GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

One of the largest pots of money in the city’s new initiative to aid black and Latino young men is going to the Department of Education.

Of the initiative’s $127 million price tag, $24 million will be used to study and develop the best practices of city high schools that have best prepared male minority students for college and work. Billionaire philanthropist George Soros will foot the bill for the three-year program, called the Expanded Success Initiative.

The funding will allow the Department of Education to hire a team of research consultants to study 40 high schools with a track record of bridging the achievement gap for black and Latino male students. Josh Thomases, the DOE’s deputy chief academic officer charged with coordinating the program, said the city had not yet identified the schools that would be studied.

“We’re looking for schools with a high concentration of black and Latino boys, with high poverty and Title I funding, but with an evidence of success,” Thomases said.

“We’re agnostic to what kind of school it is,” he added. “We’re looking at the schools that have had success graduating black and Latino boys at a high school level and expanding it to other schools.”

Thomases, citing a study published by Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation (MDRC) last year, said that he would look particularly close at small high schools in New York City, which have shown higher rates of graduation and credit accumulation. (more…)

Today’s the day that guidance counselors distribute envelopes to eighth graders with news of whether and which of the city’s top-tier high schools opened the door for them. But for minority students, the news continues to be grim.

Combined, white and Asian students account for 70 percent of the students admitted to elite schools like Stuyvesant, the Bronx High School of Science, and Brooklyn Technical High School. Hispanic students make up 6 percent of those admitted and black students 5 percent. The remainder, 18 percent, come from private or parochial schools and racial data for them was not available.

Despite repeated statements of concern from city officials about the tiny number of minority students earning entry to top high schools, the numbers have only declined in the last three years. In 2009, 744 black and Hispanic students earned seats at specialized high schools. This year, 642 made it in.

Meanwhile, the number of minority students sitting for the exams has increased. Black and Hispanic students now make up a greater percentage of test takers than they did in 2009. (more…)

New data on the increasingly popular ACT college-entrance exam show that city students’ scores have risen to meet the national average, but the gains are spotty.

Since 2005, the average city student’s score has crept from 19.9 to 21.4 — a modest gain, but one that carries weight on an exam that’s only 36 points in total. The bulk of the progress has come from the city’s Asian and white students, while black students’ scores have risen slightly. Hispanic students’ average scores have shown little change, dropping by a third of a point. (more…)

Schools that screen come out on top and schools that take neighborhood students fall to the bottom of our next rankings installment, which tackles middle schools.

A few charter schools are also in the mix — both on the top and bottom lists. Unlike our elementary school list, we included charter schools in these rankings.

To generate the rankings, we averaged the percentage of students who scored proficient across all the tested grade levels. (We excluded schools that don’t include grades six, seven, and eight.) In response to reader requests, we also listed the borough of the school in parentheses after each one.

The results contain very few surprises. All of the schools on the top-scoring lists except the two charter schools have a selective admissions process. Students must score high on standardized tests and sometimes pass in-person interviews in order to get into schools like Anderson, NEST+m, and Mark Twain Middle School — all of which rank high on these lists. (more…)

A graph using data from the Nation's Report Card shows the achievement gap of fourth graders on a national math exam.

A new report throws some cold water on optimism about the state’s black-white achievement gap, finding that while the gap is narrowing, it’s no different from the national average.

The findings were part of a report by the National Center for Education Statistics that examined racial achievement gaps for math and reading across the country. Relying on data culled from the National Assessment of Education Progress exam — also known as the Nation’s Report Card —  from the early 1990s to 2007, the report zeros in on the scores of the nation’s fourth and eighth graders.

On a national level, the study found that the reading achievement gap has slowly narrowed, but the math gap has not budged. Students’ scores have increased in both areas, but black students’ scores need to go up faster than whites’ scores in order for the gap to close.

“I think New York fits in,” said Stuart Kerachsky, acting commissioner of  the National Center for Education Statistics, on a conference call with reporters this morning. “Its gap is not significantly different from the average gap and it didn’t change in a significant way.” (more…)

A slide from the state's test score PowerPoint presentation

The results of the 2009 state math test are in, and state officials are welcoming them as a sign of overall, if modest, improvement.

More students across the state in grades 3-8 met the proficiency standards than in the previous four years, with 86.4 percent of them scoring proficient, compared to 80.7 percent last year and just 65 percent in 2006, when the state instituted a new math curriculum. In New York City, the percentage of students that met the state’s proficiency standard jumped to 81.8 percent this year from 74.3 percent in 2008.

Unlike with this year’s reading test scores, the math test scores showed similar increases in the percentage of students testing as proficient or better and the scale scores that students posted. Statewide, scale scores, which are considered the most statistically useful way to evaluate test score gains, rose by six points in 2009. New York City slightly edged out the rest of the state, with an 8-point scale score gain. (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…)

A statistic that Joel Klein, Al Sharpton, and Mort Zuckerman have all recently employed to bemoan the racial achievement gap appears to be wrong.

Here’s the statistic, as Klein and Sharpton recently summarized in the Wall Street Journal (and Mort Zuckerman used it here):

“today the average 12th-grade black or Hispanic student has the reading, writing and math skills of an eighth-grade white student.”

The problem isn’t the principle behind the claim; America definitely has a racial achievement gap. The problem, according to an official at the National Center for Education Statistics, is in the specific way that Klein et al describe the gap.

The best available measure we have to compare all American kids is the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or the NAEP test. But the NAEP test, which is given only to a sample of students across the country, not to every child, does not permit the kind of detailed comparison Klein’s statistic would demand, Arnold Goldstein, the NCES official, said. “It would be great if we could. It’s kind of frustrating not to be able to make these sorts of statements,” said Goldstein, who is program director for design, analysis, and reporting at NCES’s assessment division. “But that’s a limitation of the data.”

I contacted the Department of Education several times for comment but got no response this week. UPDATE: A spokesman, Andrew Jacob, wrote to say that Klein got the statistic from “No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning,” a book by Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom. (more…)

Both the mayor and the chancellor have now issued statements boasting about gains on Advanced Placement exams, the rigorous tests that are considered a good indicator of whether students are prepared for college. But the picture is more complex than they suggest, and if anything the evidence adds to concerns raised yesterday about college preparedness, particularly among black and Hispanic students.

More students are definitely taking the exams than were in 2002, whether you look at the sheer numbers — a total of 23,600 students took the tests in 2008, up from less than 17,000 in 2002 — or at proportions — in 2008, about 23% of eleventh- and twelfth-graders took AP exams, up from 21% in 2002.*

But, as I suggested yesterday, the increased participation has led to a lower pass rate:

(more…)

Graph by Eduwonkette.

Sociologist Jennifer Jennings (who blogs as Eduwonkette) graphed a change in demographics at the city’s eight specialized high schools, providing dramatic visual evidence of a trend described in detail by the New York Times last week.

The Times article focused on persistently low numbers of black and Hispanic students in both the group of students taking the demanding high school entrance exam and scoring high enough to earn a place at one of the specialized high schools.

But Eduwonkette’s graph shows that black and Hispanic students have long been underrepresented in the elite high schools. Instead, it suggests that the real news in recent years is soaring enrollment at specialized high schools by Asian students and declining enrollment by white students.