schools significantly more money. National Heritage Academy schools, such as Brooklyn Excelsior, turn over all of their funds to the EMO’s central office, which then doles out the money according to the its guidelines.)

In comparison, charter schools in New York City operated by non-profit charter management organizations (CMOs), such as KIPP and Achievement First, pay significantly less in management fees. On average, CMO schools, which make up the vast majority of city charter schools, spent $986 per pupil, or 7 percent of their per pupil revenue, on management fees. To be fair, these CMOs could be subsidizing the true cost of their services by using philanthropic dollars to augment the fees they collect from individual schools. Victory Schools raise significantly fewer philanthropic dollars than CMO schools. Also, different management organizations provide different sets of services, making this comparison hard to nail down.

Charter schools operated by CMOs also perform significantly better, at least on the city’s progress reports. For instance, the Achievement First schools on average rank in the top quarter of all schools citywide, as do the Uncommon Schools charters old enough to have scores in 2008-2009. Taken together, KIPP schools ranked in the top 30 percent of schools citywide. One KIPP school, — KIPP AMP Academy — performed significantly worse than the other three KIPP schools.

To be sure, progress report performance is an imperfect metric and there could be other factors that account for both the measured achievement and financial disparities between Victory Schools charters and the CMO charters in New York City. Nonetheless, Michael Duffy will have his hands full navigating the complex legal and financial hurdles associated with the biggest for-profit charter operator in the city.

As always, I welcome your feedback. For more on the types of management organizations that charters use in New York City, check out this post. A full breakdown of the data I used for this analysis is available here.

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.

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.

By induction — yes, even we former ELA teachers can resort to math and logic every now and then — this means that it will be 13 years until we get Common Core graduates. After all, how can 4th graders do Common Core level work without having been prepared up through Common Core’s highly rigorous grade 3 standards?

And let’s be honest. This work can’t begin until we have curricula based on the Common Core standards. And then we will need unit plans, materials and lesson plans. That’s going to take a couple of years at least, especially if we consider that teachers themselves will need to get used to their new curriculum, units, materials and lessons. That means it will be more like 15 or more years before we get Common Core level high school graduates.

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Some might argue (i.e. some surely will argue) that it won’t take 13 years for everyone to catch up. They will argue that given a few years, we can raise everyone to the Common Core level — a level on which they can then proceed at Common Core’s pace.

This means that people think that for the next few years, students and educators will work extra-hard to get up to the Common Core standard. Sure, they may be well behind this year, but next year they will be less behind, and the year after that a bit less behind Common Core’s levels. And eventually, they will catch up.

In other words, for the next few years, we would expect all students to do more than a full year of learning — as Common Core defines it. This means that September’s 8th graders (i.e. students and educators, both) will have to work especially hard, because these kids and their teachers have been slacking for 8 years already (i.e. kindergarten and then grades one through seven). And we probably expect those who are not even in high school next year to be able to graduate from high school passing the Common Core aligned tests in five years.

I am sorry, but I think that this is crap. Total crap. Here’s why:

* If students and educators truly are capable of working at such a pace as to be able to catch up like that, then Common Core is not that rigorous. If they are capable of working at such a pace then Common Core coddles them, allowing them to engage in far less learning per year than they are capable of achieving. If we can get next year’s 8th graders to meet Common Core’s complete high school standards in just five years, either Common Core’s K-7 standards are irrelevant or its high school standards are far too simplistic. I have yet to hear anyone make that claim, even defenders of the most rigorous preexisting state standards.

• If today’s 8th graders can learn the 60-75% more per year through high school that catching up to a Common Core would require (assuming that Common Core demands 25% more learning each year), why would our rigorous new standards not demand that greater amount of learning? If students and educators can work at the pace for the years we need to catch up to Common Core, shouldn’t they be able to work at that pace even after everyone has caught up?

* Some might argue that most students are already quite close to Common Core’s grade-by-grade standards. But those people would be saying that Common Core is really just a tweak, and not really a big reform that does not ask for very much to be changed. Or…

* Some might argue that most students perform well above their state’s current standards, and Common Core is just aimed at those few students, schools or districts who do not. These people would be granting that state standards are irrelevant to most students and educators, who already operate well above them.

And yet, Race to the Top is being used to strong-arm states into adopting Common Core. Lots of money is going into developing Common Core aligned assessments (i.e. tests). And both politicians and the public expect these tests to be passed soon, and will have no tolerance for talk of waiting fifteen years for high passing rates. But if it will be possible for students to catch up to Common Core’s standards in just a few years, then Common Core’s standards do not push students and educators nearly as hard as they could take, meaning the standards are not really that rigorous – certainly not much more rigorous than existing standards.

What do you think is going to happen? Assuming that you try to adopt a more thoughtful approach to examining Common Core as a powerful lever for school reform, what do you expect?