GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

I’ve become increasingly alarmed at the growing divide between the news and editorial functions of major metropolitan daily newspapers (e.g., in New York City, the New York Times,  New York Daily News,  and the New York Post;  in Washington, DC, the Washington Post).  The functions are largely independent, and that is as it should be;  the ideological proclivities of the publisher and editorial board should not be shaping what counts as or is reported as news. 

To be sure, the editorial page of a newspaper should express a point of view, and a typical reader will likely agree with some viewpoints, and disagree with others.  But it’s a very dangerous thing when the editorials of a newspaper are not informed by the daily reporting of its journalists.  Ignoring the news, reported with a minimum of spin by “beat” reporters, leads to simple-minded and ignorant editorializing on complex matters of public policy.  It’s also insulting to the profession of journalism, and to the many reporters whose goal is simply to understand the news and get the story right.  (I talk to some of the reporters to whom I’m referring.)

A case in point is yesterday’s Daily News editorial, “Truth in testing.”  The editorial is an effort to shore up claims about the success of school reform in New York City under Mayor Mike Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein.  Last week’s revelations that the state testing system was dramatically overstating student growth and the closing of the achievement gap rocked the New York City Department of Education on its heels.  The Daily News editorial board, which has long supported these reforms, came out firing, citing four “facts”:  (1) The State Education Department defrauded parents and students;  (2) Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch and Education Commissioner David Steiner owned up to the deception;  (3) The drop triggered bogus charges that the schools have made no progress;  and (4) Only radical action will give New York’s kids a shot at the quality education they need. (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…)

Charles Murray is a very confused guy.  His op-ed piece in today’s New York Times uses the dreary impact of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program on student achievement to justify policies expanding school choice.  Let’s get over the fact that school choice plans don’t show big impacts on students’ performance on standardized tests, he argues.  After all, we’ve known for a long time that it’s hard for schools to overcome the family advantages of cognitive ability and motivation.  Rather, he proposes, we should support school choice because it can allow a small number of parents to choose a curriculum that’s better than that offered to students in traditional public schools.

Setting aside some of the most remarkable inconsistencies—Charles Murray, 2010 edition, doesn’t think that test scores are meaningful measures of academic performance?  Has he met Charles Murray, 1994 edition, who was quite comfortable in The Bell Curve reducing the whole of human intelligence to a single score on the Armed Forces Qualification Test?—Murray fundamentally misunderstands the historic logic of the charter schooling movement—an exchange of autonomy for accountability.  We can argue over the scope of that autonomy and accountability, but even those who have disagreed on this site about whether charter schools are properly labeled as public or private schools generally agree that it’s appropriate to hold them accountable for their students’ performance on assessments measuring standards that are the de facto public curriculum of the state in which they are located.  Certainly, the charter movement gains energy from studies showing that students in charter schools may outperform their counterparts in traditional public schools on state assessments.  Charter schools may strive to expose students to a curriculum that’s more ambitious, but the standards of the state cannot be ignored. (more…)

Writing in the pages of today’s New York Post, Marcus Winters, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, argues that charter schools might improve the chances for Black and Hispanic students to enter New York City’s prestigious exam high schools.  The key evidence for this is the fact that 2.4% of the Black and Hispanic eighth-grade students who attended charter schools in 2009 were offered admission to the eight exam schools, compared to 1.5% of the Black and Hispanic eighth-graders attending traditional public schools.  Comparing these rates, he states that Black and Hispanic eighth-graders in charter schools are 60% more likely to obtain a seat in the exam schools than their counterparts in traditional public schools.

It’s true that 2.4% is 60% more than 1.5%.  But both percentages round to the same whole number, 2.  So it’s hard to say that the likelihood of admission is dramatically different for students in charter and traditional public schools.  And, although Winters pays lip service to the notion that these data are solely descriptive, there’s no mistaking his desire to use these data to argue that the quality of charter schools is in fact responsible for this small increase.  “Charter schools could,” he writes, “increase minority access to the city’s esteemed high schools by offering a higher quality elementary and middle school education than is available in the traditional public schools system.”  Yep, that’s true, they could.  They could also be successful in recruiting some talented minority students with families that are highly motivated to help them succeed in school.  In the latter case, the primary dynamic is selection into charter schools, not their academic consequences.

