But when NYU’s Wagner Education Policy Studies Association put them together on a panel earlier this week, where they agreed turned out to be notable.

The topic of the panel was how federal involvement shapes local education policy. (I moderated the panel; Evan Stone, the founder of Educators 4 Excellence, also spoke.)

Ravitch opened by sharply criticizing the move to hold teachers and schools accountable for their students’ scores on standardized tests. But when talk turned to how future standardized tests should be built, Ravitch and Suransky agreed with each other. Ravitch said:

I’m very supportive of the idea of developing new assessments, and I think it’s a very important thing. But it will take years.

Just as these common core standards were written in a little over a year — it took me three years working on the California history standards. I worked on history standards in other states, and it was never done in only a year. So I would like to think that it’s going to take a lot of time to do this well because anything that’s done hurriedly is not going to survive….

I’m very happy that there’s money out there to develop new tests, but don’t think that they’re going to be available next year or the year after. If they’re good tests, it could be three to five years. And then they have to be tried out….So this is not going to be in time for the next election.

Suransky, who is working with one of the groups of states using federal funds to design new tests, responded:

I would agree with that statement, and I think we might have actually some common ground on those points.

The one point I would like to emphasize, though, is at the same time that this work is underway — you can only get to good assessments through going through the deep process that you describe. That has to happen and that work has begun. And so I think that’s promising.

There’s no reason why we have to wait to begin working with teachers and kids on the kinds of skills and the kind of practices that they to engage in. And so I think that even though it will take time for the state to get its act together and for the national consortium to field test — and that’s why it’s going to take four years — there’s nothing that prevents schools and school districts from engaging deeply on this work now.

And I think that’s part of that intent, because ultimately the reason for assessment is to motivate what happens in the classroom. If it doesn’t actually lead to good practice in the classroom then it’s undermining practice in the classroom. And so this is an opportunity. This is a moment where there’s an opportunity to shift the direction of practice in the classroom and to push on the level of rigor and to actually figure out what is it that kids and teachers need in order to engage in that type of practice.

Ravitch and Suransky also weighed in on whether the city should release the names and performance ratings of thousands of city teachers. After several city news outlets requested the scores through freedom of information requests, the teachers union sued to stop the city from releasing the ratings. The city agreed to wait to release the scores until a hearing in court next month, but Chancellor Joel Klein has come out strongly in favor of publicizing the ratings.

Suransky explained why the city had been hesitant to release the scores with teachers’ names in the past, but why he thinks it should do so now:

We’ve had the scores for two and a half years and we haven’t made them public up until now because of two reasons. One, we don’t want an individual teacher to get called out in public in a way that is disrespectful and attacking them; and second, we know there is a tremendous amount of context that needs to be understood around the scores and we were still working on fine-tuning the tools. And they’ve gotten a lot better based on the feedback of principals like [P.S. 321's] Liz Phillips….

But if it does come out I think that what we will show when we release it is: we’ll show those confidence intervals, we’ll show what the error band is around each teacher’s scores, we’ll talk about how schools are using that data; and I think that it may have a value for many parents. Because honestly if I was a parent, I don’t know that I would feel good about the Department of Education deciding that I wasn’t smart enough to figure out the nuances of this data. And I think that a lot of parents would like to know it, and so we’ll need to work with the community to help them understand it. That isn’t the choice that we would have ultimately made, but it seems to be the choice that we’re bound to make under the law.

Ravitch responded that while she does think teachers’ value-added scores have some use, they should not be published in newspapers:

It’s the release of the names that I find objectionable. Because suppose you then have smart parents — and by the way, the DOE has never cared about what parents think about anything up to now, except to get the names and test score data for their teachers — but supposing parents are really smart, and 90 percent of the parents want 10 percent of the teachers. This seems to me it’s going to be a problem….

I think the supervisor should use these numbers to make judgments about tenure, to make judgments about who gets due process and who doesn’t, who should be fired and who shouldn’t — it seems appropriate to me, in the context of having sat in the persons class. But to make them public creates the kind o situation that the LA Times did, where — you may or may not know this — a teacher there committed suicide.  And he had been rated less effective by the Los Angeles Times, not by his supervisors. The deputy superintendent John Deasy said that his personnel files showed that he had very high ratings; he was considered one of the best teachers in the school. And he took it very seriously when there was a published database calling him a less effective teacher.

