GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

City and state officials have promised that new curriculum standards, known as the Common Core, would de-emphasize rote learning in favor of critical thinking. But exactly what that would look like wasn’t clear when the Common Core first entered the conversation.

Now the picture is growing clearer. Earlier this winter, Department of Education officials testifying before members of the City Council during a hearing on college readiness aired a slideshow presentation that showed how the same skills are tested now and how they would be tested once the Common Core is fully rolled out.

For example, the high school English Regents exam currently asks students to answer a series of multiple-choice questions that require them to locate pieces of information in texts. On a Common Core-aligned test, they would have to read several different passages and write an essay analyzing their arguments, bringing in information from other sources to bolster the analysis.

The Common Core would reshape math tests, too. A sample fifth-grade question asks students to read a paragraph and draw out the relevant information to adjudicate a dispute about three friends’ pizza consumption. In contrast, a current exam question simply asks students to add fractions that represent the sizes of two people’s meals.

The state is scheduled to roll out Common Core-aligned tests in grades 3 through 8 next year. (more…)

A frequent critique of the city’s release of value-added ratings for thousands of teachers last week has been that the city has never rated other workers in similar ways.

On Tuesday, Mayor Bloomberg explained the discrepancy, according to Capital New York. In short, Bloomberg said, teachers are not widgets, but other city workers are:

This is not like police and fire. You think about it. Police and fire, we assign a cop or a firefighter to a station, to a post, to a firehouse, to a piece of equipment. And all of the firefighers and all of the cops are changed. Not only are they interchangeable, we deliberately move them around, because that helps their careers and they learn more things and they’re better able to perform their jobs.

Education is different, Bloomberg added. His comments channeled the 2009 “Widget Effect” report by The New Teacher Project, which became fuel for reformers to push tougher teacher evaluations.

“The Widget Effect describes the tendency of school districts to assume classroom effectiveness is the same from teacher to teacher,” the study’s executive summary says. “This decades-old fallacy fosters an environment in which teachers cease to be understood as individual professionals, but rather as interchangeable parts.”

The same admissions processes that leave city parents scratching their heads or, worse, pulling their hair out have put New York City at the head of the pack in a new study ranking districts’ school choice policies.

The report, by the nonpartisan Brookings Institution, which has long pushed for expanded school choice, compares choice policies in place in 25 urban school districts and how families took advantage of them.

New York City came in first, in part because students here are never assigned to schools based simply on where they live. Of the 25 districts, New York was the only one where students are assigned to schools based on applications that asked for families’ preferences, not just their address.

The city has a labyrinthine citywide high school matching process and district-based middle and elementary school admissions processes that many believe could be improved. In a district with more than 1,600 schools (the Brookings report tallies 1,474), the processes are seen as bringing order but also as sometimes pitting schools against each other and limiting options, particularly in high school, for students who aren’t happy with what they’ve chosen.

The Brookings report also gave New York credit for making data about school performance public and closing or restructuring low-performing schools. But its B grade would have been higher if it had more virtual school options and provided transportation when students enroll in schools outside their districts.

To tie in with the report, former city schools chancellor Joel Klein, who bolstered and expanded the city’s school choice policies, is speaking at Brookings’ Washington, D.C., offices today. (more…)

For Natoshia Wheeler, the argument that schools do better when they have more resources is proven every night in her living room.

Wheeler has three children in Brownsville schools. Her youngest and oldest attend two low-performing schools that share a building, the General D. Chappie James Elementary and Middle School of Science, where she is PTA president. Her middle daughter attends I.S. 392, a selective middle school located just six blocks away.

Recently Wheeler’s middle daughter brought home a new laptop that her school provided, equipped with a tools for free online tutoring. The tools allowed her to complete complicated projects, such as building a model island with different biomes on it, that enthralled her siblings.

But at the Chappie schools, Wheeler said after-school programs have been cut, the art teacher was let go, and students can’t always bring books home to use while completing homework. What’s more, she said, the three-year-old schools are only just finding their feet after replacing P.S./I.S. 183, a perennially failing that closed in 2008. Last year, on their first progress reports, both schools got D’s.

So when the elementary school got an F and the middle school got a D on their most recent progress reports, Wheeler said she was not shocked — but she was surprised that the city said it was considering shuttering the school. The city has not yet announced any closures but has named 20 elementary and middle schools that are eligible according to the Department of Education’s guidelines. (more…)

The three schools released from the UFT and NAACP lawsuit this week followed different paths to legal freedom.

The case for one of the schools relied on a broad base of community support, but a single man, Geoffrey Canada, made the case for the other two schools.

Charter school advocates believe Canada’s profile as a well-regarded, African-American education reformer made him an unpopular target for the NAACP. They say the decision to drop these schools from the lawsuit, which charges that the co-locations give preferential treatment to charter school students, weren’t made on legal merits.

“It makes it pretty clear that it’s not about equity. It’s not about the children,” said Rafiq Kalam Id-Din II, whose new school in Bedford-Stuyvesant is named in the suit. “This is about politics.”

Girls Preparatory Academy was unique from the other 17 schools named in the suit because its co-location plan had already received widespread community support. At the initial public hearing in February, both of the schools’ leaders endorsed co-location, as did Lisa Donlan, the district’s Community Education Council president and a frequent charter school critic.

“There was not one person who opposed this co-location,” Donlan said. (more…)

We’re late to consider Tom Suozzi’s property tax commission report, released yesterday. Why would this blog care about a property tax commission report? Because it’s actually all about the education, stupid. Property taxes are raised essentially for one reason: to close the gap between what schools need and what the state gives them. If you want to lower property taxes, you also have to lower the cost of school. Suozzi’s report offers a list of recommendations for how to do that.

In the process, the report also discloses a lot of interesting facts. For instance, check out the chart above. (more…)

Andy Rotherham at Eduwonk highlights two writing assignments, both given to seventh-graders, with widely different levels of difficulty. As Rotherham says, this is what wonks mean when they worry about an “expectations gap.”

I’m highlighting this because we would like to collect similar comparisons from New York City. What does student work look like at your school? What do the assignments look like?

Send us your stuff so we can start comparing. We’re happy to keep you and your students anonymous, as long as you give some identifying information (grade, district, public/private, charter/traditional public, large/small).

The first seventh-grade assignment: (more…)