By focusing on the relative rates of minority access to New York City’s specialized exam high schools for students in charter and traditional public schools, however, Winters has buried the lead.  The real story here is the fact that, in a system that is overwhelmingly made up of Black and Latino students, very few are getting into the most prestigious high schools.  71% of the eighth-graders in New York City’s traditional public schools are Black or Latino, but only 16% of the students offered seats in the specialized exam schools are Black or Latino.  Another way of representing the same information is to look at the probability of admission to the exam schools for members of different racial/ethnic groups.  As Winters noted, 1.5% of the Black and Latino eighth-graders in traditional public schools were offered admission to the specialized exam schools.  But 19% of the white and Asian eighth-graders attending such schools scored high enough on the entrance exam to be offered admission. (more…)

GothamSchools Editor Elizabeth Green’s cover story in the March 7th edition of the New York Times Sunday magazine tackled the problem of preparing teachers for K-12 classrooms in the United States.  Embellished with the provocative title “Building a Better Teacher,” Elizabeth’s piece profiled two approaches to teacher preparation:  a grassroots approach emerging outside of the academy which focuses on a set of techniques that teachers can use to increase learning time and improve learning environments, and a research-based approach developed in colleges and universities emphasizing the knowledge and skills that enable teachers to teach particular school subjects effectively.  Elizabeth’s story opened with a description of Doug Lemov, who has developed a taxonomy of 49 instructional techniques that he and others believe are critical to effective teaching, and especially to closing the achievement gap between poor, minority children and their more advantaged peers.  If we were to judge the relative merits of the two approaches based on the amount of ink devoted to each in her article, we’d conclude that, in the battle for the minds of education policymakers and practitioners, classroom management (i.e., Lemov’s taxonomy) had won, and pedagogical content knowledge (i.e., the work of Deborah Ball on Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching) had lost.

The disproportionate emphasis on Lemov’s approach in Elizabeth’s article surprised me.  To be sure, he’s a fine human-interest story, and the schools he works with have shown remarkable performance on state achievement tests.  But Elizabeth briefly acknowledged the lack of a research basis for Lemov’s approach, writing:  “And while Lemov has faith in his taxonomy because he chose his champions based on their students’ test scores, this is far from scientific proof.  The best evidence Lemov has now is anecdotal…”  Why would she and the Times choose to feature an approach with so little evidence to back it up?

Lemov’s book, “Teach Like a Champion:  49 Techniques that Put Students on the Path to College,” was published two weeks ago, and currently ranks #30 on Amazon’s bestseller list.  I wanted to see what he had to say about the research evidence underpinning the techniques.  A thin research base does not, of course, mean that the techniques are not valuable—I expect to learn quite a bit from studying them, and seeing if there are opportunities to adapt them for teaching my graduate students (who will tell you that classroom management is not my strong suit.)  And, of course, who wouldn’t want to be a champion teacher?  Because it is, after all, a competition, right?  (more…)

Writing in the Autumn, 2009 issue of the City Journal, Marcus Winters seeks to blame the “narrow political interests” of teachers’ unions for resisting the linkage of test scores to teachers, and thereby blocking New York access to the Race to the Top honeypot.  He’s seen the future, and it’s a data revolution resting on standardized tests.  This data revolution “promises to move education policy away from politics,” Winters writes.  “Numbers don’t have agendas or run for reelection.”

No, of course they don’t.  But the people who produce those numbers do.  We would all be wise to recognize that the veneer of scientific objectivity coating most standardized tests is paper-thin.  Politics infuses the form that standardized tests take;  their length;  how they are scored, and by whom;  the content standards that appear on the tests;  and the judgments about which levels of performance are to be labeled proficient.

Here’s what I saw at the data revolution: (more…)

Last night, at the GothamSchools party, I had the opportunity to say hello to David Cantor, Press Secretary for the New York City Department of Education.  As he turned to talk with an angry parent, a piece of paper fell out of his pocket, and I picked it up.  It looked like a draft of the press release he issued for the release of the 2009 NYC NAEP math scores, but it was all marked up.  Could I have found his annotations as he was drafting the press release?

Chancellor Klein Applauds New York City Public School Students For Six Years of Sustained and Significant Gains in Math on National Exam (Let’s get that “six years” in at the start, to make it look like the growth has been steady, rather than stalled over the past two years.)

City Students Outperform the Rest of the State and Nation on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (”Outperform”?  Only in the sense that NYC fourth-graders scored almost as high as students in the nation overall, and were significantly lower than eighth-graders nationally.  But it’s a headline, and who pays attention to them, anyway?)

