This is obviously the right direction to go in, as the current system is insane: students are tested near the end of the year so by the time the results are in, it's too late to do anything.  Instead, doing quick, low-stakes tests frequently throughout the year will give teachers critical information about exactly what each student has (and hasn't) learned so that corrective action can be taken. 

 I've seen many top charter schools doing this -- Village Academies and North Star come immediately to mind -- and it really works.  Of course, the devil's in the details -- it will be a real challenge to implement this...

Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein announced yesterday that the city school system would spend $80 million over five years on a battery of new standardized tests to begin this fall for most of New York City’s 1.1 million public school students.

The contract awarded to the testing giant CTB/McGraw-Hill will involve a significant expansion of exams, known as periodic tests, which monitor students’ progress and are supposed to help predict how students will perform in the annual state exams. Mr. Klein’s announcement immediately rekindled the debate over whether such testing is emphasized too much or is even a useful tool for teachers.

Pupils in Grades 3 through 8 will be tested five times a year in both reading and math, instead of three times as they are now. High school students, for the first time, will be tested four times a year in each subject. In the next few years, the tests will expand to include science and social studies.

I know testing is a highly controverial area.  I'll write a lot more on this later, but in summary, I think we need to do more, not less, testing, but no doubt much better testing.

----------------------

 

May 31, 2007

New York City Expands Test Program in Schools

By JULIE BOSMAN

www.nytimes.com/2007/05/31/education/31schools.html

Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein announced yesterday that the city school system would spend $80 million over five years on a battery of new standardized tests to begin this fall for most of New York City’s 1.1 million public school students.

City School Board may revisit anti-charter contract

 

 Speaking of the disgraceful St. Louis school board, at least one of the four members who voted to hire a crony to run attack ads against charter schools is coming to his senses:

It seems the St. Louis School Board has not seen the last of a $25,000 no-bid contract it awarded Tuesday to radio talk show host Lizz Brown.

Brown is to counter advertising campaigns for charter schools with her own marketing firm.

School Board member David Jackson said Wednesday that he would seek to place the contract on the agenda for the board's June 12 meeting and will change his vote.

"I don't want to pay $25,000 to dog another entity," said Jackson, one of four board members who supported the contract. He now prefers the money be spent to promote the city schools rather than denounce charter schools.

 

---------------------

City School Board may revisit anti-charter contract

By Steve Giegerich

ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH

05/31/2007

http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/stlouiscitycounty/story/4560054B56F815B7862572EC000FF04D?OpenDocument

It seems the St. Louis School Board has not seen the last of a $25,000 no-bid contract it awarded Tuesday to radio talk show host Lizz Brown.

 

Teach for America in St. Louis

---

A correction: contrary to the report in the media, Teach for America has not been terminated in St. Louis -- the contract is merely being "reviewed".  Below is an email from the head of TFA in St. Louis (shared with permission), explaining the facts of the situation.  I also learned that TFA provided 50 of the 300 new teachers hired in St. Louis.

 ----------------------

Dear Corps members,

You may have seen an article in today’s Post-Dispatch reporting that the St. Louis Public School Board voted to withdraw Teach For America’s contract.

In fact, this is not true. I was at the meeting yesterday where the voting took place and have a copy of the motion voted on. The motion states that the SLPS board of education has voted to “direct the administration to review its contract with Teach For America for flexibility or cancellation for financial constraints.”

What this means is that the SLPS administration is looking at our contract to understand the terms and will then inform us of any outcome or possible decisions they might make.

I have consulted with several officials from the district and state, including the SLPS board of education, the human resources department of SLPS, the superintendent’s office and the commissioner of education’s office – all of whom have assured me that they are very eager that Teach For America corps members continue to work in St. Louis.

Through meetings in the next few days, I fully anticipate a decision that prioritizes our students’ achievement and that benefits everyone involved.

I know that some of you may be concerned about our future in the district and at your schools. I want to assure you again, that Teach For America is doing everything we can to ensure that there is little or no disruption in our work here. While we aim to have teachers continuing to teach in their current schools, as you know, placement is ultimately decided by the SLPS human resources department.

I am confident that we will continue to work in St. Louis with the steady support of our community, which includes parents, principals, teachers, businesspeople, the Mayor’s Office and other government officials and of course, your students.

As always, all of our work centers around student achievement and your work in the classrooms is at the core. Therefore, please continue to work as you do every day – with the passion and commitment that impacts your students’ lives.

I will update you as soon as we have any further information that would affect you all. In the meantime, please contact me if you have questions.

Best regards,

Dustin

Dustin Odham
Executive Director
Teach For America
815 Olive Street, Suite 14
St. Louis, MO 63101

 

Reading, 'Riting, and Spending

 

 

The NY Sun editorial is exactly right -- more spending is not THE key ingredient to success, but it is probably one of many important ingredients.

Per pupil spending in the city has doubled over the past decade and for much of that time, scores haven't changed discernably. The schools have only started improving as Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein have taken the reins and introduced new curricula and accountability for teachers and principals, as well as encouraging the development of public charter schools. Those innovations have been possible without markedly increased spending.

Ms. Weingarten posits that "school spending is as much about how you spend it as it is about how much you spend." We couldn't agree more; if only Judge DeGrasse grasped this point. In any event, the city schools have fallen short, thanks, in many cases, to union-negotiated work rules that make it difficult to fire incompetent teachers or administrators.

