Email Exchange

With permission, I'm sharing an email exchange between Bob Compton, the Executive Producer of Two Million Minutes   www.2mminutes.com <http://www.2mminutes.com> ; (here's a short trailer posted on YouTube:    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_G12pLEjQ-g      which I highly recommend) and one of the two American students featured in the film, Neil Ahrendt, who's now a freshman at Perdue.  Bob has some great advice for him.  Here was my email to Neil:
>  
I saw the movie and it reinforced what I've long believed: the Chinese and Indians (and eastern Europeans, etc.) are going to KICK OUR ASSES for the next century -- until they too become as rich, complacent and lazy as we are.
>  
I'm not attacking you  -- you're clearly a smart, promising kid, surely in the\ top 10% of what our  nation produces.  But as you watch that movie, surely you can see the  VAST difference in hunger and drive between American students and their Chinese and Indian counterparts.  They are pushing the limits of their potential -- and you're not (and, again, you're in the top 10% of young Americans on this dimension).  Nor can one simply dismiss the Chinese and Indian students in the documentary with the stereotype that they're boring, one-dimensional geeks -- they're taking dance, music, etc., and I'll bet they know more about what's going on the world than 99% of young Americans.

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Bob Compton:
The US high school boy in my film posted a VERY interesting reply to one of the ed blogs -

http://freeagentu.wordpress.com/2007/11/07/two-million-minutes-gets-people-thinking-or-well-some-people-anyway/

His name is Neil Ahrendt and he's a freshman at Purdue.
He had originally posted to the YouTube trailer the following: "This trailer somewhat makes me look unmotivated and lazy.  But... I am also somewhat unmotivated and lazy, so I guess that's to be expected.
-neil"

I replied with:

Neil,
As a venture capitalist and entrepreneur for 25 years, I'm pretty good at assessing talent. Honestly, you'd be my first hire in a new technology venture -- you have all the raw talent and intellectual horsepower. It appears you just haven't been inspired by school or other activities.

My hope is that Purdue will spark a fire in you -- or at least not dampen your interest in math, science and technology. You are a damn smart guy -- you need to get to Silicon Valley where exciting things are happening. I'm worried that Indiana will not challenge you sufficiently.

I'm grateful to all 6 students who participated in this film -- it took guts to just be yourselves. The good news for all 6 is being yourselves is pretty impressive. I think every one of you will be very successful.

For you, it just means getting fired up about something -- finding something that makes you want to work 20 hours a day to achieve it. You'll find it, is my bet.

Just to put your life in perspective - I was a "C" student in high school, scored poorly on the SAT, was a "B" student in a small liberal arts college.  Then I was hired at IBM and I got very inspired -- went to Harvard Business School, studied under the top professor on Entrepreneurship and have been inspired ever since.

I've started or co-founded several dozen companies, been president of a NYSE company and have made tens of millions of dollars (and lost millions in my share of bad ideas).

You just need to get out into the real world where you can create new ideas and make them into something exciting.  My money is on you in the long run. And if I can ever help you, in any way, just let me know.

Bob Compton, Executive Producer, Two Million Minutes

Neil’s reply:

Mr. Compton,

Thank you for responding so quickly, and I appreciate what you've said.  And I'm beginning to see my potential unravel here at Purdue; truth be told, I haven't really felt challenged yet, but I'm just in Freshman level introductory courses.

The line that struck me the most was: "You just need to get out into the real world where you can create new ideas and make them into something exciting," which is really all I ever want to do. With any luck, over the next few years I'll be able to learn the skills that will make that possible, and maybe even start creating new ideas while I'm here studying.

Being able to participate in the documentary was by far one of the best opportunities I've had in my educational career, and I hope I've been able to represent my school (and my country, I suppose) in the right manner. Perhaps the American school system isn't as robust as it should be, but should we be pushing our children to such extremes that they don't develop personalities? I don't believe the world needs more round-the-clock workhorses; we need more people with visions and ideas. And hopefully, that's where I come in.

So slowly but surely, this concept of 'the real world' is beginning to motivate me, and the possibility that I could begin to see my visions come to life is indeed inspiring. For now, there's schoolwork to attend to, and hopefully I'll be able to get some sleep in at some point (though that has increasingly become a minor concern, unfortunately).

I've read a little on your initial inspiration for this project, but if you don't mind me asking, how did it turn out compared to your original expectations? Or to start, what were your original expectations regarding the film? I'm curious about the initial intended message of the film, and if that's changed over time.

Once again, I appreciate having been involved in this, and am anxious to see what the national and global response to the documentary is.

Thanks,
Neil Ahrendt

Bob: And my TIME TO KICK HIM IN THE ASS reply:

Neil,
 
We need to see your potential "unfurl" or "unfold" rather than "unravel" at Purdue. It's time to challenge yourself.
 
Here are my recommendations to you:
 
1- read Peter Drucker's book "Innovation and Entrepreneurship" and send me a one page report on what you learned
 
2- enroll as soon as possible in the "Salesmanship" class in the Ag school - trust me everyone needs to learn to sell.
 
3- read "Wired", "Fast Company" and "INC" magazine at the library - EVERY month. You should also subscribe to the Indianapolis Business Journal online feed -- I'm pretty sure it's free. Send me a monthly email telling what you read that was interesting.
 
4- go introduce yourself to the Dean at Krannert -- Rick Cosier  -- he's a friend of mine -- tell him I sent you.  Ask him about what is going on in Entrepreneurship at Purdue -- there is a LOT and you need to get in the mix.
 
5-Learn more about Purdue's Discovery Park.
 
6- start thinking NOW about what you want to do next summer -- you should find a software development internship in Indy -- I'll help you network but you need to fire up about it!
 
