GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• Things people think teachers say during break, and what they’re actually saying. (Ms Eyre/NY Educator)
• Diane Ravitch: New York’s new evaluations will continue a recent tradition of data-obsession. (NYRB)
• Aaron Pallas suggests that new evaluations account for measurement error. (GS Community/Hechinger)
• Teacher Deven Black is telling his high school-senior son not to be a teacher. (Education on the Plate)
• A teacher describes the projects of his past that he hasn’t found time to do with his students. (Mr. Foteah)
• A charter leader collects defenses of monetary fines for poor student behavior. (Starting an Ed School)
• One of the authors of the principals’ petition talks teacher evals from a student’s view. (Answer Sheet)
• Newly released data in D.C. shows high expulsion rates at some charter schools. (D.C. Schools Insider)
• A top Teach for America recruit in New Haven is weighing whether she’ll stay there. (N.H. Independent)
• Geoffrey Canada delivered an ed-related clue during tonight’s teacher “Jeopardy!” (Relay GSE Twitter)
• A “story of transformation” from the student-centered Mission Hill School in Boston. (Sam Chaltain)
• A rousing call for more read-alouds in today’s classrooms. (The Book Whisperer via Core Knowledge)

The schedule at Paul Robeson High School.

Students at Paul Robeson High School are served lunch at 2 p.m. or later. As we reported earlier this month, many students at the phasing-out school say the schedule leaves them hungry and unable to focus on classwork by the second half of the school day.

“Later in the day, my stomach [is] talking to me, and the teacher is talking to me at the same time,” senior Akeem Pearce told me. “I don’t know who to listen to.”

Our readers asked whether it is legal for a city school to serve lunch so late in the day. The short answer is yes, according to the letter of the law — but maybe not according to the spirit.

State law governing school lunch schedules does not specify a window of time for serving lunch, but rather requires that schools serve lunch at a “reasonable time,” which could vary from community to community.

Overcrowding and co-locations — which ask multiple schools stationed in the same building to share a single cafeteria, gym and auditorium — have caused some schools to complain that they are unable to schedule lunch at a reasonable time. (more…)

City officials won’t be heading to Albany this week after all to petition State Education Commissioner John King to restore federal funding for 33 struggling schools.

King cut off the funds, known as School Improvement Grants, last month when New York City failed to settle on new teacher evaluations by his end-of-2011 deadline. Nine other districts lost their funding for the same reason.

All asked for hearings to appeal King’s decree, and those hearings were set to begin last Friday. City officials were due to make their case for the funds Wednesday morning.

But starting just hours after the news broke on Thursday that the state and its main teachers union, NYSUT, had agreed on a framework for new evaluations, all of the districts asked for their hearings to be adjourned, according to an SED spokesman, Dennis Tompkins.

It’s not clear exactly how the state’s evaluations deal would change what districts planned to say during their hearings. (more…)

During the month that Gov. Andrew Cuomo was engineering revisions to the state’s teacher evaluation law, more city principals signed onto a petition critiquing it.

A pair of Long Island principals launched the petition against the state’s 2010 evaluation law in November, arguing that its requirement that a portion of teachers’ ratings be based on students’ test scores is unsupported by research, prone to errors, and too expensive at a time of budget cuts.

Two weeks after the petition started circulating, hundreds of principals across the state had signed on, but only a handful were from New York City. By early January, only about 100 city principals had signed on, up from 30 in early December.

Now, there are more than 175 principals on board as of the version of the petition distributed Monday night.

City principals still make up less than 15 percent of the 1,359 state principals who have signed on while comprising more than a third of principals statewide. But they have made up ground in recent weeks. They were less than 10 percent of signatories a month ago. (more…)

The word rigor comes up a lot in teacher-evaluation systems. It’s akin to motherhood, apple pie and the American flag. What policymaker is going to take a stand against rigor? But the term is getting distorted almost beyond recognition.

