GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

New York City residents won’t be appointing Mayor Bloomberg as students’ chief lobbyist any time soon.

Nearly twice as many New Yorkers trust the teachers union to protect students’ interests than they do Bloomberg, according to a new poll out of Quinnipiac University. Bloomberg’s approval rating on schools has hovered around 25 percent since early 2011, according to the poll.

The poll, conducted Jan. 30-Feb. 5, found that 56 percent of registered voters in New York City say they trust the union more to go to bat for students. Less than a third, 31 percent, said they trust Bloomberg more. (The poll of 1,222 registered voters had a margin of error of 2.8 percent.)

Among households containing public school students, the split was even more pronounced. Just 21 percent of those voters picked Bloomberg, and 69 percent chose the teachers union. Parents’ backed the union more often than even households with union members.

The news comes in an education-packed poll conducted after a month in which in a showdown over new teacher evaluations led Bloomberg and Gov. Andrew Cuomo each to ratchet up rhetoric against teachers and their unions. The poll found that the percentage of New Yorkers with favorable opinions of teachers had fallen, from 54 percent last March to 47 percent now.

But while a different poll earlier this week found high approval for Cuomo’s school policies, a set of questions designed to assess New Yorkers’ feelings about a slate of policy initiatives Bloomberg proposed during his State of the City address last month elicited mixed results. (more…)

At a time when the Obama administration is rewarding efforts to improve math and science instruction, seven city math and science teachers are being lauded for the work they already do.

For the third straight year, the Fund for the City of New York and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation are giving city teachers awards for excellence in teaching science and mathematics. The teachers will receive their prizes — $5,000 each — at an award ceremony tonight and their schools will celebrate the awards, and the $2,500 that their math and science programs receive, at a series of assemblies tomorrow.

The teachers were nominated by students, parents, colleagues, and administrators and then selected by a committee made up of representatives from local science museums and universities, based on their students’ achievement, their involvement in extracurricular activities, and their efforts to promote math and science inside and outside the classroom. The recipients’ high schools range from the city’s highest-performing to some of the weakest, including one that the city is trying to turn around using federal funding.

Here are this year’s recipients, along with a highlight about each that we pulled from longer biographies compiled by the Sloan Awards:

Teacher: Kate Belin
School: Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School
Subject: Geometry, Functions
Why her school thinks she’s great: Belin makes math relevant and interesting for students at Fannie Lou Hamer, where 90 percent of entering freshman are below grade level in math or English, by connecting math to the world outside the classroom. (more…)

The full impact of the city’s short-lived experiment in teacher performance pay could still be felt.

The Department of Education confirmed today that it has ended a three-year-old school-wide bonus program that was called “transcendant” when it was introduced. The decision, spurred by a RAND Corporation report that was commissioned by the Department of Education’s private fundraising wing, follows a previous study that found no performance boost for participating schools. We reported in March that the city had quietly suspended the bonus program.

(Read the complete RAND report.)

The city will save money this year by not disbursing the bonuses, which it says cost $56 million over the life of the initiative. (The previous report, which the city did not commission, put the costs even higher, at $75 million.)

But the long-term effect could come from a pension sweetener introduced to get the teachers union on board with the controversial program. Then-UFT President Randi Weingarten hinged her support for the bonus program on a change in the law that would allow teachers to retire early, starting at 55 instead of 62, without taking a hit to their pensions. (more…)

New York City’s heralded $75 million experiment in teacher incentive pay — deemed “transcendent” when it was announced in 2007 — did not increase student achievement at all, a new study by the Harvard economist Roland Fryer concludes.

“If anything,” Fryer writes of schools that participated in the program, “student achievement declined.” Fryer and his team used state math and English test scores as the main indicator of academic achievement.

Schools could distribute the bonus money based on individual teachers' results, but most did not. Most teachers received the average bonus of $3,000.

The program, which was first funded by private foundations and then by taxpayer dollars, also had no impact on teacher behaviors that researchers measured. These included whether teachers stayed at their schools or in the city school district and how teachers described their job satisfaction and school quality in a survey.

The program had only a “negligible” effect on a list of other measures that includes student attendance, behavioral problems, Regents exam scores, and high school graduation rates, the study found.

The experiment targeted 200 high-need schools and 20,000 teachers between the 2007-2008 and 2009-2010 school years. The Bloomberg administration quietly discontinued it last year, turning back on the mayor’s early vow to expand the program quickly.

The program handed out bonuses based on the schools’ results on the city’s progress report cards. The report cards grade schools based primarily on how much progress they make in improving students’ state test scores. A so-called “compensation team” at each school decided how to distribute the money — a maximum of $3,000 per teachers union member, if the school completely met its target, and $1,500 per union member if the school improved its report card score by 75%. (more…)

Much of the debate about merit pay for teachers has focused on theoretical arguments. But for Robin Aufses, the English department chair at a private school in Manhattan, the issue is anything but abstract.

Aufses helped lead an experiment at her school last year in new ways of evaluating teachers. Starting in September, administrators plan to assign bonuses based on the evaluations. For now, Aufses writes in the GothamSchools community section, “Good thing it turned out to be a pilot program.”

Read Aufses’ entire account of the good, the bad, and the sticky in her school’s merit pay experiment. And let us know if you have an experience of your own you’d like to share.