7- go to the following web sites and do some reading:
 
www.interactiveintelligence.com <http://www.interactiveintelligence.com/>
www.vontoo.com <http://www.vontoo.com/>
www.indianmathonline.com <http://www.indianmathonline.com/>
www.exacttarget.com <http://www.exacttarget.com/>
www.aprimo.com <http://www.aprimo.com/>
 
All are software companies in Indy in which I'm an investor.
 
Maybe we should think about you going to India for a couple weeks this summer, too. And/or China. They are both amazing.
 
Send me your mailing address and I'll send you my book on India.  And a copy of the film on Nov 16th when we release. Maybe you should organize a screening of Two Million Minutes at Purdue -- you organize and I'll fly in to speak.
 
I'm copying my publicist, Meg, on this email so you can coordinate with her.  She's recently graduated from IU, is utterly charming and very attractive -- I'm trying to find the motivation here, Neil. Work with me.
 
If you take my advice, play your cards right, ride the "celebrity" of starring in a documentary and get energized you'll have nothing but opportunity and excitement ahead of you.
 
Bob
 
PS - also attached are the movie posters we designed.
 
PPS - don't be so sure that the Indians and Chinese don't have personalities. I employ 100 programmers in Bangalore and have a couple dozen employees in China. I find them to be well-read, engaging, and interested in and able to knowledgeably discuss a wide variety of subjects. Oh yeah, they also are expert in math, engineering & science, but then, isn't everyone?
 
PPPS - want to know what the Indian kids’ response was to the screening of the rough cut in Bangalore a week ago?

Whitney -- you may want to contact Neil to learn more. He gets it!
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Here was Bob's reply when I asked him "what the Indian kids response was to the screening of the rough cut in Bangalore a week ago":

  The Indian kids --  3 weeks ago in Bangalore, we screened to about 50 of Rohit's and Apoorva's high school and freshman college friends and family.

  The #1 question -- are the Chinese really studying that much more than we are (Indians see the USA as "customers" and China, Vietnam, Singapore, etc as economic competitors -- and China as the toughest competitor)

  The #2 question -- how do we get the same self-confidence that the Americans have? (Indians as a people are much more humble than Americans -- maybe partly due to Hindu faith, but also they had been dominated by the British for 300 hundred years. This will change in one generation, I believe).

 The #3 most asked question -- why do American parents push their children so hard in sports -- even to the point that several die every year in 2-a-day football practices in the summer. It seems so cruel and what is  
 the point of such sports pressure?

 The last point stands in stark contrast to what I heard at Harvard -- "Why do Indian and Chinese push their students so hard academically? It puts so much pressure and stress on them."

 Odd how the cultures are so opposite.

 One gentleman in the audience runs a chain of colleges in India and has asked if I'd come over to organize a curriculum on "Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Prudent Risk-Taking".   Indians just love to challenge
 themselves and to learn constantly!!

 Bob

Connecting Dots

Speaking of idiocy, the nyceducator blog takes it to new levels:
>  
> You have to wonder if this push towards school privatization is less about actually improving schools and more about simple privatization.
>
   Many of the "reformers" behind the education reform movement -- Mayor Moneybags Bloomberg, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Eli Broad, Whitney Tilson, for example -- are wealthy businessmen with vested interests in        
   privatizing government to lower their own tax bills and increase profits for  themselves and their business cronies.

This ranks up there as one of the most hilarious and bizarre comments ever (though it really is a tremendous honor to be included on that list).  To my knowledge, every person on that list favors spending more money on public schools -- but only if it's accompanied by genuine reform.  And I for one actually favor increasing taxes on the very rich, and esp. on people like me in the hedge fund and private equity businesses who benefit from an absurd loophole whereby our income (mostly money earn as a % of the profits we make for our investors) is taxed at a very low rate.

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Sunday, November 18, 2007
Bringing In The EMO's
http://nyceducator.com/2007/11/bringing-in-emos.html

  Washington D.C. School Chancellor Michelle Rhee is thinking about bringing in Education Management Organizations (EMO's) to run 27 failing schools in the District.

Freaked Out: Teen Dance Moves Split a Texas Town

From the front page of today's WSJ.  I never cease to be amazed by the idiocy of some parents:
>  
>      A new resolve by school officials in  this booming Dallas suburb to crack down on sexually suggestive dancing -- and  skimpy clothing -- has sparked a
>      rancorous debate over what boundaries should  be set for teenagers' self-expression. Argyle joins a long list of other  schools around the country
>      that have banned the hip-hop inspired dancing known  as "grinding" or "freak dancing."
>  
        But in Argyle, a once-sleepy farming community strained by explosive growth from an influx of well-to-do  suburbanites, the controversy has gotten
>      vicious. Some parents blame the newly  installed school superintendent, Jason Ceyanes, 35, for ruining their  children's October homecoming dance by
>      enforcing a strict dress code and  making provocative dancing off-limits. Disgusted, a lot of kids left, and the dance ended early.

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Freaked Out: Teens' Dance Moves Split a Texas Town

By SUSAN WARREN
November 19, 2007; Page A1
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119543673953997556.html

ARGYLE, Texas -- Karen Miller, 53 years old, saw her first "freak dance" four years ago when she was chaperoning a high-school dance attended by her freshman daughter.

Why is Randi going berserk?

A reasonable person might wonder why Randi is going berserk -- a candlelight vigil?! -- over the DOE having five lawyers to help principals remove the very worst teachers.  It's not like the union is going to lose any members -- if a teacher is removed, another one will be hired to take his/her place.  Nor does she truly fear that committed, effective teachers will wrongly lose their jobs -- the DOE is not trying to circumvent the onerous due process procedures.  And the teachers union is always calling for teachers to be viewed as respected professionals, like doctors and lawyers -- I'm not aware that the American Medical Association and American Bar Association fight to protect their very worst members.
 
