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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…)

The states with the top five and bottom five graduation rate goals.

A new report from Education Trust, the D.C.-based think tank (PDF), lays out all 50 states’ target graduation rates for high schools. As the graph above shows, New York’s 55% rate comes in at the bottom of the list, sneaking in right above Nevada, whose target is 50%.

The targets are required by the No Child Left Behind law, which forces states to determine whether every one of their high schools is meeting standards or not. To meet standards, high schools must either meet their state’s specific graduation rate target — the figures featured in the chart — or, barring that, meet an improvement goal.

If a school doesn’t meet the standard, consequences can be strict; in New York, punishments include forcibly shutting schools down and reopening them under a new leadership and structure.

The improvement goals are sometimes shockingly low. More than half of all states allow any progress at all, or simply that a school does not let its graduation rate drop from where it was the year before. Others require the rate to go up by at least 0.01 percentage point.

New York in this regard is remarkable for setting a target increase of 0.1 percentage point. (more…)