Now maybe he committed suicide for some other reason but his family and colleagues said this was incredibly depressing to him. He was working in a gang infested neighborhood, fifth grade teacher for 14 years, and his colleagues said he was the one who went after the toughest kids and brought them back. And he committed suicide. Was that because of publishing his score and humiliating him? I don’t know, but I think you have to think about all the consequences not just the ones you intend.

At Christopher Columbus High School, one of the 19, there are as many answers to that question as there are freshmen.

Half of the Bronx school’s 300 ninth graders selected Columbus as part of the high school admissions process. The other half were sent there by the city, sometimes after failing to find slots at other schools. Columbus’s principal, Lisa Fuentes, said a parent came to her last week after nine other Bronx high schools had turned her daughter away. Though she was old enough to be a high school senior, the student had only half the credits she’d need to graduate, making it impossible for her to get a diploma by the year’s end. Now she’s a Columbus student.

Today, I met four freshmen, each with a different story for how she or he came to Columbus. Three of them chose the school. That means that as eighth graders, Leslie Anne Alcantara, Gregory Woodson, and Edwin Santiago listed Columbus among their twelve preferred schools in the high school admissions process.

Later, when the city didn’t put them in Columbus because officials assumed the school would close, these students had to fill out more paperwork in order to enroll. All of them knew going into the school year that the city would likely try a second time to close the school. But few of them understood the city’s phase-out process or that they’d be the last class to graduate from Columbus.

Columbus was Alcantara’s first choice. “My mom wanted me to come here,” she said. “My cousins went here. One is a senior here. And then the two others graduated and are in college.”

She had reservations at first. There were rumors among friends that Columbus had problems with violence. She also knew that the school might close, and wasn’t sure what that meant for her chances of getting into another high school.

“It’s good,” Alcantara, 14, said. ”In the beginning, I was scared to come here because I heard things about it. But it’s better than I thought.”

When Woodson put Columbus on his list, he was going against his mother’s wishes. She wanted him to attend Harry Truman High School, another large high school in the Bronx, but one that is not walking distance from Woodson’s doorstop.

“I applied here ’cause it was close and it has a culinary arts class in it,” he said. “My mom said that their [Truman's] culinary institute is much better, but I said that I didn’t want to go, I didn’t want to travel.”

Edwin Santiago, 14, also applied to Columbus. Though he was enrolled at the Urban Assembly School for Wildlife Conservation, which runs through the ninth grade, he wanted to find a new school.

“I applied because my old school wasn’t prepared and didn’t have really good teachers,” he said. “And so I decided to come here because I have a family tradition [of going to Columbus].”

One freshman, who did not want her name mentioned, was placed in Columbus by the Department of Education. After eight years in New York City’s public schools, she’d gone to Jamaica for year, and upon her return the city had to find her a spot. Though the city fought against having to place students in schools like Columbus this year, the student said officials gave her a choice between Theodore Roosevelt High School and Columbus. They recommended Columbus, but she said she wasn’t sure why.

Though she’s happy at Columbus, she said she’d likely try to transfer out if the city succeeds in phasing-out the school. “I don’t want to be in a closing school, why would I want to do that?” she said, noting that she’d like to fight the school’s closure, but didn’t think the city would listen to students.

“I like the teachers, but I’ll get used to others,” she said.

The other three students said they would stay and graduate from Columbus, regardless of the school’s future.

“I would stay, just to finish,” Alcantara said.

Woodson said he would stick around, too.

“My mom, she told me so much: ‘Columbus is this and they have a lot of problems there and they’re going to close down,’” he said. “And I’m like, I’m giving it a chance. It’s better than I thought it would be.”

But that changes during after school. In the after school program he is much more focused, and much more productive. I still sense a lot of the same pent up energy I see throughout the day, and yes it’s only two days into our program, but so far, he’s practically a star of the class. Why is that?

The most obvious explanation is the class size. Only six kids showed up from my roster yesterday. Today there were seven. With fewer students around, there’s fewer distractions for him. There’s also fewer temptations, in the form of his buddies, to cause distractions. So, while there’s still moments where he seems almost uncontrollably worked up, his work’s been mostly exemplary.

The other theory I have — which doesn’t negate the first — is based on another student in the group. This other boy has a lot of the same behaviors of Baby Face, but with an added attitude. I don’t mind students who have trouble sitting still, paying attention or raising their hand to talk, because those are habits that can be worked on. A nasty attitude though … sigh. This boy also happens to be a close friend of Baby Face, which makes Baby Face’s restraint all the more surprising. You would think the two would feed off each other, but (knock on wood) so far Baby Face hasn’t joined in on the trouble making. Why is that?