So why the hysteria?  There are surely many reasons -- distrust of the DOE, overwhelming, long-standing paranoia and victimization mentality, etc. -- but I think there are two big ones:
 
A) This is posturing to maintain her position and support among a very powerful, highly motivated group with her union: ineffective teachers.  As I've noted in earlier emails, an alarmingly high percentage of teachers (I'd estimate 20-40% in inner-city schools, which probably translates into 10-20% of all NYC public school teachers) are not, and will never be, effective teachers and need to find other professions.  
 
(This is not to say they are bad people, by the way.  Motivating and imparting knowledge to young people, many of whom come from difficult circumstances, is really, really hard and only very special people can do it well.  That's why I have so much respect and admiration for great teachers, especially those in inner-city schools, and why I think such teachers should be paid much more and treated much better.)
 
But getting back to ineffective teachers: these teachers know who they are and are petrified of anything that could lead to their removal.  And rightly so -- these are not the teachers that are likely to find betters jobs elsewhere, either as teachers or in another line of work.  Statistically speaking, they are likely to have gotten very low grades and test scores in high school, gone to uncompetitive colleges, gotten low grades and scores there as well, failed the teachers basic skills test on the first attempt, etc.  Thus, being a NYC public school teacher, with its decent pay, golden benefits and ironclad job protections (which, in reality, still haven't changed much), is likely the best job by far these people can get.
 
So, if Randi doesn't engage in maximum posturing against this DOE initiative, these 10-20% of teachers (perhaps more) will surely turn on Randi in a big way.  And they're already not Randi fans to begin with -- they're really unhappy, for instance, with her embrace of Green Dot and its minimalist teacher contract, which has far fewer protections for ineffective teachers.
 
B) Randi also hates this because it changes the power dynamic in schools.  While principals have always technically had the power to remove the most ineffective teachers, the reality is that the process is so onerous that it's almost never done -- and if a principals even thinks of trying it, the union will threaten to grieve it endlessly and make the principal's life miserable in many ways.  Thus, teachers knew they could show up late, have a chronic absenteeism problem, barely attempt to teach, berate kids -- you name it, anything short of a major felony -- and there's nothing the principal could do other than maybe force the teacher to leave the school at the end of the year, which leads to the abhorent annual game called "Dance of the Lemons" or "Pass the Trash."
 
Now, principals have a significant new weapon that has real teeth -- and it won't only affect the bottom 1% of teachers that might actually lose their jobs, but also the bottom 10-20% who know they're on the list.  This, in turn, might lead them to try harder, not be absent so often, etc.
 
While some may blanch at motivation by fear, I think any effective system has to have both carrots and sticks.  If you work hard and do a good job, you get rewarded, but if you're lazy and/or ineffective, you risk losing your job.  Sadly, neither carrots nor sticks are present in our public schools -- and we can see the dreadful results.  This is really basic stuff -- so basic that I can't think of a single effective organization of any type in which this is not the case.
 

City Plays "Gotcha" With Teachers

Randi's pulling out all the stops to try to prevent the DOE from removing the worst of the worst -- the bottom 1% of teachers -- and is (I'm not making this up) holding "a candlelight vigil at the Tweed headquarters to protest the establishment of this unit and call for respect for city teachers."  I actually Googled "candlelight vigil" to make sure I had the concept right: that it's something done to mourn a great loss or tragedy.  A long overdue step, following the onerous due process called for in the teachers' own contract, to get rid of the very worst teachers is a tragedy?!  Puh-leeeeeeze!

 

Let me tell you what's a tragedy: the ruined lives of tens of thousands of NYC schoolchildren (and millions nationwide) every year because their schools and teachers are failing to educate them to even the lowest standard!  52% of young black men who don't graduate from high school -- most of whom can't even read! -- end up in jail at some point in their lives.  The educators who are responsible for this failure need to be identified and held accountable -- and I'm sick of listening to the endless "woe-is-us" and "blame-the-victim" excuses!

 

Randi is so apoplectic that she can't even read the NAEP statistics properly (I'll be generous and not accuse her of deliberately distorting the facts).  She writes: "the city’s scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed no progress between 2003 and 2007 in three of four categories".  This is false.  The data shows that NYC did make progress in three of four areas between 2003 and 2007 (see: http://schools.nyc.gov/daa/reports/2007%20NAEP%20TUDA%20Results.pdf; slides 9 (4th grade math), 24 (4th grade reading) and 37 (8th grade math) clearly show progress; only slide 43 (8th grade reading) shows a (3-point) decline; and if you want to be fair and compare apples to apples, for 4th grade reading, you'd use slide 26, which shows even greater gains for all English proficient students).

 

The NY Sun article Randi links to, while somewhat confusing at points, confirms her false statement: #1) "This year, 34% of fourth-graders scored proficient on the math test, up from 21% in 2003."; #2) "When it comes to reading, 43% of fourth-graders in the city this year did not reach the basic level — one step below proficient — down from 47% in 2003." -- in other words, the % of students scoring at the lowest level declined from 47% to 43% (this is progress; another way of saying this is that the % of students scoring at or above basic increased from 53% to 57%); #3) Ditto for 8th grade math: "On the math test, 43% of eighth-graders scored below basic, compared with 46% in 2003."  In other words, the % of students scoring at or above basic increased from 54% to 57%

 

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City Plays “Gotcha” With Teachers

Filed under: Labor, Education — Randi Weingarten @ 5:39 pm

http://edwize.org/city-plays-gotcha-with-teachers#more-1009

On the same day that the city’s scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed no progress between 2003 and 2007 in three of four categories, the city revealed that it has hired a team of lawyers and former principals to help principals build cases against tenured teachers who they believe are incompetent. It is unfortunate that at the first sign of bad news, the preemptive response by this administration was to blame the teachers.