-------------------------------------------

http://www.nysun.com/article/41046

Reading, 'Riting, and Spending

New York Sun Staff Editorial
October 6, 2006
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/41046

Debate over the role of money in education is igniting anew as the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit over school funding heads to the state's highest court yet again on Tuesday, and the good news is that it's still not too late to re-examine the premise that more spending equals a better education. The CFE lawsuit is founded on the idea that the equation holds and that idea has absorbed the courts for so long that students who were kindergartners when the case began are now in college if they're lucky.

TV watching

 

My recent email on how much TV children are watching led my friend Norm Sherman, who was a principal in NYC public schools for decades (he's now retired), to write:

You are right on the money about both TV watching and expectations.

 

Are you familiar with the Rosenthal study and book Pygmalion in the Classroom?  It's a classic study on teachers' expectations.

 

When I was a principal the kids were spending more time watching TV than they did in school. I mounted a major campaign against this and was reasonably successful. At the time, I connected with an educational  TV producer who had done a video on the effects of TV watching on children and their school work and incidents of violence. I was fortunate to have her come to a PTA meeting. I also did things like a "A Month Without TV" and had the kids keep records of what they did with their time.

 

TV, like fire, used wisely is a wonderful tool and leaving children on their own is dangerous.

And I guess I missed a generation -- a friend who's in his early 20s wrote me:

I know your email about TVs in childrens' rooms was for elementary school-age children. I agree with you that for that age group having a TV in their own room is a little unusual; however by the time children get to high school almost everyone had a TV in their room (this is for 1998-2001 in LA County).

 

I think it was partly a maturity issue in being able to handle your responsibilities, but also partly the child's ability to negotiate a TV for their room! Much easier to do as you get older :)

Washington Post 3-part series

If you have the time, this three-part series in the Washington Post recently is worth reading (see below; posted at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/metro/interactives/dcschools).  Part 1 documents the depravity and horror of Washington DC's school system; Part 2 traces how it got to where it is and why so many reform efforts have failed (with a number of quotes from DFER chairman Kevin Chavous, who used to be head of the education committee of the DC City Council), and Part 3 highlights the gains Philadelphia made under Paul Vallas for a model of what DC might be able to achieve.

---------------------

June 16, 2007

Op-Ed Columnist

-----------------------

Successes at a Big-City System
Focus, Funding Help Turn Around Nation's 8th-Largest School District

By V. Dion Haynes
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 12, 2007; A01

PHILADELPHIA -- Darren Romero could see this was no ordinary parent-teacher meeting.

Romero had left his construction job early, having been summoned to M. Hall Stanton Elementary School with a call that his first-grade son, Darren Jr., had fallen behind in reading and math. Now, a large screen flashed video footage of Darren coloring with markers when he should have been working on a money-counting exercise. The teacher pointed to a chart showing Darren's reading level, far below where he should be at this point in the school year.

------------------------

Worn Down by Waves of Change
Bureaucracy, Politics Beat Back Succession of Superintendents and Plans

By April Witt
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 11, 2007; A01

When a board appointed by Congress seized control of the D.C. public schools in 1996, its members were eager to give the school system a clean break from its troubled past. They fired Superintendent Franklin L. Smith, replaced him with a war hero, retired Army Lt. Gen. Julius W. Becton Jr., and urged Becton not to bother debriefing Smith.

 

-------------------------

Can D.C. Schools Be Fixed?
After decades of reforms, three out of four students fall below math standards. More money is spent running the schools than on teaching. And urgent repair jobs take more than a year . . .

By Dan Keating and V. Dion Haynes
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, June 10, 2007; A01

Kelly Miller Middle School opened its doors in a struggling Northeast Washington neighborhood in 2004, a $35 million showcase for the District's public schools, every classroom equipped with a whiteboard and computers. A particular source of pride was a media production room, where students could broadcast announcements and produce programs to be viewed on TVs wired in each classroom.

 

An interesting Op Ed in Saturday's WSJ, arguing that Utah's passage of a statewide voucher bill shows that the best approach to getting voucher legislation passed is to go for large-scale programs like Utah's rather than more limited ones such as in DC, the Urban Schools Scholarship Act Cory Booker is supporting in NJ, etc.  I disagree.  Even if you thought giving everyone a voucher was a good idea, it's a nonstarter just about everywhere except Utah...

The success of school choice as a method of empowering parents, raising student achievement and improving public education systems in those markets where it has been implemented is indisputable. The question now becomes how to achieve meaningful school choice for the benefit of all parents, not just a select few?

After this year's compelling school-choice victory in Utah, the methodology for successfully advancing parental options against the well-funded phalanxes of institutional opposition is crystallizing. Specifically, Utah's success has proven the efficacy of advocating universal choice initiatives as opposed to limited, means-tested pilot programs...

In spite of enormous resistance, Utah's victory is proof positive that a universal approach -- consistently advanced over time and leveraging every available grassroots and political coalition -- can succeed in securing the educational choices our nation needs to compete in the new millennium. The sooner we apply these lessons to other states, the sooner America can inherit its 21st century Manifest Destiny.

--------------------

School-Choice Strategy

By HOWARD S. RICH
June 16, 2007; Page A8, WSJ

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118195964720137475-search.html

The flattened borders of the 21st century have made networking faster, global trade freer and competition more rigorous -- meaning the premium we place on educating future generations is higher than ever before. Yet the nation's monopolistic approach to education remains a millstone around our children's necks, with America consistently lagging behind its industrialized peers in academic achievement.

 

This sounds a little loosy-goosy, but I certainly applaud the experiment.