I wonder if Baby Face sees this other boy causing problems, and taking the heat, and feels freed by it? Maybe part of the reason he acts out the way he does is because other students (and I?) expect him to. With another boy filling that role, he doesn’t have to.

Whatever the reason, the smaller class size, psychology, or some combination of the two, I hope Baby Face’s focus continues. More than that, I hope he can build on his success during after school, and extend it to the regular school hours.

City officials said today that they plan to ramp up communication with parents and staff at 47 schools that could face closure. The move is in part a response to a successful lawsuit the union brought last year, in which two courts ruled that the city failed to meet state legal requirements for notifying schools and their communities about plans for closure.

But Mulgrew said today that the public notice and earlier meetings are not enough. Rather than helping the schools improve at the first signs of struggle, he said, the city let them get worse, until they became candidates for closure.

“Engaging the community in the process I think is a good thing,” Mulgrew said. “At the same time, if we know we have schools that are turning in the wrong direction, why are we waiting til now to reach out to them?”

City officials said they are distributing an outline of steps the Department of Education has already taken to boost each of the schools on its list. And and they said the new strategy is designed to uncover whether schools can be helped by changes other than closure.

“The whole point of our efforts is to get to struggling schools early, hear directly from the community what’s working and what isn’t working, and figure out the best path forward,” said DOE spokesman Jack Zarin-Rosenfeld. “We’ve been very clear that while some schools will be proposed for phase-out, some won’t be.”

Zarin-Rosenfeld noted that some of the schools on the city’s watch-list may instead receive less severe interventions, such as a change in principals or experiments with new curriculum.  ”But getting out to have conversations early and often, before any proposals have been made, will help us find the right solution for these schools,” he said.

As of tomorrow, Victory Schools will be named Victory Education Partners and it will no longer be a traditional management company. The group will retain its for-profit status, but will continue to work in schools by offering a variety of services, from professional development to back-office support, that schools can choose to purchase.

The change was prompted by the passage of a new law last spring that doubled the cap on charter schools, and also barred for-profit companies from operating or managing new charter schools. One of three for-profit charter management groups work with New York City schools, Victory had to change or close shop in the city. It’s choosing to change.

Since 1999, Victory has managed 13 New York charter schools and it continues to run seven of them in the city, with an additional two in New York State. Most of them began when community or church groups discovered the charter management company and signed five-year contracts for services that came as one package. A contract with Victory meant the company would oversee everything from professional development to payroll.

Under the new law, Victory can continue to manage these schools — Stovall calls them his “legacy clients” — but it can’t open new ones in New York. In other cities where Victory works, such as Philadelphia and Chicago, it can continue to run schools.

But in New York, the company is evolving in accordance with the new law.

“Going forward, we are unbundling our services,” said James Stovall, who become Victory’s CEO in June. Instead of hiring Victory for all of their management and instructional services, schools will be able to pick and choose from a menu.

“So if a school wants to hire us to provide just leadership coaching, they can do that,” Stovall said. “If a school wants to hire us to provide their accounting and finance functions, they can do that.”

In addition to allowing schools to pick from a menu of services, Stovall said the company wants to get involved in turnaround schools. In the next year, New York City may begin closing as many as 47 schools, and the Department of Education is likely to replace some of them with charter schools that could buy services from Victory.

The new law that bars for-profit companies from managing charter schools is vague about precisely how involved a company can be before it crosses the line into management. One problem Victory may face is how to define that line.

“I’ve heard tossed around that well, as long as you stay below 50 percent of a school’s total number of outside vendor services, you’re safe,” Stovall said.

Executive Director of SUNY’s Charter School Institute Jonas Chartock said the charter school authorizer would look at a variety of factors to decide whether a for-profit company was overstepping the law’s bounds.

“We would not view the provision of back office services only (payroll, benefits management, accounting,
etc.) to be a violation,” he wrote in an email.

“At the other end of the spectrum, a full-service, sweep contract where the management provider receives all funds after expenses certainly would violate the law,” he said. Chartock said that SUNY would also look at how much of a school’s per pupil funding was going to pay a vendor’s fees.

“Anything over 8-10 percent would be worthy of further review and look like a more traditional management model, whereas a 3-5 percent fee would be more typical of a back-office only arrangement,” he wrote.

Established in 1999, Victory has had a mixed record in New York City. While some of the schools it helped start, like the South Bronx Charter School for International Cultures and the Arts, have earned top grades on the annual progress reports, others are struggling. The Sisulu-Walker Charter School — the first school Victory opened — went from an A last year to landing on the list of the 15 lowest performing elementary and public schools this year.