There comes a point in time that recycling old arguments no longer works. School reform is tough. It takes a lot of different initiatives working in tandem to get results. It takes qualified teachers; it takes working conditions that foster real progress; it takes an accountability system that’s fair and accurate; it takes engaged parents; and above all it takes collaboration between teachers and principals.

The blame game should stop and people should be rolling up their sleeves and working together to help this city’s kids. The mayor should apologize to the teachers and use the $1 million this unit will cost on something else.

It’s time to shift the responsibility back to the school system. This union is not against accountability. We are against “gotcha” and scapegoating and shifting blame to teachers who are working as hard as they can.

Please join us on the evening of Monday, Nov. 26, for a candlelight vigil at the Tweed headquarters to protest the establishment of this unit and call for respect for city teachers.

Pantsuits and Candlelight Vigils

I would have thought Hillary Clinton would be kowtowing to Randi on this, but instead I was delighted to see her throw her support the other way in the debate last night (from Joe Williams' Dems for Ed Reform blog post, below, about this):

the MOST GENUINE (and refreshing) non-Kucinich moment of last night's Democratic Presidential debate came when Sen. Hillary Clinton was responding to Wolf Blitzer's question about merit pay.

If you watched it, you know what I'm talking about. Blitzer asked the former First Lady what to do about school-based bonuses (which Hillary supports and are all the rage with the kids these days) if there was a "crummy teacher" on a winning team.

It wasn't so much what Clinton said (though that was important too) but how she said it. She eeked out a slightly stifled laugh as she was answering. You know that kind of the laugh. The kind of laugh that says, "Well Wolf, only a complete boob doesn't understand how to solve this problem!!!"

What she actually said was:

Wolf, you need to weed out the teachers who are not doing a good job. I mean, that's the bottom line. (Applause.) They should not be teaching our children. 

Wow. Considering all the drama over NYC's decision this week to start weeding out crummy teachers, it is a wonder that more hasn't been made about Hillary's break with the union that already endorsed her.

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November 16, 2007

Pantsuits and Candlelight Vigils

I'll let Rick Kahlenberg weigh in on whether Al Shanker would be pleased by the candlelight vigil planned by the United Federation of Teachers for Monday night to protest the team of lawyers who will begin working with principals to do a better job of managing the workforce in the city's schools. (Though Rick told me a few months ago that Al would have the Green Bay Packers winning the Super Bowl this season - so you can take it to the bank!)

But it is noteworthy that the MOST GENUINE (and refreshing) non-Kucinich moment of last night's Democratic Presidential debate came when Sen. Hillary Clinton was responding to Wolf Blitzer's question about merit pay.

If you watched it, you know what I'm talking about. Blitzer asked the former First Lady what to do about school-based bonuses (which Hillary supports and are all the rage with the kids these days) if there was a "crummy teacher" on a winning team.

It wasn't so much what Clinton said (though that was important too) but how she said it. She eeked out a slightly stifled laugh as she was answering. You know that kind of the laugh. The kind of laugh that says, "Well Wolf, only a complete boob doesn't understand how to solve this problem!!!"

What she actually said was:

Wolf, you need to weed out the teachers who are not doing a good job. I mean, that's the bottom line. (Applause.) They should not be teaching our children. 

Wow. Considering all the drama over NYC's decision this week to start weeding out crummy teachers, it is a wonder that more hasn't been made about Hillary's break with the union that already endorsed her.

It sounds like Sen. Clinton is siding with Chancellor Joel Klein (and the rest of the world that understood her laugh when she answered Wolf Blitzer's question) on this one.

Many union leaders tell you that they don't want bad teachers either, but that due process must be followed. Now it turns out that is a load of bull too. The plan announced this week by the Department of Education brings in a team of lawyers to engage in due process up the wazoo. They will eat due process for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.They will wake up in cold sweats at night from dreaming about due process. They will scream "due process!!!" in the throes of passion. Because that is what the union has demanded through collective bargaining.

And they still aren't happy. In fact they their candlelight vigil seems to pay homage to the days when the school system looked at all that due process and just threw its hands into the air. Which is understandable, I suppose.

Kudos to Hillary, by the way. Every child deserves to have the best possible teacher we can give them, and every great teacher deserves to be surrounded by teammates who are just as effective and pulling their weight.

Air Obama

It's nice to see Sen. Obama starting to address this issue as well with a commerical that's airing in New Hampshire -- see http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/chancesad (I even heard that he's going to make his long-awaited education speech in New Hampshire on Tuesday morning).  While this ad isn't exactly bold, at least he's TALKING about education!  From Joe's blog:

Considering how depressing it was to see the charts in yesterday's NY Times about what issues voters in Iowa and New Hampshire listed as the most important (education aint even close) the ad's launch marks what could (hopefully) turn out to be a better discussion about the future of America as far as schools are concerned.

Will the other candidates engage, or leave education to Obama?

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

Air Obama

Presidential hopeful Barack Obama became the first candidate in the race to hit the airwaves with an education related ad. The 30-second spots, which can be seen here, call for expanding early childhood education and recruiting "a new generation of teachers."

Safe bets, but at least he's out there on the issue.

Considering how depressing it was to see the charts in yesterday's NY Times about what issues voters in Iowa and New Hampshire listed as the most important (education aint even close) the ad's launch marks what could (hopefully) turn out to be a better discussion about the future of America as far as schools are concerned.

