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When the state and city education officials released the 2010-2011 ELA and Math test data on Monday, they didn’t make it easy for interested New Yorkers to make sense of the scores.

One spreadsheet, released by the city Department of Education, left off school names and corresponded results only by school code. It also excluded public charter schools entirely. The state’s spreadsheet included names, but listed every other public school in New York State as well.

There was also no easy way to compare schools to one another. The city included a comparison against previous years’ scores, but the file didn’t allow users to compare change over time among schools. The state’s data didn’t include any previous scores at all.

Not surprisingly, many of our readers emailed us to express their frustration over the scattered and unwieldy data. When I asked a DOE spokesman Matthew Mittenthal about it, he told me that grouping the data into school-by-school comparisons wasn’t a priority when publishing the information.

“We would never use test scores alone for accountability purposes, so we don’t actively encourage people to compare one school to another on that basis,” Mittenthal wrote in an email.

We spent the past couple of days playing with the spreadsheets so that it’s easier and more intuitive. First, we corresponded codes used by the DOE to actual school names (for example, 15K447 = The Math & Science Exploratory School). Then, we stripped non-essential data and added last year’s test results as a column header. Finally, we filtered the schools by performance so the best-scoring are at the top. (more…)

I can still remember a conversation I had with my child psychology professor during my first week of pre-service training for Teaching Fellows in June 2007. She asked me about my plans for teaching, and I responded without hesitation, “I’m only going to do this for two years. Then I’m planning to move on to journalism.” I’m embarrassed now when I think of myself back then.

I had the best of intentions when I entered the Teaching Fellows, but even as I ended my training filled with nervousness and doubt, I had no real appreciation for the challenge ahead of me. At the end of a tumultuous first year, I felt proud I hadn’t quit but deeply regretful about the classroom I’d presided over.

By the end of my second year I felt a much greater sense of pride, but I knew my work wasn’t finished. The ingenuous idealism I felt two years earlier had evaporated. Now that I understood the immensity of the task of teaching, I had no choice to work until I had mastered it.

Now, two years later, I can see that I was still looking at teaching from naive perspective. While I’ve made important gains each of the last two years, it’s become apparent to me that while one may become a “master teacher” over time, the challenge of growing, developing, and improving as an educator never ends. I could dedicate myself over the next year, or next 10 years, and my growth would never be finished.

It’s with mixed emotions, then, that I am preparing for my new classroom, no longer on the third floor of PS 310, but in Longfellow Hall at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education where I will pursue a degree in education policy and management. (more…)

• For the first time in years, all city secondary schools must teach sex ed. (Times, Daily News, NY1, Post)
• Parents’ early reviews of the policy shift were mixed, with some saying they’ll pull their kids. (Daily News)
• The city announced the outside groups that will manage some struggling schools. (GothamSchools, NY1)
• Buffalo won’t get federal funds for failing schools after the state said its plans were weak. (Buffalo News)
• The largest 1-year test gain, 17 points, was for a grade at Better Choice Community School. (Daily News)
• On average, city charter schools saw their test scores rise by slightly more than the city’s overall. (Post)
• The Wall Street Journal says charter schools’ test scores should give a policy boost to the movement.
• The Post says the city’s new test scores offer “reasonable grounds for hope for the future” of city schools.
• But the Daily News says the year’s gains were too small and blames the city’s teachers for the slow pace.
• A Bronx principal is soliciting his colleagues’ help in an effort to bolster arts education. (GothamSchools)

• Joel Klein’s op/ed got more responses than any other Atlantic piece this year. A sampling. (Atlantic)
• The city employs at least a dozen octogenarian teachers. Meet three of them. (Daily News)
• Advice about what to do if your math teacher frequently goes off on political tangents. (Dear Prudence)
• An analogy: Using bad data to assess reality is like using bad binoculars to see. (James Boutin)
• A nonprofit news site got a $100,000 to launch a Brooklyn bureau. Congratulations to City Limits!
• Could Arne Duncan’s veiled criticism of Common Core objectors doom the whole project? (Flypaper)
• Some folks on both sides of the education aisle are worried about new NCLB waivers. (Politics K-12)
• A teacher’s letter to himself on the eve of his first day in the classroom, two years ago. (Mr. Foteah)
• More flesh, aka “content maps,” is being thrown onto common standards’ bones. (Curriculum Matters)
• An argument that state test scores’ stability doesn’t make them any more reliable. (NYC P.S. Parents)
• A new data tool created by Colorado makes it easy to look at progress, or its lack. (Gary Rubinstein)

With just weeks to go before Labor Day, the city has announced the nonprofit groups that will help 14 struggling schools get a fresh start this fall.

A deal between the city and teachers union last month cleared the way for 33 low-performing schools to receive federal School Improvement Grants starting this fall. In exchange, the city must overhaul the schools in accordance with one of four federally sanctioned processes, and one of them, “restart,” requires schools to turn over the reins to an approved nonprofit organization.