Mindfulness, while common in hospitals, corporations, professional sports and even prisons, is relatively new in the education of squirming children. But a small but growing number of schools in places like Oakland and Lancaster, Pa., are slowly embracing the concept — as they did yoga five years ago — and institutions, like the psychology department at Stanford University and the Mindfulness Awareness Research Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, are trying to measure the effects.

During a five-week pilot program at Piedmont Avenue Elementary, Miss Megan, the “mindful” coach, visited every classroom twice a week, leading 15 minute sessions on how to have “gentle breaths and still bodies.” The sound of the Tibetan bowl reverberated at the start and finish of each lesson.

---------------------

In the Classroom, a New Focus on Quieting the Mind

 

By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN

Published: June 16, 2007

OAKLAND, Calif., June 12 — The lesson began with the striking of a Tibetan singing bowl to induce mindful awareness.

Herbert is no doubt correct that the lack of summer jobs for inner-city youth is a major issue, but it pales in comparison to the lousy education most of them are getting the rest of the year...

From January through May, according to the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston, “the national teen employment rate averaged only 33.1 percent, tying for the lowest employment rate in the past 60 years.”

For youngsters like Emmanuel Wayne and others in this distressed city just a stone’s throw from Philadelphia, the problem is much worse. Last summer, the employment rate for black teens from low-income families was an abysmal 18 percent.

This is the flip side of the American dream. Kids who grow up poor and never work at a regular job tend not to think in terms of postgraduate degrees, marriages and honeymoons, careers and the cost of educating the next generation.

---------------------

June 16, 2007

Op-Ed Columnist

Flip Side of the Dream

By BOB HERBERT

http://select.nytimes.com/2007/06/16/opinion/16herbert.html

Camden, N.J.

Emmanuel Wayne pressed his back against the shabby, one-story building, trying unsuccessfully to escape the downpour. The blue-and-white sign overhead said Bill’s Liquors.

Rhee-Inventing D.C. Schools

 

On the same topic is DFER board member Andy Rotherham on his must-read Eduwonk blog:

Rhee has a huge challenge ahead. The people who tried and failed before her were not bereft of talent. There are two key differences though: She has a mayor who supports her and can support her through the new governance arrangement and she understands the system, wants it to work for kids, but is not of it, she's a reformer. D.C. has had folks who are one, or the other, rarely both and never, obviously, in this governing arrangment. And it's impossible to look at the state of affairs in the D.C. Public Schools and not conclude that substantial reform is what it needs. The status quo literally kills kids. Rhee's work to date has been about changing that and while the D.C. Council should exercise it's responsibility to confirm the mayor's choice, let's hope they keep the politics to a minimum and get Michelle into this job as soon as possible.

 

----------------------------

Rhee-Inventing D.C. Schools

http://www.eduwonk.com/2007/06/rhee-inventing-dc-schools.html

WaPo breaks the news that New Teacher Project head Michelle Rhee is Washington Mayor Fenty's choice to lead the D.C. Public Schools...so pretty soon that will be Chancellor Rhee to you. WaPo ed board pretty on board with the pick, too. Couple of thoughts in no particular order, and I should point out that I’ve known and worked with Rhee for a while:

TFA job opportunities

 

Here are some job opportunities at Teach for America:

Teach For America is seeking several directors of design to develop powerful learning experiences and support tools for the training of 3000 new teachers (corps members) and the over 400 instructional staff who teach our corps members...Teach For America is also seeking a managing director who will lead a team of directors of design to achieve their goals.

----------------------------

 

Teacher Preparation Design Opportunities at Teach For America

 

 

Director of Design

Teach For America is seeking several directors of design to develop powerful learning experiences and support tools for the training of 3000 new teachers (corps members) and the over 400 instructional staff who teach our corps members.  Directors of design identify learning needs, conduct research on best practices, and partner with execution leaders to identify the right training and support solutions.  They then write sessions, develop resources, and create other tools needed to support effective execution. 

 

Prior teaching experience is preferred but not required.  Competitive candidates for this position will:

·        possess exemplary writing, critical thinking, and problem solving skills;

·        have the ability to take a high volume of abstract information and create logical frameworks that are accessible to a wide audience;

·        have the ability to manage long-term projects in a self-directed way;

·        have the ability to efficiently facilitate collaborative processes;

·        thrive in a fast-paced, goal-oriented environment; and

·        feel motivated by creating powerful solutions that help corps members and staff reach greater levels of effectiveness.

 

 

Managing Director of Design

Teach For America is also seeking a managing director who will lead a team of directors of design to achieve their goals.  The managing director will work closely with the vice president of design and other national leaders to shape the vision, measures of success, and strategy for improving teacher and staff effectiveness.  The managing director will cultivate, hire, develop, and manage a team of 3-5 people, while creating a culture of excellence that places a premium on effectiveness and efficiency. 

 

Prior teaching experience is preferred but not required.  Competitive candidates for this position will possess all of the above characteristics listed in the director of design description.  In addition, candidates will have demonstrated past experience leading others to reach goals and managing multiple, complex projects effectively.

 

For more information, see www.teachforamerica.org.

The brazen corruption and depravity here is really quite astounding...

Gifts and payoffs to universities and their officials by student lenders were far more pervasive than had been disclosed and in some cases were demanded by university officials themselves in exchange for promoting lenders to students, according to a Senate report on the student loan industry issued yesterday.

The report, released by Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts and chairman of the Education Committee, drew new colleges into the loan scandal. It also revealed an array of aggressive marketing practices by lenders, many of which, the report suggested, were unethical and possibly illegal because they involved quid pro quos.

