GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Chris Cerf, Evan Stone and Seth Andrew at a Manhattan Institute panel this morning.

Even though he received 6,000 applications to fill 60 teacher positions last years, charter school operator Seth Andrew said he still has trouble hiring the right people for the job.

Andrew, who runs four Democracy Prep Charter Schools in Harlem said even the promise of a $65,000 starting salary – 50 percent above that of a city teacher’s – did not attract the kind of teaching talent he wants for his schools.

The reason, he said this morning, was that state laws — he called them “barriers” — require most prospective teachers to earn an education degree before they can to teach in a classroom. He said those degrees did not assure that a teacher would be effective, echoing an argument frequently made by advocates of non-traditional teacher training programs.

“It doesn’t matter how you enter the classroom,” Andrew said.

Andrew was one of four panelists at a breakfast sponsored by the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, that was held to celebrate the release of “Teachers Matter,” a new book authored by senior fellow Marcus Winters. Ex-Schools Chancellor Joel Klein delivered a keynote address lauding the role school choice plays in school reform. (more…)

A vocal supporter of mayoral control says that though he’s an economist, it’s tough for him to base his belief in the school governance structure on numbers.

Marcus Winters, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research who has touted Mayor Bloomberg’s school reforms in newspaper op/eds and academic papers, says mayoral control is the best way to govern schools because it provides more accountability for education reforms — but he can’t prove that using test scores.

“It makes me a little queasy to talk about researching positive effects of mayoral control,” Winters said today in a meeting with reporters about the governance structure. He said it’s “inappropriate” to draw a correlation between student performance and mayoral control because mayoral control is a broad governance structure, not a specific reform. “It’s really difficult to study because there’s a period before mayoral control and a period after, but other things have changed in the world besides mayoral control in that time,” he said. (more…)

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…)

Yesterday, I took an initial look at the Manhattan Institute’s study, “Building on the Basics.” Today, I want to look at Florida’s state science exam, the focus of the study. A common criticism of standardized tests is that they all, to some degree, test reading ability. What does the Science FCAT look like? What skills would you need to perform well on it? I’ve only seen the NYS Science exams, so I decided to download a Florida sample test and take a look. The first thing that surprised me about this test was the reading level, which seemed high. Many of New York City’s fifth graders would (for better or for worse) stumble over sentences like, “Florida has many limestone caves containing formations called stalactites.” I tracked down a site of readability analyzers and entered text from test items.

Question 1: Melissa’s school rings a bell to alert students that it is time to start class. When the bell rings, it vibrates. The use of vibrations to send messages is an example
of which type of energy?

This one ranged from 4.72 to 10.07 in estimated US grade level required to understand it, which certainly calls into question the reliability of the readability analyzers, but also the ability of average 5th graders to understand this question.

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