Victory has been targeted by the city’s teachers union for how much it charges schools. An analysis by Kim Gittleson showed that Victory charges schools an average of 17 percent of their per-pupil funding, or about $2,000 per student. Non-profit management groups charge their schools an average of 7 percent of their per-pupil funding, or about $1000 per student. According to Victory officials, their company charges more because it offers more support to its schools.

The union has made inroads at three Victory-run schools, where teachers voted to unionize after relations between’s the schools’ administration and staff broken down.

List of schools Victory manages:

NYC:

New World Preparatory (Staten Island), Merrick Academy (Queens), Bronx Global Learning Institute for Girls (Bronx), New Hope Academy (Brooklyn), New York City Charter High School for Architecture, Engineering and Construction Industries (Bronx), Sisulu-Walker Charter School of Harlem (Manhattan), South Bronx Charter School for International Cultures and the Arts (Bronx)

New York State:

Academy Charter School (Hempstead), Charter School of Educational Excellence (Yonkers)

Victory also helps several non-charter high schools and advises their principals. Those schools are:

August Martin High School
Herbert Lehman High School
High School for Media and Communications in Manhattan
High School for Law and Public Policy in Manhattan

On the watch-list, which education officials released today, are 19 schools that the city tried to close last year but were saved by a successful union lawsuit. It also includes most of the 23 schools currently on the state’s list of lowest-performing schools that did not begin federally-mandated interventions this year. All 16 of the newly-identified schools are elementary and middle schools.

City officials said today they had learned lessons from last year’s thwarted closure process and are re-strategizing for this year.

The city is hoping to avoid some of the confusion and shock that marred their efforts to close schools last year by announcing their plans early and by clarifying their rationale for shuttering schools, officials said. Last year a state appeals court ruled that the city failed to meet legal requirements for notifying the community about its closure plans.

Officials have already posted their criteria for adding schools to their watch-list to the Department of Education’s website: schools were tagged if they received three consecutive C’s, or a single D or F, on their progress reports, or if they received anything below a proficient rating on their last Quality Review.

Some schools met this criteria but are not on the city’s list: elementary schools that outperform their districts on state tests; high schools with higher graduation rates than the citywide average; schools that received high marks on their Quality Review; and new schools that received a report card for the first time this year.

Three schools that are on the state’s list of lowest-achieving schools are notably absent from the city’s list of schools targeted for possible closure: Washington Irving High School, Boys and Girls High School and P.S. 65 (Mother Hale Academy). Officials said today that they have decided not to close these three because of strides the schools have made under new leadership.

City officials stressed today that their list is not definitive. More schools could be added to the list once the state releases this year’s update to its “persistently lowest achieving” schools list and after high school progress reports are released in several weeks.

Decisions about which elementary and middle schools the city plans to close will be handed down by the end of next month; decisions about high schools will follow by mid-December. The city will then begin its formal public approval process, which involves hearings at the schools and eventual votes by the citywide school board.

If the city eventually decides to close all or most of the schools identified today, it would be a drastic jump in the number of schools it has closed under Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The city has phased out — or is in the process of phasing out — 91 schools since Bloomberg took office.

Last year, the mayor promised to turn around the lowest-performing 10 percent of city schools over the next four years, double the number federal officials have required the state to identify.

Teachers union chief Michael Mulgrew sharply criticized the city for the potential surge in closures. ”If Joel Klein and Michael Bloomberg want their legacy to be closing every school in New York City, they should be ashamed,” Mulgrew said. “They should be focused on fixing schools, not shuttering them.”

City officials also said they are changing their strategy of communicating with the schools marked for possible closure as it evaluates them. Last year, teachers and parents protested that the first time they had heard from the DOE was when the city announced its plans to close the school.

This year, the city is planning early meetings with principals, school leadership teams, parent associations and community groups before they finalize plans for the school. City officials characterized those meetings both as attempts to learn more about the school beyond what is captured in their data and to prepare the schools for whatever final decision is announced.

Those meetings have already begun or have been scheduled for 33 of the schools; officials said today they are waiting to schedule meetings at the schools slated for closure last year until this year’s high school progress reports have been released.