“It is clear that the problem is systemic and cannot be isolated to a few ‘problem’ lenders or schools,” the report concluded.

--------------------

June 15, 2007

Report Details Deals in Student Loan Industry

By KAREN W. ARENSON and DIANA JEAN SCHEMO

www.nytimes.com/2007/06/15/washington/15loans.html

Gifts and payoffs to universities and their officials by student lenders were far more pervasive than had been disclosed and in some cases were demanded by university officials themselves in exchange for promoting lenders to students, according to a Senate report on the student loan industry issued yesterday.

The NYT editorial writers note the great math results of NYC's public schools, but can't bring themselves to acknowledge the remarkable reforms that are responsible for them nor do they have the decency to give Chancellor Klein the kudos he deserves...

Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the teachers of New York are rightly proud of the city’s performance on this year’s state math tests. New York City students showed gains in every grade tested, outpaced students in most other of the state’s big cities and edged closer to the state performance average. That’s significant, given that big city systems typically lag far behind rural and suburban districts.

------------------

June 15, 2007

Editorial

www.nytimes.com/2007/06/15/opinion/15fri3.html

Good News on Math

Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the teachers of New York are rightly proud of the city’s performance on this year’s state math tests. New York City students showed gains in every grade tested, outpaced students in most other of the state’s big cities and edged closer to the state performance average. That’s significant, given that big city systems typically lag far behind rural and suburban districts.

When Agitators Become Insiders

DFER Exec Dir Joe Williams is already up and blogging on our new web site at dfer.org.  Here's his take on Michelle Rhee's hiring:

I love the work that Michelle has done in the area of human resources and teacher contracts. She's got the kind of chutzpah it takes to stare special interests in the face and put common sense ahead of petty demands.

But she's also taking on one of the toughest jobs in public education. If we have learned anything in the last 20 years, it is that public education itself may simply not be reformable in its current state. The Great Man Theory doesn't have a great track record of teaching kids how to read, write, and do math.

Here's to hoping that you beat the odds, Michelle. Honestly. Let us know how we can help. 

----------------------------

When Agitators Become Insiders

http://www.dfer.org/2007/06/when_agitators.php#more

The Washington Post this morning reports that Mayor Adrian M. Fenty is ousting D.C. Superintendent Clifford Janey and replacing him with Michelle Rhee, a dynamo who runs the NYC-based New Teacher Project.

Battle Over Math in New Jersey Drives Off a New Schools Chief

 

An interesting article about the math wars in one upscale district in NJ:

Dr. Brooks, a superintendent on Long Island, is the latest casualty in the math wars, felled by parents who complain that their children have failed to learn basic skills in one of the top-performing school districts in New Jersey. After consulting math professors and hiring private tutors, the parents flooded the Internet — and the local newspaper, The Ridgewood News — with concerns about what is known as reform math, collecting more than 175 signatures on a petition calling for an overhaul of math instruction in six of the district’s nine schools.

These schools — four elementary schools and the district’s only two middle schools — use reform math, an approach that typically allows students to explore their own solutions to problems, writing and drawing pictures, and to use tools like the calculator while they learn mathematical methods and skills. Reform math grew out of an effort to instill in students a deeper understanding of what they are doing rather than memorizing facts and repeating answers.

But parents like Linda Moran, a former math teacher, say the approach has left their children lacking. Mrs. Moran said she became upset last year when one daughter, 10 at the time, had no idea how much she was owed after shoveling snow for an hour and 15 minutes, at $7.50 per hour, and the other, at 13, asked for a calculator option on her cellphone to figure out restaurant tips.

-------------------

Battle Over Math in New Jersey Drives Off a New Schools Chief

 

By WINNIE HU

Published: June 14, 2007

www.nytimes.com/2007/06/14/nyregion/14math.html

Parents, some involved in a campaign against the math teaching in the highly regarded Ridgewood, N.J., school district, were to have met the new superintendent at a reception last Monday night.

 

The time has come for Alabama to hold bad teachers accountable

 

This story from Alabama captures one of the biggest problems plaguing our public schools (at least in places where the union is strong): the almost total impossibility of firing any tenured teacher, not matter how eggregious the behavior.  Of course teachers should be protected against arbitrary dismissals, but the pendulum has swung WAY too far the other way...  For slides on the importance of teacher quality, how many ineffective teachers there are, and the outrageous way in which teacher talent is distributed, see: http://www.tilsonfunds.com/Personal/Teacherquality.pdf

Why is the Alabama Education Association afraid of a little accountability?

There's no other way to explain the teachers union's opposition all session long to House Bill 831, which would restore to local school boards the authority to dismiss tenured teachers without having each individual decision reviewed by labor arbitrators (typically from out of state).

It wasn't always this way. The law used to uphold the autonomy of school boards to fire a problem teacher. But in 2004, the Legislature passed a bill - at the AEA's urging - that installed arbitrators over school boards to hear appeals from any teacher with tenure. And every teacher, no matter how borderline, is awarded tenure after three years.

----------------------

The time has come for Alabama to hold bad teachers accountable

Sunday, June 10, 2007

RICHARD BERMAN

http://www.al.com/opinion/birminghamnews/index.ssf?/base/opinion/118146394954080.xml&coll=2

Why is the Alabama Education Association afraid of a little accountability?

There's no other way to explain the teachers union's opposition all session long to House Bill 831, which would restore to local school boards the authority to dismiss tenured teachers without having each individual decision reviewed by labor arbitrators (typically from out of state).