Will the other candidates engage, or leave education to Obama?

Dicslosure: While DFER is not endorsing any candidate in the primary, my wife and I both personally maxed out on our contributions to Obama's campaign.  

Matching Top Colleges, Low-Income Students

This looks like a great program.  Kudos!

Last year, when Amherst College welcomed 473 new students to its idyllic campus, 10% of them came from QuestBridge.
 
But QuestBridge is no elite private school. It's a nonprofit start-up in Palo Alto, Calif., that matches gifted, low-income students with 20 of the nation's top colleges. In return, the schools -- including Princeton, Yale, Stanford and Columbia -- give scholarships to the students and pay QuestBridge for helping to diversify their student bodies.

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

Matching Top Colleges, Low-Income Students
By JIM CARLTON
November 15, 2007; Page B1
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119509033710893611.html

Last year, when Amherst College welcomed 473 new students to its idyllic campus, 10% of them came from QuestBridge.

Jeanne Allen on Charter Schools in Ohio

A good letter to the editor from Jeanne Allen:

Ohio’s Charter Schools  
Published: November 15, 2007
 
To the Editor:
 
While your Nov. 8 news article Ohio Goes After Charter Schools That Are Failing  offers a balanced presentation of the issues and opinions driving the charter school controversy in that state, it unfortunately leaves a stigma attached to charters by saying the state is cracking down on the schools (as if they’re  somehow a scourge) and overlooks the continuing and far more widespread failures of traditional public school systems across the state.
 
Certainly some of Ohio’s charter schools are not performing as well as had been hoped for when they were founded. But in many of these cases it’s because the schools have taken on the challenge of educating the difficult-to-reach children who were given up on by traditional public schools  —  the children who, every year, fell further and further behind and received no help; the children who, were it not for their charter school, would have dropped out or landed in jail or worse.
 
For them, charter schools are their last best hope for receiving an education and ultimately succeeding in life.
 
Will these students be better off if their charter schools go out of business? The answer must be a resounding no.
 
If Ohio’s governor and attorney general truly want to deliver on a promise of delivering quality education for all of the state’s children,  let them launch an across-the-board crackdown on all failing public schools,  including the traditional, union-run schools that for far too long have been far too comfortable in their abysmal performance and shameful failure to help children learn and succeed.
 
Jeanne Allen
President, The Center for Education  Reform
Washington, Nov. 13, 2007

5) This looks like a great program.  Kudos!

 

Last year, when Amherst College welcomed 473 new students to  its idyllic campus, 10% of them came from QuestBridge.
 

But QuestBridge is no elite private school. It's a nonprofit  start-up in Palo Alto, Calif., that matches gifted, low-income students with  20 of the nation's top colleges. In return, the schools -- including  Princeton, Yale, Stanford and Columbia -- give scholarships to the students  and pay QuestBridge for helping to diversify their student  bodies.

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Little Progress for City Schools on National Test

Chang W. Lee/The New York Times
Chancellor Joel I. Klein said he saw plenty of good news in federal scores.

By JENNIFER MEDINA <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/jennifer_medina/index.html?inline=nyt-per>
Published: November 16, 2007
www.nytimes.com/2007/11/16/education/16scores.html <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/16/education/16scores.html>
New York City’s eighth graders have made no significant progress in reading and math since Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/michael_r_bloomberg/index.html?inline=nyt-per>  took control of the city schools, according to federal test scores released yesterday, in contrast with the largely steady gains that have been recorded on state tests.

The national scores also showed little narrowing of the achievement gap between white students and their black and Hispanic counterparts.

The results for New York and 10 other large urban districts on the federal tests, the National Assessment of Educational Progress <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/n/national_assessment_of_educational_progress/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier> , paint a generally stagnant picture for the city, although there are gains in fourth-grade math. On measure after measure, the scores showed “no significant change” between 2005, when the test was previously administered, and 2007.

Mr. Bloomberg has trumpeted improving state test scores as evidence that the city is setting the pace for urban school reform. But the federal scores, on a test often called the nation’s report card, suggest that the city’s gains are limited. Similar patterns of gains on state tests outstripping gains on the national assessment have emerged elsewhere as well.

New York City’s federal scores showed that while fourth-grade reading results have improved over the past five years, the most significant jump came in 2002, before Mr. Bloomberg took control.

The schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/k/joel_i_klein/index.html?inline=nyt-per> , said he saw plenty of good news in the federal scores, drawing attention to the fourth-grade math results during a news conference. He noted that with 79 percent of students performing at or above basic levels of competence, the city was approaching the national average of 81 percent.

“I said when I arrived, a goal was to be at the national average,” he said. “That is a landmark that should be celebrated.”

But a range of other educators said the results undercut the city’s reputation as a beacon of school improvement. Michael J. Petrilli, a researcher at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute in Washington, said the city did not seem to be improving any more than the rest of the state. “That to me seems quite damning to the Bloomberg administration,” he said.

The national assessment has become an important way to measure states and cities against each other. State by state results were released earlier this year, but 11 large cities have agreed to have their own results published separately since 2002.

Forty-three percent of fourth graders in New York City were below the basic level in reading in 2007, the same percentage as in 2005. In eighth grade, the percentage of students below basic increased to 41 percent, from 39 percent in 2005.

There was a slight uptick in the percentage of students reaching proficient or above in math, which federal officials said was not significant.

The city’s best results were in fourth-grade math. This year, 21 percent of fourth graders scored below basic on the math exam, down from 27 percent in 2005. In eighth-grade math, 43 percent of students were below basic, down from 46 percent in 2005.

In contrast with New York City, federal scores in Atlanta and Washington rose significantly across all grade levels and subjects since 2005.