Dear Stacey,

As I was preparing to write back to you I decided to read a column in Huffington Post by Randi Weingarten. And, as I was reading it I saw the link to the “manifesto” signed by your chancellor in New York City and my superintendent here in Denver. I won’t get into the arguments for or against each of these articles other than to say that the answer probably lies somewhere in the middle. But, interestingly, the “manifesto” has a direct connection to your last correspondence to me. It states:

District leaders also need the authority to use financial incentives to attract and retain the best teachers. When teachers are highly effective — measured in significant part by how well students are doing academically — or are willing to take a job in a tough school or in a hard-to-staff subject area such as advanced math or science, we should be able to pay them more. Important initiatives, such as the federal Teacher Incentive Fund, are helping bring great educators to struggling communities, but we have to change the rules to professionalize teaching.

In last correspondence, you wrote, “Four years ago teachers voted overwhelmingly to participate in the Teacher Incentive Fund program (Partnership for Compensation in Charter Schools, a collaboration between CEI-PEA and nine charter schools).”

You may remember that the conversion charter school I co-founded and co-directed in Harlem, Future Leaders Institute, also voted on whether to participate in the Teacher Incentive Fund program. There, teachers narrowly voted against participation.

Now that your school has been part of the program for several years, I would love to hear more about how it is going. I remember that a key issue at our school was whether participation would negatively impact the teacher culture of collaboration and collegiality. Have you had any negative unintended consequences? Has the program been successful?

View of this evening's double rainbow from the GothamSchools' HQ.

• The city has backed away from a policy that charged schools for after-school activities. (InsideSchools)
• SUNY approved Eva Moskowitz’s application for a charter school on the Upper West Side. (GS, NYT)
• A teacher foresees a city-union compromise before the release of teachers’ ratings. (Accountable Talk)
• A space fight in Clinton Hill is intensifying as one school plans to expand. (The Local)
• Ruben Brosbe: any attempt to rate teachers without considering the “intangibles” of the job will fail. (GS)
• Looking back at lessons from Chicago’s, and Duncan’s, first turnaround school. (EdWeek)
• Baltimore and its teachers union are likely to announce a new contract soon. (EdWeek)
• Leonie Haimson identifies seven myths about class size reduction. (Washington Post)
• A majority of education professors in this survey think TFA is worthwhile. (Flypaper)

The parent of a Queens public school student is accusing the New York Post of fabricating his support for publicly releasing teachers’ effectiveness scores.

Queens Community Education Council member Brian Rafferty said that an op/ed published in the New York Post last week bore his byline, but not his views. Rafferty, who is also the executive editor of the Queens Tribune, made the accusation at a council meeting in Ridgewood, Queens last night. The piece, titled “Dad: Union putting my child last,” criticized the city’s teachers union for going to court to block the city from releasing teachers’ ratings.

Last night, Rafferty told a room packed with parents and teachers that he does not support releasing 12,000 teachers’ ratings with their names included.

“I might be skeptical of the union sometimes, no offense guys, but there is absolutely no way that these opinions are mine,” he said.

Rafferty said that an assistant to a Post reporter called him last Wednesday night and asked to transcribe his comments for an op/ed piece, yet his actual views never ended up in print. “I feel duped and used,” he wrote in a letter to the Post’s editors, that he said the newspaper refused to publish. Rafferty explained his opinion of teacher ratings in detail:

“First of all, what I know that I said is that I assume the teacher ratings are as reliable a measure of the performance of a teacher, as an ELA is reliable as a measure of performance of a student. Testing, microscopic pieces of data, do not provide valid results for rating anything or anyone. And I made it very clear that the position that I hold is that these teacher ratings could be a very useful part in training and assisting the teachers to be better, assisting the department of education to better serve the children of this city and that if data were to come out relative to the schools, that could be useful for the parents in making decisions about schools and school choice. But that the private information and the names of teachers associated with those ratings, to release that, would be just as harmful as it would be to release the names of poor performing students. That somehow, got left out.”

GothamSchools contributor Ruben Brosbe, who wrote about his data report for the Post, had his piece edited so that it was more supportive of the city releasing ratings.

Last August, the Post was one of several city newspapers to submit a Freedom of Information Request for teachers’ effectiveness ratings. Since the city announced its intention to release the ratings last week, the newspaper’s editorial board has lambasted teachers union president Michael Mulgrew for barring the release.

Rubenstein Associates, which handles public relations for the Post, did not return calls for comment.

]]> http://gothamschools.org/2010/10/27/parent-says-ny-post-fabricated-his-opinion-of-teacher-ratings/feed/ 6 http://gothamschools.org/2010/10/27/suny-trustees-approve-success-academy-for-upper-west-side/ http://gothamschools.org/2010/10/27/suny-trustees-approve-success-academy-for-upper-west-side/#comments Wed, 27 Oct 2010 21:10:36 +0000 Maura Walz http://gothamschools.org/?p=48673

A screenshot from Upper West Success Academy's website.