Record Number of Students Performing at or Above Proficiency

Chancellor Calls on State to Adopt More Rigorous Standards to Ensure Further Progress

Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein today applauded consistent and sustained gains by New York City public school students on the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) math exam. (Consistent and sustained might be a stretch, but maybe it’ll pass.) (more…)

What is it about the Harlem Children’s Zone that causes pundits and reporters to suspend disbelief?  Perhaps it’s the deep desire for evidence that the large and persistent racial gap in educational achievement can be overcome.  The enduring racial inequalities in educational and social outcomes in the U.S. are a blight on our society, and evidence that these inequalities can be eliminated, however, tenuous, can be elevated into the feel-good story of the year.

Last night, Anderson Cooper reported on the Harlem Children’s Zone for the CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes.  “For years, educators have tried and failed to get poor kids from the inner city to do just as well in school as kids from America’s more affluent suburbs,” he began. “Black kids still routinely score well below white kids on national standardized tests. But a man named Geoffrey Canada may have figured out a way to close that racial achievement gap.”  Cooper asked Canada, “So you’re trying to level the playing field between kids here in Harlem and middle class kids in a suburb?”  “That’s exactly what we have to do,” Canada replied.

As is customary, Cooper spoke with Harvard economist Roland Fryer, who has analyzed the achievement of students attending the HCZ Promise Academy charter schools.  Fryer said, “At the elementary school level, he closed the achievement gap in both subjects, math and reading.”   

“Actually eliminating the gap in elementary school?” Cooper asked.

“We’ve never seen anything like that. Absolutely eliminating the gap. The gap is gone, and that is absolutely incredible,” Fryer said. (more…)

Monday afternoon, I had the opportunity to respond to Merryl Tisch, Chancellor of the Board of Regents, and David Steiner, the New York State Commissioner of Education, as they talked about the future of P-16 education in New York State at the Phyllis L. Kossoff Policy Lecture at Teachers College, Columbia University.  I wasn’t sure what they’d say, so prepared some remarks responding to the proposals regarding teacher education in New York State that the Commissioner presented to the Board of Regents a few weeks ago.  For the handful of readers who might be interested, here’s what I wrote.  (Due to time constraints, I didn’t say all of this at the event.)  Chancellor Tisch and Commissioner Steiner were quite willing to hear and engage with the critiques that my colleague Lin Goodwin and I offered, and I look forward to continuing this conversation with them.

It’s no surprise that the State Education Department and the Board of Regents have taken up the cause of ensuring an equitable distribution of highly-qualified teachers across New York State.  The key justification for such a goal is the fact that the K-12 education system is shortchanging our children.  Although some students are highly successful, many more are not, and the problems are concentrated in urban school systems serving large numbers of poor children of color. 

If that’s the problem, is improving the education of teachers the solution?  It’s certainly part of the solution, given what we know about the centrality of teaching to student learning.  But it’s by no means the entire solution, as a great many other forces shape student outcomes.  For example, a great teacher can’t compensate for a child coming to school hungry, and great teaching of an out-of-date curriculum only results in great mastery of out-of-date knowledge.  I trust that Chancellor Tisch and Commissioner Steiner are not seduced by claims that the single most important determinant of a child’s achievement is the quality of his or her teachers, because that’s simply not true.  Family background continues to be the dominant factor.  But the quality of teachers is, at least in theory, something that is manipulable via education policy initiatives, and it’s a lot more tractable than addressing the fact that one in five children under the age of 18 in New York State live below the poverty line. (more…)

I’m not sure how much credibility the Progress Reports at the heart of the NYC Department of Education’s accountability system have left.  The elementary and middle school Reports issued earlier this fall were ridiculed for their inability to distinguish one school from another, since 97% of the school’s received A’s or B’s (and 84% received A’s).  Moreover, I showed that the student progress measures that make up 60% of a school’s overall score were highly unreliable from one year to the next.  As long as these reports are tied to year-to-year changes in state test scores, they’re likely to be fatally flawed.

On Monday, the Department released the 2008-09 Progress Reports for high schools.  Anna Phillips reported that Chancellor Joel Klein said that the high school Progress Reports were more stable and accurate than those for elementary and middle schools because they’re based on multiple measures.  Huh?  Welcome to the party, Chancellor Klein.  I hate to tell you that measures such as credit accumulation are not necessarily accurate measures of a school’s contribution to student learning and development. 

But the high school Progress Reports have a bigger problem.  Three-quarters of a school’s score comes from a school’s location in relation to a group of 40 peer schools.  The idea of comparing a school to peer schools is to create an “apples to apples” comparison.  It’s actually a good feature of the Progress Reports that they seek to compare a given school to how schools across the city are doing as well as to how schools that serve similar students are performing. (more…)