A third-grade assignment from a Ridgewood school that uses reform math, in which

HELP ALL STUDENTS

Here's hoping this tuition tax credit bill passes in NY -- it's so tiny, but there's a big battle over it because of the precedent...

WE are encouraged to hear Gov. Spitzer pledge to make a renewed push to get relief for tuition-paying families enacted by the end of this year's legislative session.

More than 500,000 New York children attend non-public schools - and the rapid rise in costs has left many families struggling to pay tuition and in desperate need of financial relief.

Thankfully, this situation captured the attention of those with the ability to do something about it. As the year began, both Gov. Spitzer and Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno proposed budgets that included a tuition-tax deduction that would have meant relief for countless grandparents and parents.

Unfortunately, combating their plans became a way for some to prove fealty to entrenched interests - keeping any such aid out of the budget adopted in April.

-------------------

HELP ALL STUDENTS

NY Post, NICHOLAS DIMARZIO & ELIE ABADIE

June 13, 2007 -- WE are encouraged to hear Gov. Spitzer pledge to make a renewed push to get relief for tuition-paying families enacted by the end of this year's legislative session.

 

 

Smartening up - Teachers union softens opposition to charter schools

Yesterday Klein and Bloomberg visited Eva Moskowitz's Harlem Success charter school, which is off to a fabulous start in its first year: the kindergarteners and first graders have made huge strides and have read over 20,000 books! (Contrast this with the awful fact that 58% and 54% of black and Latino 4th graders nationwide are illiterate! -- see: http://www.tilsonfunds.com/Personal/4thgradereading.pdf) (The school was co-founded by John Petry, one of the founders of Dems for Ed Reform, and his partner, Joel Greenblatt; they hope to grow it to more than 40 schools over time.)

An auditorium full of parents applauded Mayor Bloomberg yesterday for his support of charter schools.

The Harlem Success Academy's executive director, Eva Moskowitz, invited the mayor for a celebration of her charter school's first year.

Ms. Moskowitz sometimes sparred with the mayor when she served on the City Council, but she had only kind words yesterday. "You have demanded that parents like ours have a choice," she said.

the attention of those with the ability to do something about it. As the year began, both Gov. Spitzer and Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno proposed budgets that included a tuition-tax deduction that would have meant relief for countless grandparents and parents.

Unfortunately, combating their plans became a way for some to prove fealty to entrenched interests - keeping any such aid out of the budget adopted in April.

------------------------

Parents Hail Mayor's Support of Charters

By Staff Reporter of the Sun
June 14, 2007

http://www.nysun.com/article/56539

An auditorium full of parents applauded Mayor Bloomberg yesterday for his support of charter schools.  The Harlem Success Academy's executive director, Eva Moskowitz, invited the mayor for a celebration of her charter school's first year.

A third-grade assignment from a Ridgewood school that uses reform math, in which

Charters and math scores

 The good math scores from NYC charter schools are good to see, though static scores don't mean much.  Year-to-year gains by the same students is what matters.  That being said, Klein is absolutely right that, overall, charters are working in NYC.  While there are some weak schools, some of the best charter schools and charter school operators in the country are in NYC.

This year, 74% of city charter students scored proficient on the state math test, up from 66% last year, a review of state data by a procharter group, the New York City Center for Charter School Excellence, found. Just 65% of students citywide scored as well this year, up from 57% last year.

Mayor Bloomberg and his schools chancellor, Joel Klein, applauded the results. "The charter school model is working in New York City," Mr. Klein said in a statement.

------------------------

Math Scores Show Charters ‘Working'

BY ELIZABETH GREEN - Staff Reporter of the Sun
June 15, 2007
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/56644

Charter schools are beating other New York City schools on math tests, the latest state test results show.

This Is a Test. Results May Vary. (and why I think NYC's gains are the beginning of a long positive trend)

This article raises some fair points, which is why it's critical to examine the context for the rising scores.  I'm generally skeptical when test scores rise in the absense of genuine reform, but in the case of NYC, I think there has been genuine reform in many, many areas, so I'm convinced that what we're seeing here is not a short-term blip in performance but -- I'll really stick my neck out here -- the beginning of major improvement (if the reforms stay on track under the next mayor -- a huge if).  The best analogy I can think of is the reforms of the NYC police department initiated in 1994 -- in the subsequent 10 years, total crime in the largest city in America fell 67 percent!

We know the script. It opens with a Greek chorus lamenting how poorly students are reading. A pedagogic hero — a new chancellor or state commissioner — appears on the scene with a fresh quiver of weapons and schedules improved tests.

The results come back, and — alakazam! — achievement surges, and our hero is hailed as rescuer of the school system. That is, until tests in later years reveal that students are back to about where they were.

Such a pattern has stamped the history of standardized testing. And so the heartening results last month on the annual reading tests in New York State and New York City, and the results on the math tests announced yesterday, should be taken in perspective.

Officials trumpeted these results. In reading, the city’s proportion of passing eighth graders — for years the subject of hand-wringing — rose a breathtaking 7.9 percentage points, with 46.4 percent of fluent English speakers tested qualifying as proficient compared with 38.5 percent the year before. Reading results for eighth graders statewide were as comforting. In math, almost 73 percent of students from third through eighth grade met standards compared with almost 66 percent last year.

But some skeptics who have been on this roller coaster before wonder whether these increases are animated more by the content of the tests or by how the results are measured than by anything administrators or teachers did or did not do. In these critics’ view, a test may show an individual student’s progress, but is not as precise at measuring the progress of an entire grade or school system.