The State University of New York’s Board of Trustees unanimously approved Eva Moskowitz’s application to open a charter school on Manhattan’s Upper West Side this morning.

But the approval is unlikely to dampen any of the controversy surrounding the Upper West Success Academy, which Moskowitz’s charter network plans to open in the fall of 2011.

The fight over the school has centered on two questions: Is a new charter school the answer to the district’s overcrowding? And, if so, should that charter share another school’s building?

This is the first time Moskowitz’s charter chain plans to open a school in a neighborhood that is not predominantly low-income. Moskowitz has said she intends the school to provide an alternative to parents who have been crowded out of the neighborhood’s most popular schools or who cannot send their students to one of the city’s gifted programs.

Moskowitz has said she would like the charter to open in P.S. 145, which the city currently lists as underutilized. City officials have told the school they are likely to site the charter there, according to P.S. 145 parent leaders, though the city says no decision has been made.

Over the past few weeks, as Moskowitz has begun to advertise the school’s arrival to the neighborhood, opposition to the school has begun to grow, especially among P.S. 145 parents, neighborhood activists and politicians. Critics fear that, even in cases where the city considers a building underutilized, district schools will be squeezed if an expanding charter moves in.

“The community is behind improving our existing schools, not evicting them,” said Noah Gotbaum, the president of District 3′s parent council.

Gotbaum and others, including the neighborhood’s Councilwoman Gale Brewer, worry that if Upper West Success moves in, it could compromise an $11 million grant P.S. 145 and seven other neighborhood schools recently won to expand. The school is supposed to use the grant money to attract more students by improving its technology programs.

Brewer also said that neighborhood activists had wanted the city to move a small middle school, West Prep Academy, into the building to help relieve overcrowding in the district’s southern section, a plan that would also be jeopardized by the entrance of Upper West Success.

Under the revisions to state charter school law passed this year, charter applicants must demonstrate demand for the school in the neighborhoods where they want to open. Parents and activists who attended the SUNY trustee vote this morning said their voices were largely ignored in the approval process.

“There’s one fatal flaw in this overall process: nobody asked what the community wanted,” said Donna Nevel, a West Side parent and community activist.

But Moskowitz has insisted — and SUNY officials agreed — that demand exists for her school in the crowded neighborhood.

“We’ve spent a lot of time this summer talking to Upper West Side parents,” Moskowitz wrote in the New York Post this week. “Regardless of their politics or ideology, they almost all agree on one thing: If they can have the option of applying to a new, tuition-free school in their community with proven results, they want that option.”

Just before the trustees voted to approve the application, Pedro Noguera, the chair of SUNY’s charter school committee, expressed concern that because the Charter School Institute does not select sites for its schools, parent objections might be overlooked.

But when institute staff noted that the city would need to go through its own public approval process before siting Upper West Success in a district building, and that the institute also can veto a proposed charter school location, Noguera seemed satisfied.

“I think that hopefully should give those members of the community who are objecting to the location ample opportunity to be heard,” Noguera said.

The fight will likely now shift to the city’s public approval process for siting the school. If the city decides to give the charter school space at P.S. 145, it will hold a hearing at the school and the citywide school board will vote on the move.

Tina Crockett, president of the P.S. 145′s parent association, argued today that the co-location is not a foregone conclusion.

“We just think [Moskowitz is] unfairly jumping the gun to influence parents to attract them to her school,” Crockett said.

“Let us go through the process,” she said. “Don’t insinuate that it’s a done deal.”

That said, the whole thing has to be taken with a grain of salt. As much as my job has been overwhelmed by testing, I refuse to judge my performance on test scores alone.

Ultimately my job is to prepare my students for a life of learning and success. Tests that measure students’ academic performance are one way to assess my own performance. But I’d like to believe that there are intangible aspects to my job — for example instilling a love of learning and proper work ethic — that can’t possibly be measured quantitatively. I think any attempt to rate teachers without accounting in some way for these aspects of teaching will be fatally flawed.

Rereading this old post from last year, I was also struck by the conversation that followed in the comments. I think they’re worth reading:

Jonathan said:

But when we open the door to this sort of evaluation, it will become in many cases the only evaluation.

There is nothing easier than picking a number out of a report.

Qualitative observation, qualitative evaluation, would take work.