Last spring I took a position as English department chair at a New York City independent school, giving me a chance to work in the city after many years in suburban schools. The head of my new school told me that he and the board planned to launch a performance-based compensation system and asked me to help administer it. Like many teachers, I object to being paid based on student test scores, but after learning that wasn’t the plan at my new school, I found myself intrigued.

I admit it: I believe in merit pay, performance-based compensation, or whatever you want to call it. I’ve been in education too long not to be frustrated with the lock-step salary system: No matter how hard a teacher works, she’s paid the same as everyone else who started the same year she did and has the same number of postgraduate credits she does. While no one goes into teaching for the money, we’re also not volunteers. And why shouldn’t great teachers make more than mediocre ones?

So in I jumped, working with a formula that the department chairs, grade leaders, and heads of the secondary and primary schools had created. We made classroom observations and assessed each teacher’s collegiality, commitment, and participation in activities outside the classroom.  Teachers were scored 1 to 4 in 20 different categories. The categories were weighted, producing final scores that fell into four ranges. Teachers who fell into three of the ranges would — when the plan went into full effect — receive bonuses.

Good thing it turned out to be a pilot program. We made some mistakes; we learned a lot; and we saw hope for the future. (more…)

A school system run by Comptroller William Thompson would continue experimenting with teacher “merit pay,” he said yesterday in an exclusive interview with GothamSchools. But he said he wouldn’t expect such an experiment to yield much in the way of results.

His mixed message underscores the odd reality of performance pay plans. Though the plans enjoy increasing political support, no research studies have conclusively shown they improve student achievement.

“Would I continue merit pay? Yes,” Thompson said. “Should it make the difference? Hopefully not.” (more…)

Remember how, in 2001, when he was first running for mayor, Michael Bloomberg vowed to require all public school students to wear uniforms, to bring in private companies to take over long-failing schools, and to re-evaluate tenured teachers every two years?

These are among the fun facts included in a self-evaluation Bloomberg released today, running through all the promises he made in his 2001 and 2005 campaigns, and reporting that he’s followed through with most of them (97% in 2005, the report says).

The list of education promises Bloomberg terms stick-a-fork-in-it “Done” (as opposed to those he “reconsidered”) includes many that did obviously happen, but it also includes claims that could inspire challenge. Four promises that caught my eye:

• Improve access to selective schools for students in under-served communities. (2005 campaign promise) The mayor’s report notes that the city now offers summer workshops for parents to encourage them to consider having their children take the entrance exam for selective high schools like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science. The city has also offered summer test-prep institutes for low-income students. Still, The New York Times reported last year that proportionately fewer racial minorities were taking the admissions exam, and a lower percentage were passing. There was little change when the paper reexamined the figures this year. Gifted and talented programs for primary school students, meanwhile, have also gotten less racially diverse under Bloomberg’s watch, The Times reported.
• Give teachers more control over how they teach. (2001 promise) The report explains that this “done” stems from the new availability of “a series of tools for teachers that highlight students needs and provides teachers the information to focus on helping students master their subjects.” I assume that refers to projects like ARIS, the data warehouse, and the periodic assessments known as Acuity, meant to give teachers an ongoing portrait of what students do and don’t know throughout the school year. While some teachers embrace these tools, others say the tools limit the way they teach, forcing them to focus too much time on test preparation. (more…)

Schools Chancellor Joel Klein has for years been a proponent of paying some teachers more based on their performance, and he has made some headway in introducing merit pay in the city schools. But the policy has plenty of critics, from teachers who say merit pay divides them to statisticians who point simply to flaws in the measures on which pay calculations are based.

In the video above, University of Virginia psychology professor Dan Willingham gives six reasons in three minutes why paying teachers based on their students’ test scores isn’t statistically sound. But Willingham doesn’t totally rule out the prospect of paying better teachers more: “Merit pay can’t work until there’s a way to measure teacher performance that’s fair,” he concludes.

Governor David Paterson. (Via Flickr Creative Commons)

An important story slipped by our watch late last week: Governor Paterson waded into the debate on how to evaluate teachers. In an interview with WNYC’s Brian Lehrer, Paterson said that efforts to judge teachers based on their student test scores concern him:

“How would you assess a teacher who could go into a very difficult school and does a good job bringing a class up to, say, state average on standardized tests and then a teacher that’s a little lazy in an affluent community, where all the other teachers are doing well, [and] benefits from the location?”

Beth Fertig, WNYC’s education reporter, points out that Paterson’s remarks come in the context of a heated debate between teachers unions and those who advocate for test-based accountability, including the Bloomberg administration and, now, some in the federal government. While the local union partnered with the mayor on a merit-based pay initiative for teachers, it has quarreled with him on efforts to measure individual teachers.

Exactly where Paterson stands on education issues has been a subject of debate since he took office. Though his father is a close adviser to Randi Weingarten, the union president, Paterson himself has become a vocal supporter of school choice. With the governor taking few steps to get involved in education policy, the mystery has been a kind of moot point so far. There’s also the small problem of how long Paterson will hold onto his seat. But even if this term becomes his last, Paterson will be an important player in the mayoral control debate this year. The fate of the 2002 law lies in the hands of already-vocal legislators — but just as much in the hands of Paterson.