That’s not to say that New York students did not genuinely improve. State officials say scores rose because tougher curriculum standards were spelled out, teachers were given better training and students were given extra tutoring. But a little humility may be called for.

Robert Tobias ran New York City’s office of assessment for 13 years under seven chancellors, so he knows in his marrow the vagaries of test scores. He was there when chancellors flaunted the results and when they had to sheepishly explain why scores fell. He has learned neither to get too intoxicated by the leaps nor too downhearted by the plunges.

-----------------------

This Is a Test. Results May Vary.

 

By JOSEPH BERGER, The New York Times

Published: June 13, 2007

We know the script. It opens with a Greek chorus lamenting how poorly students are reading. A pedagogic hero — a new chancellor or state commissioner — appears on the scene with a fresh quiver of weapons and schedules improved tests.

The results come back, and — alakazam! — achievement surges, and our hero is hailed as rescuer of the school system. That is, until tests in later years reveal that students are back to about where they were.

Such a pattern has stamped the history of standardized testing. And so the heartening results last month on the annual reading tests in New York State and New York City, and the results on the math tests announced yesterday, should be taken in perspective.

Officials trumpeted these results. In reading, the city’s proportion of passing eighth graders — for years the subject of hand-wringing — rose a breathtaking 7.9 percentage points, with 46.4 percent of fluent English speakers tested qualifying as proficient compared with 38.5 percent the year before. Reading results for eighth graders statewide were as comforting. In math, almost 73 percent of students from third through eighth grade met standards compared with almost 66 percent last year.

But some skeptics who have been on this roller coaster before wonder whether these increases are animated more by the content of the tests or by how the results are measured than by anything administrators or teachers did or did not do. In these critics’ view, a test may show an individual student’s progress, but is not as precise at measuring the progress of an entire grade or school system.

That’s not to say that New York students did not genuinely improve. State officials say scores rose because tougher curriculum standards were spelled out, teachers were given better training and students were given extra tutoring. But a little humility may be called for.

Robert Tobias ran New York City’s office of assessment for 13 years under seven chancellors, so he knows in his marrow the vagaries of test scores. He was there when chancellors flaunted the results and when they had to sheepishly explain why scores fell. He has learned neither to get too intoxicated by the leaps nor too downhearted by the plunges.

Mr. Tobias, who directs the Center for Research on Teaching and Learning at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Education, gets suspicious when test results rise too high from one year to the next, or when one grade rises spectacularly and others register only a modest change.

On this year’s reading test, for example, the proportion of state eighth graders reaching proficiency surged by 7.7 percentage points, but the proportion of proficient sixth graders increased by a more modest 2.8 points and that of seventh graders by only 1.4 points.

Richard P. Mills, the state education commissioner, credited the middle-school showing to leaders who “have high expectations for all children” and “use proven practices.”

Did the leaders of sixth and seventh grades not have expectations that were as high or fail to use proven practices in reading?

And, in math, why did the state’s eighth graders improve by almost 5 percentage points, while the seventh graders, lackluster readers after all, soared by nearly 11 points?

Another detail that raises Mr. Tobias’s eyebrows is sharp gains in too many places. Only in Yonkers, among the state’s biggest five cities, did reading scores fall, a setback officials attributed to an unusually large number of immigrants in the pool. Were almost all city superintendents at the top of their game?

“I would say it’s something about the test when there’s too large an increase and it’s too ubiquitous — in too many districts,” Mr. Tobias said.

Although officials insist that tests are thoroughly scientific, a reading test — by the very fact that its questions are chosen by teachers — does not measure a student’s ability as precisely as, say, a cardiogram measures the cadence of a heart. For one thing, test scores can go up and down depending on who is allowed to take the test.

IT has long been known that some administrators find pretexts for eliminating students on the margins — those with learning disabilities or in danger of being held back. Walter Haney, a testing expert at Boston College, said Texas doubled the number of special education students who were exempted from 1994 to 1998, a move that he said accounted for spectacular gains — gains which, incidentally, contributed to calls for nationwide testing that culminated in the federal No Child Left Behind Law.

For several years until the federal government banned it, New York State exempted immigrant students who had been in the school system for less than three years. This year, only those in the country for less than a year were exempted, and the declining scores in Grades 3 and 4 were attributed to the large share of immigrants those grades absorbed.

Familiarity with the test format can also lead to slightly higher scores, Mr. Tobias said; versions of the reading and math tests were given for a second year.

Then there’s the test itself. Psychometricians may argue that what they do is science, but Mr. Tobias contends that there is more than a little art. Test questions are given weights based on degree of difficulty or their power to discriminate among students of similar abilities. Theoretically, a question that is scaled the same way a similar question was the previous year should yield the same results.

But, Mr. Tobias said, “in practice the theory is not always realized.” Mr. Haney pointed out that states can tweak the proportion of students deemed proficient by including one or two easier questions.

Seymour Fliegel, a longtime administrator who is now president of the Center for Educational Innovation-Public Education Association, a nonprofit group, said that there is always skepticism when scores go up, but seldom when they decline.

“If you live by the sword you die by the sword, it seems to me, or else public education can’t win,” he said.

State officials in New York said statistical factors explain part of the anomalous rise in the eighth-grade reading test, paradoxically making it less remarkable.

David M. Abrams, the state’s assistant commissioner for standards and assessment, noted that sixth graders and eighth graders improved about the same in raw numbers — five points on a scale in which a score of 650 represents proficiency. But since a comparatively large number of sixth graders were already proficient the year before and a relatively large number of eighth graders were clustered just below the 650 threshold, the same five points qualified many more eighth graders as proficient while doing far less for the sixth-grade showing.