Under the federal No Child Left Behind <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/n/no_child_left_behind_act/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>  law, states are required to administer reading and math tests every year in grades three through eight, with the goal of bringing every student to “proficiency”‘ in math and reading by 2014. But the law lets each state write its own tests and define proficiency. The national assessment is considered a more reliable indicator of performance.

“The question is, why are the students making so much more progress on the state tests? What is likely to be happening is that schools are teaching students to that particular test,” said Mr. Petrilli, who released a report last month analyzing the differences between state and national tests. He said similar patterns had emerged in South Carolina and California.

Mr. Klein called the federal scores “supplementary” ways to measure school improvement, because the national assessment was given only every two years and tested only a sampling of students. He suggested that the state tests were more important.

“This is not just about a single-year picture,” Mr. Klein said. “The state tests are aligned with our standards, and our teachers know that.”

Alan Ray, a New York State Education Department spokesman, echoed Mr. Klein’s concerns and added that students might not perform as well on the national test because passing the test is not required to advance to the next grade level, as it is on the state tests.

The federal results are divided into four categories: below basic, basic, proficient and advanced.

B. Jason Brooks, director of research at the Foundation for Education Reform & Accountability, said it was “appalling” that the national test found just 34 percent of fourth graders in the city “proficient” or above in math, while the state test showed that 74 percent of fourth graders met that standard.

“Today’s release of federal testing data for urban districts underscores what New Yorkers have suspected: New York State has dumbed down its assessments,” he said in a statement. “The simplified state tests are misleading. New York’s education policy makers need to face up to the glaring inadequacies of the state’s public education system and get down to the business of fixing it.”

At the news conference, Mr. Klein also suggested that the federal reading scores dropped this year because more students who are still learning English were tested. Officials said this was because in 2006, the federal Education Department began requiring thousands more non-English speaking students to be tested for No Child Left Behind.

Mr. Klein also suggested that the change in testing requirements for non-English speakers masked improvements for Hispanic and Asian students on the tests.

New York City’s achievement gap between white students and their black and Hispanic counterparts stayed the same and even widened in reading on the federal tests, after narrowing two years ago. Part of the improvement in 2005 came because the scores for white students dipped slightly, while those of black and Hispanic students increased. But as white students’ scores went up again this year, the decrease in the gap evaporated.

Overall, the results in large cities across the country largely reflected national trends: Students are showing more improvement in math than reading, and eighth-grade performance is roughly flat.

Randi Weingarten <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/w/randi_weingarten/index.html?inline=nyt-per> , president of the United Federation of Teachers <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/united_federation_of_teachers/index.html?inline=nyt-org> , described the scores as “bad news.” Ms. Weingarten said the disparity between state and national scores was particularly troubling because state scores were used to determine schools’ A through F grades under a new rating system.

“When scores become so high stakes, then you have to really think about and ensure the reliability of these testing systems,” she said, adding that the federal scores “call into question the reliability of the New York State testing system.

“Is it right?” she continued. “Is it wrong? I’m not a psychometrician. But what I do know is when everything is so high-stakes, you have to be doubly, triply, quadruply sure of the accuracy of the data.”



-----------------------
New York's schools
The great experiment
Nov 8th 2007 | NEW YORK
From The Economist print edition

http://www.economist.com/world/na/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10104912
Bringing accountability and competition to New York City's struggling schools
Eyevine
THE 220 children are called scholars, not students, at the Excellence charter school in Brooklyn's impoverished Bedford-Stuyvesant district. To promote the highest expectations, the scholars—who are all boys, mostly black and more than half of whom get free or subsidised school lunches—are encouraged to think beyond school, to university. Outside each classroom is a plaque, with the name of a teacher's alma mater, and then the year (2024 in the case of the kindergarten), in which the boys will graduate from college.

Like the other charter schools that are fast multiplying across America, Excellence is an independently run public school that has been allowed greater flexibility in its operations in return for greater accountability, though it cannot select its pupils, instead choosing them by lottery. If it fails, the principal (head teacher) will be held accountable, and the school could be closed. Three years old, Excellence is living up to its name: 92% of its third-grade scholars (eight-year-olds, the oldest boys it has, so far) scored “advanced” or “proficient” in New York state English language exams this year, compared to an average (for fourth-graders) across the state of 68% and only 62% in the Big Apple. They did even better in mathematics.

This is the sort of performance that the mayor, Michael Bloomberg, now wants to extend from New York's 60 charter schools to all of the city's schools. On November 5th, the mayor and his schools chancellor, Joel Klein, announced what is in effect the final piece in their grand plan to charterise the entire city school system. As charter schools remain politically contentious, though, they have been careful not to use that phrase in public.

When Mr Klein took the job in 2002, having led the Clinton administration's efforts to break up Microsoft, The Economist joked that he should try to do the same thing to New York's schools monopoly. He more or less has. Under the new scheme, every school run by the city will receive a public report card, with a grade that reflects both academic performance and surveys of students, parents and teachers. The first grades were given out this week.

Schools that do well will get a boost to their budget; the principal may get a bonus of up to $25,000 on top of a base salary of $115,000-$145,000. Schools graded D or F (about 12% of them this year) will have to submit improvement plans that will be implemented with support from Mr Klein's department. Principals whose schools are still faltering after two years will be fired. Schools still failing after four years will be closed. Though each element of what is happening in New York has been tried elsewhere, this seems to be the most far-reaching urban school accountability initiative in America. Mr Klein claims that no school system on earth has innovated on the scale of New York.

Even New York's previous reforming mayor, Rudy Giuliani, failed to improve the city's disastrous schools, despite several attempts. When he ran for election in 2001, Mr Bloomberg said the school system was “in a state of emergency”. The graduation rate in 2002 was alarmingly low, 51% of students compared to a national average of 70%. Most New Yorkers thought the system impossible to fix.