Six nonprofits, several with existing ties to the city Department of Education, will take over the management of two to three schools each. The groups, known as Educational Partnership Organizations, will control budgeting, personnel decisions, curriculum, student discipline, and other issues, and the principals of those schools will report directly to their EPO rather than a DOE superintendent.

A matching process linked 11 of the schools with their first-choice EPO, and the other three were matched with one of their top picks, according to a DOE spokesman, Frank Thomas. The schools and nonprofits will begin working together as soon as the state approves the pairings, he said.

The remaining schools set to receive the new federal funds will undergo “transformation.” Transformation relies on replacing longtime principals and promising additional resources.

In a statement, principals union president Ernie Logan said he had “intense discussions” with the DOE to make sure the 33 schools would receive adequate support but remained unconvinced. (more…)

Sixth-graders at M.S. 223 drew Andy Warhol-inspired portraits during summer arts enrichment program

Angel Angel, 13, missed playing in seven baseball games last month so he could mentor students at his middle school, M.S. 223.

But Angel, a rising eighth-grader who is also an avid guitar-player, welcomed the opportunity to forgo his usual summer activities to help 96 incoming sixth-graders at the South Bronx middle school study reading, math and music for three weeks.

The summer enrichment program, which just finished its first year, is the brainchild of M.S. 223′s principal, Ramon Gonzalez, who has gained a reputation as a leader in public school management since he opened the school in 2003.

Gonzalez has touted initiatives to increase literacy and parental involvement to school community members throughout District 7, which is largely poor and low-performing. Now he is trying to turn District 7’s attention toward arts education, at a time when many schools are facing cuts to their art and music teaching positions. He is asking a handful of local principals to help him write a large grant to fund after school and summer school arts education at multiple schools in future years.

Gonzalez said he wanted to create a free summer program for his students that would address the learning-loss that some students, particularly those from low-income families, experience between June and September. He hoped offering afternoon classes in painting, printmaking, and orchestral music — in addition to trips to Broadway shows and the Museum of Modern Art —  would bring the students back each day, even though the classes were not mandatory.

Rather than try to carve $85,000 out of MS 223′s tight budget, he leveraged his connections — augmented after this spring’s appearance in the New York Times Magazine — to win funding.

Still, selling the split schedule to donors was difficult. (more…)

• The city’s small test score gains outshone the state’s. (GothamSchools, Daily News, NY1, WNYC, WSJ)
• But the reading scores for eighth-grade students actually dropped to their lowest point since 2006. (Post)
• A Bronx teacher was fired after investigators found she enrolled her son but didn’t pay tuition. (Post)
• Nearly every student at Bronx Charter School for the Arts reported bullying on the city’s survey. (WPIX)
• The city knew for months about toxins at Bronx New School but only told families this week. (Daily News)
• The government is suing a for-profit education company for illegally claiming financial aid. (Times, WSJ)
• Atlanta is taking $6 million from savings to pay salaries of teachers accused of cheating. (AJC)

• States are lining up for NCLB flexibility even though the rules and benefits are vague. (Politics K-12)
• Joel Klein’s NewsCorp links date to 1997, when he okayed a deal that raised antitrust flags. (Daily Intel)
• An assessment of the city’s ATR plan is that it provides opportunities but no guarantees. (NYC ATR)
• A rundown of the state’s conflicting messages on test integrity. (NYC P.S. Parents)
• On the city’s progress reports, many “F” schools actually outperformed other schools. (Gary Rubinstein)
• Peter Goodman: Bloomberg’s stalling on teacher evals is working against his interests. (Ed in the Apple)
• A city parent explains why she wishes she could quit her preschool’s PTA, and why she hasn’t. (Babble)
• A roundup of the research on class size, an issue that parents often put first. (Salon)
• Some mentor teachers come as an assignment and others are discovered. (Coach G’s Teaching Tips)
• A new teacher reports he needs more help than a 3-year-teacher mentor can give. (Pissed Off Teacher)
• Comparing the financial system’s cracks to education incentives, and proposing a fix. (James Boutin 1, 2)
• Arguing that the AFT and the NEA are corporate education reform machines, too. (Dropout Nation)
• On principle, a principal outlines his objections to for-profit schools. (Practical Theory)

From the state's test score presentation, a slide that shows gains in New York City that exceeds that of other cities.

A first look at state test score data confirms good news for New York City: The city’s test scores gains exceeded those across the state.

According to data released today, 43.9 percent of city students in grades 3-8 met the proficiency standard in reading and 57.3 percent hit the math proficiency standard. That’s compared to 42.4 percent and 54 percent in 2010, the first year after state officials raised the bar to reach that rating.

Statewide, reading scores dropped by a tiny amount — 0.4 percentage points — to 52.8 percent proficient, and math scores rose by 2.3 points, to 63.3 percent proficient.

State officials sounded a somber tone in their press release announcing the scores. “While the majority of students statewide met or exceeded the state’s proficiency standards in both math and ELA, overall performance remains low and the gaps in achievement persist,” the press release said.

Mayor Bloomberg is likely to point to city students’ relative performance during his press conference later today.

But the big story this year is not the scores but the tests themselves. (more…)