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The study, published in the latest Education Next, was partially funded by one of the companies it examined.

Maybe I fell victim to the blindly trust-Harvard-professors trap when writing about a recent report on for-profit school management in Philadelphia. The report found that for-profit companies like Edison are doing a better job of running the schools than non-profit managers and the regular district, and it led some readers to ask me why New York City doesn’t bring in companies to manage the schools here. (All we have our “support” organizations that are run either by school district employees or by nonprofits.)

But the report should not be seen as the final word on the Philadelphia experiment. Here’s a critique of the research, which was conducted by Paul Peterson (he of Harvard) that’s worth reading as a counter-point. Written by a parent activist who has argued against for-profit school management, the critique argues that Peterson also has a bias, demonstrated by his track record of studies favoring market-based school reforms. More important, the parent activist points to three independent studies that found opposite results — at least one of which inspired Peterson’s effort to look at the numbers again.

Maybe even more important than the other studies is the fact that, if you look into the report a little more closely, as I did this morning, you’ll find that part of its funding comes from one of the for-profit companies it praises: EdisonLearning. Other funds come from the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute for Education Sciences, under the Bush administration’s leadership, presumably, and from two right-leaning foundations, Olin and Bradley.

I spoke to an associate director at the Harvard research center, Antonio Wendland, this morning. He said that he doesn’t think the funds from Edison compromise the center’s research, which doesn’t just appear in the center’s journal, Education Next, but will also be presented at conferences around the country. “Someone has to pay for it,” Wendland said, explaining that the center is financed almost entirely by grants. “I guess you could characterize it as a criticism that we have accepted money from some people who have stake in it, but we’ve been open about it, and no one has said, ‘Oh let me show you the fault in the research.’”

Some people think scoring the state English language arts exam is a piece of cake. But judging from the experience of one teacher-blogger who was sent away from her school last week to grade tests, it’s not actually an easy job at all. The teacher, Miss Brave, writes that the new requirement that tests be scored at centralized locations makes the task even harder:

My fellow graders and I did our best to be thorough. We frequently passed tests around the table to get a second opinion, and for those essays we were truly on the fence about, we had spirited discussions and consulted our rubrics frequently before committing to a final grade. When grading the editing passages, in which students have to correct grammatical errors, I always counted twice to make sure I was grading correctly. But we were only one room, and who knows what was going on in the other rooms at the other grading sites? Some schools sent intermediate and junior high school teachers to grade third graders’ exams, and some of those teachers had to be gently reminded that they were dealing with the writing of eight-year-olds, not teenagers. Some graders seemed to be handing out 4s to nearly every essay, while others seemed to be unwilling to give the students the benefit of the doubt. Despite our supervisors’ best efforts to get everyone on the same page of the same rubric, grading the ELA, I learned, is frighteningly subjective. The exams we graded, for example, all came from districts outside our own — districts that tend to be high-scoring. I teach a population of mostly ELLs in a low-scoring district, so I was pretty impressed by the work that I read — until I thought about teachers who are used to teaching high-scoring kids in other districts who would be reading the exams from my district and wondering what the kids could possibly be thinking.

Miss Brave also says her grading site was disorganized, and little attention appeared to be paid to concerns about cheating. Read her whole account here.

One highlight of the mayoral control panel put together by the parent commission Friday night was testimony by Robert Tobias, the former city testing czar and now New York University professor. Tobias has often been quoted expressing concerns that the Bloomberg administration inflates its record of educational improvement.

But the analysis Tobias presented Friday, explaining exactly what progress he thinks happened (“real” improvements in math) and what he thinks did not (any narrowing of a longstanding gap between the state and city students’ scores on reading tests), was the most succinct summary I’ve ever heard him deliver — not to mention a striking counterpoint to the sanguine evaluations of Chancellor Joel Klein, Mayor Bloomberg, and even Caroline Kennedy.

Here’s what Tobias said:

Tobias also tempered the fact of the improvements in math scores with a warning about score inflation, the phenomenon by which test-prepping, in his words, can “undermine” the meaningfulness of the test as an indicator of what students know, versus how well they have been prepped. (Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Daniel Koretz has written the most on score inflation that I know of. For more on the topic, see this story I wrote for the Sun and these posts by Eduwonkette.)

Tobias’s remarks on score inflation are below the jump. Thanks to David Bellel for sending me the video. (more…)

In his daily school-reform-report e-mail today, Whitney Tilson, the hedge fund manager by day, education entrepreneur by night, defends Deputy Chancellor Christopher Cerf, the subject of a 2007 investigation that just came to light last week. The investigation concluded that Cerf had stretched conflict-of-interest lines by soliciting a charitable donation from a Department of Education vendor while he as deputy chancellor. But Cerf later took back the solicitation, and no actions were taken against him.

Tilson describes the investigation into Cerf as a trying experience that turned Cerf’s life “upside down” — all for naught, because it ultimately found no evidence of wrongdoing. His take-away is that “truly no good deed goes unpunished” in the education world, which is characterized by “madness,” he says. The full e-mail is below the jump. (more…)