To do something about this, Mr Bloomberg demanded, and got, the thing that Mr Giuliani had with the police but not with the schools: mayoral control. As soon as he had it, the new mayor promptly moved the schools headquarters from its sprawling building in Brooklyn to be next to the heart of his government in City Hall. He hired Mr Klein, and they set about changing things—initially by taking decision-making away from the patronage-heavy local school boards, and then by decentralising it to accountable principals, and by actively piloting experimental charter schools that could be models for others. A new “leadership academy” was created to train principals. Big schools with poor graduation rates were closed, and replaced with smaller ones, often several sharing the same building once occupied by a single big school.

Many of these innovations were paid for by wealthy philanthropists, including Bill Gates of Microsoft, Eli Broad from Los Angeles and sundry hedge-fund managers who have been cajoled into handing over millions of dollars at the annual Robin Hood Foundation auctions. Mr Klein says that this private source of funds was crucial in paying for experiments that might have involved huge political battles had they been paid for out of public funds. The hope is that in future, such reforms might be more widely supported.

Even before this week's reforms, progress has been sufficiently impressive that the Broad Foundation declared New York the most improved urban school district in the nation. Some $500,000 in Broad scholarships will be distributed to graduates. In 2002 less than 40% of students in grades three to eight (aged eight to 14) were reading and doing maths at their grade level. Today, 65% are at their grade levels in maths and over 50% in reading. Graduation rates are at their highest in decades. Last year the city outperformed other New York state school districts with similar income levels in reading and maths at all grades. The gap between white and minority students has been narrowed.

The New York reforms rely on collecting a lot of data. An $80m computer system designed by IBM will give teachers access to information about student performance and progress as well as contact information for parents.

Equally crucial has been Mr Bloomberg's success in winning round hitherto reluctant principals, who have agreed to sign a new accountability contract, and the teachers' unions, which despite quibbles broadly support the new system. The fact that teachers' starting pay is up on average by 43% since Mr Bloomberg took office may have helped. But whatever the reason, there seems a good chance that the reforms are here to stay.

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

Schools (2)
The untidy revolution
Nov 8th 2007 | LOS ANGELES AND NEW ORLEANS
From The Economist print edition

http://www.economist.com/world/na/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10104894
Elsewhere in America, school reform is slower and messier, but the pressure for change is coming from parents, which bodes well
OUTSIDE New York, as usual, it is a different story. Most American mayors look longingly at Michael Bloomberg's accomplishments and wish they were equally mighty. West of the Mississippi, none has succeeded in seizing control of a school system. Nor are they likely to be able to do so: the early 20th century progressive movement, strongest in the West, severely blunted their powers. “We haven't had reform from the top here,” says Eli Broad, a Los Angeles philanthropist. “So instead we're seeing change from the bottom up.”

AP
And, yet again, they did
In the vanguard are charter schools like the Academy of Opportunity in south-central Los Angeles. Here 13- and 14-year-olds, almost all of them black or Hispanic, firmly shake your hand and outline their plans to go to Yale and Stanford. They work long hours—from 7.30am to 5pm five days a week, plus four hours every other Saturday. The grind pays off. At the end of their first year in the school just 28% of pupils are proficient or advanced in maths, compared to 48% of pupils elsewhere in California. By the time they leave, three years later, they far outperform their peers.

Los Angeles has 125 charter schools, more than any other school district in America. That is partly a reflection of the dismal state of the mainstream public schools. Perhaps no city would find it easy to educate such a diverse group of children, many of them the offspring of immigrants from rural Mexico. In California, with its miserly education budget and stifling state bureaucracy, the task is almost impossible. For many parents in poor areas, charter schools represent the only hope for a decent education.


That became even clearer this week when another promising reform was stymied. Voters in Utah struck down a scheme, passed last year by the state legislature, which would have helped parents pay for their children to go to private schools. In principle, vouchers are popular: a YouGov poll for The Economist (see chart) finds 53% of people favouring them, with only 32% opposed. Yet voucher schemes have been defeated in every state where they have been on the ballot. Some fear harm to the public-school system, others an influx of poor children. If a universal voucher system cannot be introduced in America's most conservative state, it probably can't be anywhere.

As public schools, albeit independent ones, charters cannot deliver nearly such a strong competitive shock to the system. Yet they still introduce a welcome element of choice. Because they are not too controversial, they have been able to grow quickly: some 1.2m American pupils attend them, compared to fewer than 100,000 who receive vouchers. And they are beginning to affect other schools. In May a majority of tenured teachers in Locke High School, one of the worst in Los Angeles, expressed a desire to convert the school into a charter. It was an astonishing gesture, since (as the teachers' union quickly pointed out) they would lose some of their rights.  
The drowned and the saved
Michael Kirst of Stanford University reckons about 15% of pupils in a district need to be going to charter schools before the system as a whole faces real pressure to change. That is not easily achieved, given a lack of appropriate buildings: the Academy of Opportunity has moved three times since it was founded in 2003. Yet the threshold has been reached in a few places, such as Washington, DC, and Dayton, Ohio. And it has been spectacularly exceeded in a city that is among the last one would associate with reform.

New Orleans's public schools have long been a shambles. Since the 1980s the middle class has fled them for the private sector, with the result that most of the system's 65,000 pupils came from poor, often single-parent, homes. A potent teachers' union combined with a meddling school board to frustrate reform. The system was startlingly corrupt: in June a former president of the board pleaded guilty to receiving some $140,000 in kickbacks.