Skoolboy said:

Ruben,

Would you be willing to share your report? If you’ve only been teaching for a year, it’s very likely that the information is extremely unreliable — i.e., your percentile location in the experience-adjusted distribution might be due to chance.

Aaron Pallas
skoolboy2@gmail.com

NYC HS History Teacher said:

Many teachers say this, and I have to believe it will be true

“When they measure teacher performance on student test scores, every kid will get an A.”

And really, does anyone believe the DOE would have an effective way of figuring out whether teachers are fudging grades or not. After all, high scores make them look better. Just look at the abortion the Regents exam has turned out to be.

I responded:

I don’t remember the exact numbers but I believe my ELA percentile was 58 and my Math was 33. I already knew that math was a weak area for my last year though, and I expect this year’s scores to reflect a big improvement. To NYC HS Teacher, I agree partly, but in the case of the ELA and Math scores, I don’t assign them, so it’s impossible to “give every student an A” to raise my grade. That doesn’t mean however, that teaching to the test becomes the standard practice

Skoolboy responded:

Ruben,

One of the things that worries me about the teacher data reports is that teachers might focus on their percentile ranks — 33 and 58 in this case — without considering just how much uncertainty there is in the data that go into those percentile ranks. The report displays the range of percentiles which might be a teacher’s “true” percentile rank, but we’re drawn to the single number that is the best single estimate.

I think it’s quite likely that estimates such as the 58th and 33rd percentiles represent broad ranges of possible values, to the point that the 58 and 33 are statistically indistinguishable. What appears as better performance in ELA than in math may simply be a matter of chance.

I don’t know how useful these reports might be. Teachers who take their work seriously are going to be striving to improve regardless of what the teacher data report says. But if you find it useful, that’s great.

If any other readers would be willing to share the information in their teacher data reports — and anonymously is fine with me — I’d very much like to see them.

Aaron Pallas
skoolboy2@gmail.com

And I responded:

To be clear, I think the report cards are far from perfect, and yes, more than a little annoying. But I’ve always cared about grades, even if I’m had problems with the teacher or their grading system. Even in these cases, I’m the type who will strive for an A. So if nothing else good comes of this report card, at least maybe I will improve my practice to the point where all my students will achieve beyond the predictions of the system.

To which Jonathan said:

But achieve what? Is your job limited to maximizing their scores on the state ELA and Math exams?If you strive to increase your “grade” you will be working to master test prep. Is that the kind of teaching you want to learn to do? What would you be neglecting?

Unfortunately, I never responded to this final, and essential question. I want to do so now with a resounding refusal to let test prep dominate my practice. I understand the fear that the use of test score data will precipitate test prep centered teaching, and that’s why I think it’s essential we have a open dialogue on valid methods of quantitative and qualitative evaluations for teachers. It’s imperative that this discussion includes teachers.

I believe that good readers, writers and critical thinkers can score well on any test they’re given. These are the skills I have always worked to develop in my students. It’s my hope that by preparing my students for the tests in this way, their scores will rise. To belatedly answer Jonathan’s questions, I do worry that report cards predicated on test scores will drive test prep in the classroom. However with the right balance of qualitative evaluations, this practice would be discouraged. In my own classroom, I think it is possible to strive for high test scores (and by extension a high mark on a teacher data report) without sacrificing what I know are the best practices.

Last week, the city announced that it would release a list of teachers’ names and their effectiveness ratings to reporters who had submitted freedom of information requests. The union has sued to stop the release, and the city agreed to postpone publicizing teachers’ names until a hearing is held in court next month.

The union asserts that the ratings should not be made public in part because they are non-finalized and often error-prone internal documents. To make that case, the union is asking teachers to comb their reports for mistakes and tell the union when they find them.

The union sent teachers a sample report showing teachers how to look for mistakes, and has set up a dedicated phone line and e-mail address for concerns about the accuracy of their ratings, according to a memo union President Michael Mulgrew sent teachers last week. A union spokesman said that, as of Friday, at least 200 teachers had called the union to report errors.

Department of Education spokesman Matthew Mittenthal said that the city had seen an increase in the number of calls since the union sent out its memo. But he said that the majority of calls were prompted by misunderstandings of the reports rather than inaccuracies.

Still, Mittenthal said, the city plans to check teachers’ complaints and fix problems it finds before releasing the reports publicly.

The report recounts the brief history of New York City’s adventures with its own database known as ARIS, for Achievement Reporting and Innovation System. It also looks at schools’ gradual adoption of “data inquiry teams,” which about 65 percent of teachers were using at the end of last year.