In science, a rigorous study is one in which the scientific claims are supported by the evidence. Scientific rigor is primarily determined by the study’s design and data-analysis methods. It has nothing to do with the substance of the scientific claims. A study that concludes that an educational program or intervention is ineffective, for example, is not inherently more rigorous than one that concludes that a program works.

In the current discourse on teacher-evaluation systems, however, an evaluation system is deemed rigorous based either on how much of the evaluation rests on direct measures of student-learning outcomes, or the distribution of teachers into the various rating categories, or both. If an evaluation system relies heavily on No Child Left Behind-style state standardized tests in reading and mathematics — say, 40 percent of the overall evaluation or more — its proponents are likely to describe it as rigorous. Similarly, if an evaluation system has four performance categories — e.g., ineffective, developing, effective and highly effective — a system that classifies very few teachers as highly effective and many teachers as ineffective may be labeled rigorous.

In these instances, the word rigor obscures the subjectivity involved in the final composite rating assigned to teachers. The fraction of the overall evaluation based on student-learning outcomes is wholly a matter of judgment; and if you believe, as I do, that a teacher’s responsibility for advancing student learning extends well beyond the content that appears on standardized tests, you could conceivably argue that increasing the weight given to standardized tests in teacher evaluations makes these evaluations less rigorous. This is, however, a hard sell in the absence of other concrete measures of student-learning outcomes that could supplement the standardized-test results.

Even more importantly, describing a teacher-evaluation system as rigorous hides the fact that the criteria for assigning teachers to performance categories — either for subcomponents or for the overall composite evaluation — are arbitrary. There’s no scientific basis for saying, as New York has, that of the 20 points out of 100 allocated for student “growth” on New York’s state tests, a teacher needs to receive 18 to be rated “highly effective,” or that a teacher receiving 3 to 8 points will be classified as “developing.” In fact, the cut-off separating “developing” from “effective” changed last week as a result of an agreement reached between the New York State Education Department and the state teachers’ union — not because of science, mind you, but because of politics. (more…)

News from New York City:

• A step forward on evaluations hasn’t mended fences between the city and the UFT. (WSJ, NY1, Post)
• “Validators,” tried in New Haven, will be a key element in the city’s evaluations. (GothamSchools, Times)
• More dads seem to be getting involved in local schools, changing the dynamics of some PTAs. (Times)
• Charter backer Eric Grannis wants to open schools near wife Eva Moskowitz’s new one. (Brooklyn Paper)
• Violating policy, I.S. 392 told low-scoring students they couldn’t take a Regents exam. (Daily News)
• The city unveiled new policies to screen workers’ pasts. (GS, Times, Post, NY1, Daily News, WSJ)
• The Post says the move to root out school employees with histories of abuse is too little and too late.
• A worker at P.S. 754 in the Bronx was fired after investigators found she threatened a student. (Post)
• A Beach Channel HS teacher was removed after a video showed him confronting a student. (Post)
• Eagle Academy, a boys school, could get space vacated by a closing Christian school. (Daily News)
• Churches that were evicted from school buildings held services where they could Sunday. (Daily News)
• The Daily News: It’s inexplicable why anyone would attack the high-scoring Success Charter Network.
• Gary Rubinstein: The state’s new evaluation system is so flawed that it might well not last. (Daily News)

And beyond:

• Across the country, states with new evaluation systems are finding and trying to fix problems. (Times)
• Michael Winerip: With a new leader, Atlanta’s schools are moving past their cheating scandal. (Times)
• The Obama administration is seeking new rules to monitor quality in school vending machines. (Times)
• The Times says that across the country, charter authorizers need to close schools that don’t perform.
• A single man has built, grown, and defended the charter school sector in Albany. (Times-Union)
• Connecticut’s governor has proposed requiring teachers to re-earn tenure every five years. (Conn Post)
• Parents in Chicago say they are feeling shut out, even after the city created an office about them. (Times)
• Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum took aim at the institution of public education. (Times)
• Feeling duped, some parents want to back out of a petition to turn their school into a charter. (L.A. Times)
• The parent trigger is the subject of a forthcoming Hollywood movie, one of several about schools. (Times)