Mr. Tobias said officials generally did not analyze high scores as aggressively as falling ones, and his remark betrays a weary understanding of educational politics.

“Why would you take away your own good story?” he said.

An Invitation To Cheat

A NY Sun Op Ed from yesterday about the incentives to cheat when accountability and/or merit pay is introduced.  This is a very good point, which is why there need to be systems in place to detect and punish cheating.

Under the federal pilot program for the charter schools announced last week, administrators will receive bonuses of up to $8,000, teachers up to $6,000 and school aides, up to $2,000. These bonuses will be based on student gains on standardized tests, and therein lies the rub.

I'm a believer in the power of the market to influence outcomes, but this type of program, unless subjected to rigorous scrutiny and security, is nothing more than an invitation to cheat.

This article raises some fair points, which is why it's critical to examine the context for the rising scores.  I'm generally skeptical when test scores rise in the absense of genuine reform, but in the case of NYC, I think there has been genuine reform in many, many areas, so I'm convinced that what we're seeing here is not a short-term blip in performance but -- I'll really stick my neck out here -- the beginning of major improvement (if the reforms stay on track under the next mayor -- a huge if).  The best analogy I can think of is the reforms of the NYC police department initiated in 1994 -- in the subsequent 10 years, total crime in the largest city in America fell 67 percent!

We know the script. It opens with a Greek chorus lamenting how poorly students are reading. A pedagogic hero — a new chancellor or state commissioner — appears on the scene with a fresh quiver of weapons and schedules improved tests.

The results come back, and — alakazam! — achievement surges, and our hero is hailed as rescuer of the school system. That is, until tests in later years reveal that students are back to about where they were.

Such a pattern has stamped the history of standardized testing. And so the heartening results last month on the annual reading tests in New York State and New York City, and the results on the math tests announced yesterday, should be taken in perspective.

Officials trumpeted these results. In reading, the city’s proportion of passing eighth graders — for years the subject of hand-wringing — rose a breathtaking 7.9 percentage points, with 46.4 percent of fluent English speakers tested qualifying as proficient compared with 38.5 percent the year before. Reading results for eighth graders statewide were as comforting. In math, almost 73 percent of students from third through eighth grade met standards compared with almost 66 percent last year.

But some skeptics who have been on this roller coaster before wonder whether these increases are animated more by the content of the tests or by how the results are measured than by anything administrators or teachers did or did not do. In these critics’ view, a test may show an individual student’s progress, but is not as precise at measuring the progress of an entire grade or school system.

That’s not to say that New York students did not genuinely improve. State officials say scores rose because tougher curriculum standards were spelled out, teachers were given better training and students were given extra tutoring. But a little humility may be called for.

Robert Tobias ran New York City’s office of assessment for 13 years under seven chancellors, so he knows in his marrow the vagaries of test scores. He was there when chancellors flaunted the results and when they had to sheepishly explain why scores fell. He has learned neither to get too intoxicated by the leaps nor too downhearted by the plunges.

-----------------------

 

An Invitation To Cheat

BY ANDREW WOLF
June 12, 2007
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/56370

As the schools chancellor joined in the announcement of a federal grant to test whether merit pay can lift performance in charter schools, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education confirmed that an investigation of test results was under way in a high-profile school in which the principal benefited from such a merit pay program.

The Class-Consciousness Raiser

This is quite an interesting article about a touchy subject: class, how different classes of people tend to behave in certain ways and, most controversially, how the behavior of low-income people often makes/keeps them poor.  There are powerful implications for schools, esp. those serving low-income children:

In public schools, though, class divisions are a frequent part of daily existence, sometimes within the student body but also, and more significant, between teachers and students.

The passage of the No Child Left Behind law in 2002 brought a new urgency to the issue of poverty in the classroom. For the first time, schools were required not only to report their overall test results but also to calculate the scores for various “subgroups,” including racial minorities, students for whom English is a second language and students whose parents’ income is low enough to qualify them for a free or reduced-price lunch. It soon became impossible to ignore that there was a problem: poor students were scoring well behind their wealthier peers. And schools suddenly had a powerful incentive to try to address that disparity. Even otherwise well-performing schools could be labeled failures if their poor students weren’t catching up.

Payne believes that teachers can’t help their poor students unless they first understand them, and that means understanding the hidden rules of poverty. The second step, Payne says, is to teach poor students explicitly about the hidden rules of the middle class. She emphasizes that the goal should not be to change students’ behavior outside of school: you don’t teach your students never to fight if fighting is an important survival skill in the housing project where they live. But you do tell them that in order to succeed at school or later on in a white-collar job, they need to master certain skills: how to speak in “formal register,” how to restrain themselves from physical retaliation, how to keep a schedule, how to exist in what Payne calls the “abstract world of paper.”

At the Jekyll Island seminar, I met Steve Kipp, a science teacher at Brunswick High with a ponytail and a jumpy, eager energy. He looked as if he might be the kind of guy whom the other teachers would call when they couldn’t get their computers to work right. Kipp sat in the front row, dead center, and at the break he was the first person to come up and ask Payne for advice.

In 10th grade at Brunswick High, Kipp told me later, the advanced students usually take chemistry, and the other students, the ones who are more likely to wind up in technical college, take Kipp’s class, which is called General Physical Science. And each year it’s the same, Kipp said: the rich and middle-class kids are tracked into chemistry, and he gets the kids from poverty. Kipp grew up in the middle class, and in the past, he said, before he read Payne’s book, he would get frustrated by his poor students. They seemed unwilling or unable to learn; they laughed when he tried to mete out discipline. And so he found it hard to keep exerting himself. What was the point in teaching them, he thought, if they weren’t going to make an effort?