Inquiry teams are groups of four or five teachers that select a small number of low-performing students to focus on. With information culled from ARIS, the teachers try and alter curriculum and teaching methods to improve the students’ performance. These teams are the DOE’s largest-scale reform that directly targets the instructional process. Officials hope to bring the participation rate up to 90 percent by the end of this year.

One DOE official notes in the report, “data analysis ‘is not yet leading to fundamental change in teacher practice or decision-making.” The reports states that some of the reason for that is that ARIS isn’t showing teachers as much data as they want to see as fast as they want to see it. But the city clearly expects that to change as it opens ARIS up to data that comes from teachers, not just to them. Here are some of the changes the city has in store:

• Responding to complaints that ARIS’s data isn’t updated frequently enough and is too broad to really help inquiry teams, the city is creating ARIS Local, which we reported on last month. Though several years away, ARIS Local will eventually let teachers load their own data onto the city’s servers. This could eventually give teachers the ability compare how a student does on a test the teacher made herself to how he does on the state’s exams.

• One drawback of ARIS that the city is beginning to look at is the fact that only teachers, administrators, and parents can access the data. Community and after-school organizations that work with students can’t see their attendance information, or whether they’re classified as English language learners. But that is changing, as Tucker writes:

  “Sophie Lippincott, former director of knowledge sharing in the Division of Performance and Accountability, sees the clear value of sharing ARIS information with community-based organizations, and she has been trying to begin a program to do so. “It’s obviously in our favor to have partner organizations using ARIS,” she says. The district has trained two organizations that are “gung-ho . . . and ready to go,” she says. But, here again, organizational silos are proving difficult to break. The developers of ARIS did not contemplate out-of-school use; because user authentication is based on the Education Department’s human resources databases, it is difficult for non-school employees to gain access. (The district has recently developed a temporary solution that enables schools to grant access to certain community partners.)”

• Though the DOE hasn’t have the tracking programs it needs to know what parts of the site are getting the most use or how parents are viewing ARIS, officials do know that more parents are logging in. The report states:

  “A total of 62,000 unique users logged in to the ARIS educator tools from July 2009 to March 2010. As of August 2009, 340,000 different parent accounts had been accessed at least once, most often during parent/ teacher conferences.”

  The report gives examples of some ways the city has tried to get low-income families to check out their students’ scores.

  “Parent Link employed more strategies in a pilot effort to boost use by low-income families in 24 schools. Successful strategies include using parent and student volunteers; in one school, students train their parents and have them sign notes confirming they have logged in to Parent Link. Teachers have been trained in how to talk about data with parents. Another school opened its library early for ARIS workshops, and at another, a parent coordinator e-mailed parents who had not logged in. One school, located across from a homeless shelter, even created a resource room with a washer, dryer, and Internet access.”

Unfortunately, the Post’s word count constraints meant a large part of my argument was left out in favor of a stronger pro-release column. I understand the newspaper’s need to support its stance as simply as possible, but I want to use the space here to clarify my views and hopefully add some of the nuance that the Post wasn’t interested in.

The truth is, I am in favor of releasing the scores, including my own “average” rating. But not without a serious effort by everyone involved to explain the flaws and shortcomings inherent in them. I believe parents and the public have a right to know how teachers are being rated.

The public should also know that the scores are based on a formula that produces wide variability. The margin of error for some scores was as high as 35 percent! So a teacher who belonged in the top quintile may have ended up in the third quintile, and vice versa. If scores are released, the city or the media have a responsibility to give limitations like this prominent coverage.

Ultimately, the UFT’s decision to fight the release isn’t unreasonable, but it seems like a losing battle, and one that once again puts the union and the teachers it’s seeking to protect in an unfavorable light. I worry that the UFT is going to do more damage than good, and is missing an opportunity to control the conversation over the data reports and teacher effectiveness in general.

The main reason I favor the release of the scores is because of the conversation I hope it will spark. Recently, the discussion surrounding effective teaching has centered on student test scores. I hope (perhaps naively) that by looking at the limits of the teacher data reports, we can also talk honestly about the limits of test scores in general to judge teacher effectiveness and student performance.

The truth is, effective teaching is about much more than helping students score well on state tests. The best teachers I know act as role models and inspirations for their students. They teach their students how to respect one another, take pride in themselves, love learning, constantly question and search for answers. The teacher data reports will never be able to quantify this impact. If we’re going to honestly discuss effective teaching we can start by recognizing this fact.