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If the Board of Regents approves a proposal today to double the weight of student test scores in teacher evaluations, they’ll be spurning the advice of 10 leading education researchers.

The researchers — who include Linda Darling-Hammond and New Yorkers Aaron Pallas and Henry Levin — sent a letter to the Regents yesterday that summarizes studies that they say point to problems with basing teacher evaluations on student scores. Those problems include teaching to the test and disincentives to help students with special needs.

“We urge you to reject proposals that would place significant emphasis on this untested strategy that could have serious negative consequences for teacher[s] and for the most vulnerable students in the State’s schools,” the researchers say.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo last week told the Regents that he thought test scores should play a larger role in teacher evaluations. The state’s year-old teacher evaluation law bases 20 percent of teachers’ evaluations on student test scores and another 20 percent on local measures of student achievement. The proposal being considered today would allow districts, with the approval of their local teachers unions, to use the same measures for both parts of teachers’ evaluations.

The Regents meeting is being broadcast online beginning at 4:45 p.m. (more…)

A chart from the CREDO study shows black and Hispanic students in charter schools have higher scores on reading and math tests than peers in district schools.

Students in nearly 50 charter schools across the city are outperforming their peers in district schools on state tests, according to a study by an education research group at Stanford University.

The report, which was done by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes, known as CREDO, uses the same methodology the group used when looking at the performance of charter schools in several states across the country. Looking at 49 city charter schools from the 2003-04 to 2008-09 school years, CREDO matched data from about 20,000 students in grades 3-8 to an identical number of students with comparable scores at local competing district schools. Though the Department of Education asked CREDO to do the analysis, the foundation procured its own funding for it.

CREDO’s study of charter schools across the country offered a mixed picture — charter schools in some states did better than local schools, while others did worse — but New York City stands out as having a particularly successful crop of charter schools. (more…)

The students who enroll at new small schools are not always just like those who enrolled at the large high schools they replaced, a new study has found.

The study, by Aaron Pallas, a professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College and Jennifer Jennings, an assistant professor at New York University, confirms Jennings’ earlier analysis of student enrollment patterns on the Evander Childs High School campus. But it also suggests that when it comes to who enrolls, not all new small schools are alike.

“New small schools don’t look that different overall. But the ones that replaced large schools do,” Pallas said last night at a presentation sponsored by the Annenberg Institute for School Reform. (more…)

Last year, Teachers College sociologist Aaron Pallas concluded that the city’s progress report formula generated results that were wildly inconsistent from year to year, to the point of statistical meaninglessness. Now a regular contributor to the GothamSchools community section, Pallas analyzed this year’s reports and found that nothing has changed.

Providing the scatter plot at the right, which compares the percentage of students at each school making a year of progress in reading from one year to the next, Pallas writes:

 The correlation between student progress from 2007 to 2008 and student progress from 2008 to 2009 is -.02, which is indistinguishable from zero.  This means that there really is no pattern to the results, and certainly not a pattern that demonstrates consistency or stability from one year to the next.

Read Pallas’s complete analysis of this year’s reports here.

After years of criticism that its school report cards are too difficult for most parents to understand, the city is redesigning the report cards that give each school a letter grade.

Starting this fall, the Department of Education will produce one-page progress reports that contain only the most important pieces of performance data about each school. The new reports are meant to deliver complicated accountability information “in a more parent-friendly way,” according to Phil Vaccaro, a representative of the department’s accountability office. Vaccaro presented a draft of the new report to the city school board yesterday.

The “progress report family summary” has the same content but a different design from the data-packed two-pager currently produced for each school. For example, instead of having eight different numbers to describe student progress, there is just one, the proportion of students who made a year’s progress in a single year.

A member of the school board, Dmytro Fedkowskyj, worked with the department to develop the new reports. ”We need to present them in ways parents can understand,” he said, adding that parents who misunderstood the reports could make misinformed school choices.

Critics of the progress reports said the family summary might actually be too simple. (more…)

It’s not news to report that statistics can be deceptive. But when a new set of test scores come out, it’s worth repeating nonetheless.

Teachers College sociologist Aaron Pallas tackles the subject in the Community section of GothamSchools today, by taking a closer look at two middle schools that the Post has recently highlighted for exceptional performance and finding that both schools admit their students selectively. He writes:

Due to their selective admissions, IS 187 and, to a lesser extent, IS 364 were born on third base.  The New York Post thinks they hit a triple.

Some schools might have hit something closer to a home run. Manhattan’s citywide Anderson School, for instance, admitted every single one of its students in grades 3-8 on the basis of their scores on an IQ test and in-person interview. Not a single student at Anderson failed the math test, and in fact it was the only school citywide with a clean 100 percent of all students in a single grade scoring at the very highest level, in the sixth grade.

Not all successful schools handpick their students. (more…)

A screenshot (including a caption) from today's online press conference about state test scores, featuring State Education Commissioner Richard Mills and Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch.

More students across New York State scored proficient on the state reading and writing test this year than ever before, and gains by black and Hispanic students drove the improvements. The difference between white and black students’ average scores is now at 18 points, down from 28 in 2006.

More students in New York City scored proficient, too; proficiency rose 18 percentage points to 69 percent from 51 percent in 2006. According to the city Department of Education, the difference between the percentage of black and Hispanic children who scored proficient on the test and the percentage of white students who did now stands at 22 percentage points, down from more than 29 three years ago.

State school leaders described the gains across New York as “moderate” because much of the increases were driven by a greater proportion of children just squeaking past the proficiency cutoff, State Education Commissioner Richard Mills explained during a press conference this morning.

The difference comes from looking at the actual scale scores students received, rather than the percentage of students deemed proficient. Scale scores are considered the most statistically useful way to evaluate test score gains. (Aaron Pallas has written about this on GothamSchools.)

Mills explained the distinction by providing three ways to look at this year’s sixth-grade scores. The first is by looking purely at what proportion of students in the grade tested at basic proficiency. According to that metric, 81 percent of this year’s sixth-graders met proficiency, compared to 60.4 percent of sixth-graders in 2006, the first year of a new statewide curriculum and testing program.

Looking at proficiency over time, 69 percent of children in 3rd grade in 2006 met standards; those are the same children who posted an 81 percent proficiency rating as sixth-graders this year. But the scale scores of that same cohort of children actually dropped slightly over the same period, from 669 to 667. (more…)

Teachers College Professor Aaron Pallas

Eduwonkette, the soon-to-be NYU professor who specialized in explaining education research to the rest of us, and whose data analysis often contradicted Department of Education claims, signed off this morning. Her many fans are now declaring a collective “Nooo!”

Here’s Nancy Flanagan, in the comments:

Oh, no. No.

Who will make statistics sing? Who will take on the nattering nabobs of educational negativism, the Big Names who blog to hear their own wonky voices? Who will simplify arguments for those who believe that complicated and quantitative = correct? I am, quite literally, crushed.

Nancy, please meet Aaron Pallas, professor of sociology and education at Teachers College, Columbia University; former statistician for the U.S. Department of Education, and the man behind Eduwonkette’s blogging sidekick, Skoolboy.

Professor Pallas will be keeping up his own sharp analysis of what the New York City data show in a new section of GothamSchools that we and our awesome web brains are furiously working to develop, tentatively titled the GothamSchools Commons. Please look out for his contributions very soon.