But after he immersed himself in Payne’s work, about five years ago, Kipp’s ideas changed. “I realized, these kids aren’t dumb,” he said. “They just haven’t had the enriching experiences that I had growing up.” So he pushes himself harder now to provide more experiments in the classroom, more hands-on learning to help his students develop the same kind of instinctive understanding of nature that he got running around in the woods as a boy.

Not surprisingly, her work has driven the political correctness police into a tizzy:

Payne’s work in the schools has attracted a growing chorus of criticism, mostly from academia. Although Payne says that her only goal is to help poor students, her critics claim that her work is in fact an assault on those students. By teaching them middle-class practices, critics say, she is engaging in “classism” and racism. Her work is “riddled with factual inaccuracies and harmful stereotypes,” charges Anita Bohn, an assistant professor at Illinois State University, in a paper on Payne’s work. Paul Gorski, an assistant professor at Hamline University in St. Paul, writes that Payne’s central text “consists, at the crudest level, of a stream of stereotypes and a suggestion that we address poverty and education by ‘fixing’ poor people instead of reforming classist policies and practices.” (“LeftyHenry,” a recent poster on a political blog, was less subtle in his criticism; he called Payne “the Hitler of American academics.”)

Payne’s critics seem less aggrieved by what she includes in her analysis than by what they say she has left out: an acknowledgment that the American economy and American schools systematically discriminate against poor people. In this way, Payne finds herself in the middle of one of the central debates about poverty today. On one side are those, like Payne, who believe that poor people share certain habits and behaviors that help keep them in poverty. Recognizing and changing those behaviors, Payne and those who share her views believe, will help poor people to succeed. On the other side are those like Payne’s critics, who think that the game is so thoroughly fixed that most poor people can’t succeed no matter what they do. To them, locating any of the causes of persistent poverty among poor people themselves is, in effect, blaming the victim.

Academics in the latter group can’t stand Payne. And academics in the former group find it hard to defend her. There are plenty of sociologists, psychologists and economists who have reached conclusions similar to Payne’s: poor parents are more inclined to use corporal punishment; poor students are more eager to work hard in a teacher’s class when they feel a personal relationship with a teacher; poor homes are more often chaotic and loud. The problem is Payne’s methodology, or rather her lack of one. She does have a Ph.D. in social policy, and her book does have a few pages of footnotes. Her seminars include occasional references to popular scholarly works of sociology and history, like Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone” and Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs and Steel.” But clearly, Payne’s preferred unit of research is the anecdote. Her talks are nothing like university lectures. They’re a blend of cracker-barrel wisdom, Tony Robbins-style motivational speaking and a Chris Rock comedy routine. And that means that among academics in good standing, saying something nice about Ruby Payne is a good way to invite the disapproval of your peers.

Of course there are many ways in which poor and/or minority citizens are discriminated against in this country, but it's hard to think of anything more destructive and debilitating than to teach someone that they are victims and are not in control of their fate.

 

The schools that have been most successful educating low-income, minority students all get this and make a HUGE effort -- it's enormously difficult -- to build a culture that instills in their students the values of hard work, persistence, being nice, etc.

 

To be clear, however, I'm not advocating that school districts pay Payne a whole lot of money to come preach what should be obvious...

 

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The Class-Consciousness Raiser

By PAUL TOUGH

Published: June 10, 2007

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/10/magazine/10payne-t.html

By the time Ruby Payne sat down for lunch, she had been at it for three hours straight, standing alone behind a lectern on a wide stage in a cavernous convention hall, parked between two American flags, instructing an audience of 1,400 Georgians in the hidden rules of class. No notes, no warm-up act, just Ruby, with her Midwestern-by-way-of-East-Texas drawl and her crisp white shirt, her pinstriped business suit and bright red lipstick and blow-dried blond hair, a wireless microphone hooked around her right ear. She had already explained why rich people don’t eat casseroles, why poor people hang their pictures high up on the wall, why middle-class people pretend to like people they can’t stand. She had gone through the difference between generational poverty and situational poverty and the difference between new money and old money, and she had done a riff on how middle-class people are so self-satisfied that they think everyone wants to be middle class.

 

 

 

 

A great article about the rise of charter schools in New Orleans post-Katrina (plus a nice plug for one of the KIPP schools there; there are 2 open and the third will open this summer):

It is difficult to visit charter schools in this city without feeling both concern and optimism. Getting publicly funded entities to compete with one another is not easy. And the background of many students isn't encouraging. At the same time, the idealism and energy that has been unleashed is impressive. Teachers believe they can make a difference when they are responsible for their charges and accountable for their successes and failures. Perhaps that will be the decisive change.

Mr. Smith of the National Alliance says the charter community in New Orleans "is showing that it's possible to build an entire system of autonomous schools of choice, with high expectations for all kids." Thanks to Katrina, New Orleans may now definitively tell us how well charter schools can perform on a large scale and on short notice.

-----------------------

Big Easy, Bigger Test

By TOM BETHELL
June 9, 2007; Page A8

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118134660127829677-search.html

NEW ORLEANS -- It's not often that large, public institutions get a chance to rebuild from the ground up. But that's more or less what New Orleans public schools have had to do since Hurricane Katrina came ashore nearly two years ago. The results may be better than many had feared, when survivors were still being plucked from the flood waters.