GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

America’s schools systematically fail to educate black males as well as they educate other students, according to a new report by the Schott Foundation for Public Education, Given Half a Chance: The Schott 50 State Report on Public Education and Black Males.

If Black students did poorly in all schools, we would plausibly seek solutions to the problem of their achievement among those students themselves. The same would be the case if, in schools with majority Black enrollments, Black students did poorly and the other students did well. But in reality, Black students in good schools do well. At the same time, White, non-Hispanic students who attend schools where most of the students are Black and their graduation rates are low, also do poorly. The crisis of the education of Black males sits squarely in the middle of the crisis America faces as we work to create a world-class public education system that will support and maintain the values of a fair and equitable democratic society.

According to the report, in New York State, 39 percent of black male students graduated from high school in 2005-06, compared to 75 percent of white male students, and far more black male students performed at the Below Basic level on all sections of the NAEP tests compared to white male students. Also, as the report points out, on the eighth grade NAEP reading assessment, “virtually none reach the Advanced level.” Furthermore, black males in New York State are about 5 times less likely to be placed in Gifted and Talented programs, and nearly 3 times more likely to be classified as mentally retarded.

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The New York Sun reported today on The Lengthening of Childhood, a new paper from David Deming and Susan Dynarski of Harvard’s Kennedy School.  The paper examines the costs of “academic redshirting,” the practice of holding children back a year before enrolling them in kindergarten, and how it affects long-term outcomes, like national high school and college graduation rates and economic outcomes.  As the New York State Assembly is considering legislation affecting kindergarten enrollment across the state, it’s a good time to think about the possible results of changing school entry age for some or all students.

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Thousands of city students can’t get out of middle school grades, leaving them overage, demoralized, and at great risk of dropping out — and the DOE isn’t doing much of anything for them, according to a report released this week by Advocates for Children of New York on behalf of the citywide Out of School Youth Coalition. (Disclosure: Before starting GothamSchools, I worked at Insideschools.org, which is a project of Advocates for Children.)

“Stuck in the Middle: The Problem of Overage Middle School Students in New York City” chronicles the DOE’s decades-long track record of inadequately meeting the needs of overage students; describes the various reasons that students become overage, including academic failure, interruptions in schooling, and illegal discharge; and highlights schools where innovative initiatives appear to be helping overage middle schoolers make it to high school. (more…)

Yesterday, I took an initial look at the Manhattan Institute’s study, “Building on the Basics.” Today, I want to look at Florida’s state science exam, the focus of the study. A common criticism of standardized tests is that they all, to some degree, test reading ability. What does the Science FCAT look like? What skills would you need to perform well on it? I’ve only seen the NYS Science exams, so I decided to download a Florida sample test and take a look. The first thing that surprised me about this test was the reading level, which seemed high. Many of New York City’s fifth graders would (for better or for worse) stumble over sentences like, “Florida has many limestone caves containing formations called stalactites.” I tracked down a site of readability analyzers and entered text from test items.

Question 1: Melissa’s school rings a bell to alert students that it is time to start class. When the bell rings, it vibrates. The use of vibrations to send messages is an example
of which type of energy?

This one ranged from 4.72 to 10.07 in estimated US grade level required to understand it, which certainly calls into question the reliability of the readability analyzers, but also the ability of average 5th graders to understand this question.

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I read with interest the Manhattan Institute’s report, “Building on the Basics: The Impact of High-Stakes Testing on Student Proficiency in Low-Stakes Subjects.” The authors looked at what happened to science scores in schools that received an “F” grade for their reading and math scores in the previous year. Did focusing on reading and math instruction “crowd out” proficiency in other subjects? The authors conclude that it did not, and that in fact, the F-grade sanction produced small positive gains in science proficiency. If correct and generalizable, this result would have profound policy and curriculum implications across the nation.

After a closer look at the study, I had some questions about the methods.  Since Florida does not test students in science in 4th grade, the authors used the students’ math and reading scores in 4th grade to estimate their performance in science. They then compared this estimated 4th grade performance with 5th grade performance on the Science FCAT. The authors stated that “this procedure assumes that student proficiency in these subjects is highly correlated and that there was no differential relationship in student knowledge among these subjects in the five categories of schools before the F-grade sanction was introduced.” Given that the authors also conclude (tentatively) that math and reading ability enable learning of science, it seems that their method of estimating 4th grade performance assumes the very outcome they purport to discover. A commenter on Eduwonkette raises this and other relevant questions about the methods.

More on “Building on the Basics” tomorrow….