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Teachers unions, school district officials, and lawmakers have all weighed in on New York State’s Race to the Top application with varying degrees of skepticism and enthusiasm, but few have given any thought to the legal issues behind the experiment.

Last night, students at Columbia Law School held a panel discussion on Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s competitive grant program that, in its first round, will award several states hundreds of millions of dollars to adopt the Obama administration’s education policies. The question put before the panel is one any federal initiative like Race to the Top is apt to bring up: Is this experiment stepping too heavily on states’ policy toes?

The panelists included Marcus Winters, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, Deborah Meier, a columnist for Education Week, James Liebman, a law school professor and the NYC Department of Education’s former accountability chief, Richard Iannuzzi, president of the state teachers union, and Dan Weisberg, a vice president at The New Teacher Project. (more…)

A frequent criticism of the Department of Education under Schools Chancellor Joel Klein is that it is run by lawyers and businessmen instead of by educators. In fact, the number of educators reporting to Klein quietly doubled in the last few months.

A recent issue of City Limits carried a story under the headline, “Teachers Missing at the Top.” Indeed, at the end of the last school year, just one quarter of the people reporting directly to Klein — two out of eight people — had extensive experience in city classrooms.

Now, after Klein replaced one top administrator with a former principal and added a new top-level position, four out of nine top administrators have extensive experience in city classrooms. The remaining five hold positions, such as in finance and legal affairs, that are unlikely to be occupied by educators in any school district, according to a department spokesman, David Cantor.

Asked about the shift by GothamSchools, Schools Chancellor Joel Klein called the new numbers “an interesting observation.” But he said he had not changed the way he chooses his deputies. (more…)

Shael Polakow-Suransky, the city's new accountability chief.

Accountability czar James Liebman is officially leaving the Department of Education, but he isn’t going far. From his office at Columbia University, he will help the city win federal stimulus money to boost the very programs he pioneered during his three-year tenure.

In an interview today, Liebman said he’ll go back to teaching criminal law this fall. But he’ll also help the department put together “the most powerful proposal” for federal innovation funds, he said. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has said that New York City’s accountability and teacher pay initiatives are top candidates for a $650 million grant program meant to spur innovation.

Liebman is leaving behind an accountability system that has divided educators and parents. ”I think [he] has forever changed the way this public school system thinks about accountability and the way public school systems around the country will think bout accountability in the future,” said Eric Nadelstern, the department’s chief schools officer.

But some principals reacting to the news of Liebman’s departure this afternoon showed relief. One laughed joyfully when she saw the city’s press release at an event today. Another jokingly wrote to a fellow principal, ‘No more progress reports?’

Shael Polakow-Suransky, the former principal who is replacing Liebman, said the basic tools created by the accountability office would not change. (more…)

James Liebman. (Photo courtesy of NYC Department of Education)

James Liebman, the law professor mastermind behind the Bloomberg administration’s school accountability system, is resigning, Chancellor Joel Klein just announced.

A former principal, Shael Polakow-Suransky, will replace Liebman on an “interim acting” basis. The swap transitions the Office of Accountability to the hands of a longtime educator from those of a outsider criticized for having no teaching experience.

The accountability system constructed by Liebman, a law professor at Columbia University, changed the tone of many schools in the city, sometimes dramatically. The new focus on improving students’ test scores drew both sharp criticism from some city educators who said it narrowed curriculum and created incentives to cheat — and a carnival of visitors from around the country and abroad hoping to model the system in their schools.

The matrix of tools built by Liebman includes report cards that assign each school a letter grade; quality reviews that evaluate schools’ use of test score data to inform teaching; a data warehouse searchable by teachers and, now, parents; so-called “formative assessments” that help teachers diagnose students’ strengths and weaknesses before state test time; and a “data inquiry team” system that encourages teachers to make curriculum decisions by referring to students’ test scores.

Liebman will return to teaching at Columbia full-time, but will continue to work on special projects for the Department of Education, Klein’s press release said. Neither Liebman nor Klein could be reached for an immediate comment.

Updates to come. Here’s the full press release: (more…)

A lineup of Department of Education officials challenged Assemblyman Mark Weprin's assertion that the public schools are overrun by excessive test prep. GothamSchools

Another snippet of Friday’s final Assembly hearing on mayoral control that’s worth highlighting is an exchange between school officials and Mark Weprin, the Assemblyman from Queens, over test prep.

Weprin has raised his concerns that the public school are doing too much test prep with Chancellor Joel Klein before. (He memorably hijacked a press conference that was supposed to be about Klein’s accomplishments.) This exchange gave school officials and Weprin a less awkward chance to duke it out. Weprin was incredulous when Eric Nadelstern, the chief schools officer, and a lineup of other officials told him that the Department of Education does not encourage test prep. “There’s an incredible amount of test prep going on. You know that, right?” he said.

When James Liebman, the chief accountability officer, told Weprin that only a tiny percentage of parents believe there is too much test prep going on in schools — about 1%, according to the department’s surveys — Weprin snapped back. “That’s unbelievably ridiculous,” he said. “You guys are either in denial, or you’re trying to pretend to be in denial. I thought it was just a given you knew how much test prep was going on.”

Officials clarified that they are in favor of testing; it just depends on which kind of testing. They said that giving diagnostic tests to assess what exactly students know and what they don’t is not test prep but a good way to help teachers educate children. “You will never find a serious educator who will say that merely teaching children how to take a test is a sufficient form of education or indeed a defensible form of education,” Cerf said. “To the extent people are being taught the content and then assessed on whether they have mastered that content by the milestone ages, that is not test prep.”

A study examining whether getting poor grades on city progress reports prompted schools to improve their students’ test scores found little evidence of such a boost.

The study, released today by the conservative-leaning Manhattan Institute, asked the question by comparing schools with progress report raw scores that were roughly the same, but just different enough to get different letter grades.

In fact the two groups showed about the same amount of progress — except in fifth-grade math, where students in failing schools made “significant and substantial improvement” compared to their peers in schools that had been assigned a grade of D, according to the study.

The progress reports assign letter grades to schools based primarily on improvements in students’ test scores. Since the first reports were released a year ago, the program has been the subject of sustained criticism: Parents and teachers have complained about unfair stigmatization of good schools, and statisticians have charged that the reports are driven as much by error as by actual school improvement.

The study’s architect, Manhattan Institute senior fellow Marcus Winters, called his findings “mixed-positive” in favor of the progress reports. Those findings were the subject this morning of a panel discussion sponsored by the Manhattan Institute featuring Winters, Columbia University economist Jonah Rockoff, and two officials from the Department of Education’s accountability office, including its CEO, James Liebman. (more…)