Two years ago Hurricane Katrina swept away this sorry edifice. The state of Louisiana, which had seized control of some of the worst schools before Katrina, took over most of the district, leaving only the best-performing schools to the local board. Charter schools were approved in bunches, with an entire “charter district” created in the Algiers neighbourhood, on the west bank of the Mississippi River. As a result, New Orleans now has a higher proportion of pupils in charter schools than anywhere else in America.

So far, test results suggest that the charters are doing better than the competition. And there are other encouraging signs. Earlier this year the state brought in a new superintendent, Paul Vallas, who had helped turn around schools in Philadelphia and Chicago. The once-mighty teachers' union and school board have seen their influence wane. Still, fixing New Orleans's schools will be a daunting task. The system is in flux: more students are trickling back each month, swelling the school population from a low point of about one-third of pre-Katrina levels to about half today. And Karran Harper Royal, a trenchant critic of the public schools, points out that corruption may be even harder to root out when there are more than seven school-board members to keep tabs on.

In New Orleans, as in Los Angeles, a certain amount of chaos is to be expected. Some charter schools are bound to close. Five hundred and sixty others have done so around the country since 1992. Yet, while that will be painful for the children affected, it will be a good thing in the long run if it leads to better schools. Reforms carried out by a mayoral strongman are quicker and tidier. But most revolutions are messy.

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

Matching Top Colleges, Low-Income Students
By JIM CARLTON
November 15, 2007; Page B1
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119509033710893611.html

Last year, when Amherst College welcomed 473 new students to its idyllic campus, 10% of them came from QuestBridge.

But QuestBridge is no elite private school. It's a nonprofit start-up in Palo Alto, Calif., that matches gifted, low-income students with 20 of the nation's top colleges. In return, the schools -- including Princeton, Yale, Stanford and Columbia -- give scholarships to the students and pay QuestBridge for helping to diversify their student bodies.

The program is gaining in popularity because it addresses a growing interest of private and public colleges: increasing the diversity of their student bodies without relying solely on race. Since some states banned racial preferences in college admissions, many public colleges have begun focusing on income as a means to broaden the backgrounds of their students. Private schools, while not bound by the states' restrictions, are also eager to admit more students from low-income families.


QuestBridge isn't the only program that helps schools achieve diversity by focusing on the economically disadvantaged. The Posse Program, launched in 1993 by a New York nonprofit, specializes in sending groups of students who already know each other to top colleges. It got its start after the founder, Deborah Biel, discovered that several of the inner-city youth she had worked with in New York had dropped out of college. When she asked why, one responded that he didn't have his posse with him.

Another program called Mathematics, Engineering, Science Achievement, or MESA, helps recruit low-income students for the University of California, California State University and other California colleges. Upward Bound, a long-running federal program, feeds low-income high-school students into colleges all over the country. And some colleges, including schools that are partnering with QuestBridge, have begun their own recruiting programs for low-income students.

The efforts come as diversity remains elusive, particularly at elite colleges. According to a 2004 study by the Century Foundation, a New York-based research group, at the 146 most selective colleges in the U.S., just 3% of the students came from families that ranked in the bottom 25% in income, while 74% came from the top 25%,

School officials say that having a more diverse student body will make their graduates better prepared for the real world. "Every student we graduate today is going to work in a shrinking world with tremendous disparities," says Jeff Brenzel, dean of undergraduate admissions at Yale University, which began using QuestBridge this academic year. "We want the Yale undergraduate body to reflect that reality to whatever degree we can."

QuestBridge was conceived by Michael McCullough, an emergency-room doctor, in 2003, and it has been run by him and Tim Brady, who helped to write the business plan for Yahoo <http://online.wsj.com/quotes/main.html?type=djn&amp;symbol=yhoo>  Inc. The program has created a network of about 30,000 recruiters, including high-school counselors, teachers and youth ministers, to identify a pool of about 4,000 talented, disadvantaged students.

QuestBridge contacts the nominees by both email and old-fashioned mail. They are asked to fill out a 17-page application that, like regular college applications, requires essays and short answers. But the questions are tailored to better suit a low-income student's skills. For example, instead of asking why they like a particular poem, the students might be asked what obstacles they have overcome.

Last year, the pool of names was winnowed down to about 1,600 finalists based on criteria that also included income, grade point averages and community service. "We want to help those who help others," Dr. McCullough says.


The finalists' applications are then matched with QuestBridge partners. Last year, about half of the finalists were admitted to their match with partial to full scholarships. Those who aren't admitted through the program can still apply to other QuestBridge partners, frequently using the QuestBridge application plus a supplement and having their application fees waived. Their names are also kept in a pool for other opportunities, such as when an employer needs an intern or law schools are seeking low-income talent down the line.

Once they're at school, the students get support from QuestBridge mentors through online forums on Facebook and other sites. Alumni organizations that will provide mentoring are also being set up.

Each college or university that uses the program pays QuestBridge $40,000 to $70,000 annually in recruiting fees. But QuestBridge says that only half of its $1.6 million annual budget comes from those fees. The other half comes from philanthropic groups, including the Goldman Sachs Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Edward Fein Foundation.

One student who has gone through QuestBridge is Dante Lamarr Benson, a 19-year-old from Camden, N.J., who is now in his sophomore year at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., with a full scholarship. An African-American, Mr. Benson says he was raised by his grandmother and made the dean's list at a high school where as many as half of the students drop out. When he received a QuestBridge application in the mail, he was skeptical of his chances of getting into a prestigious college and reluctant to fill it out. But he did, he says, and "to simply put it, QuestBridge changed my life."

For Dr. McCullough, the program is the second educational project. He and his wife, Ana, a lawyer, started a program in 1994 that provided an intense, five-week "boot camp" at Stanford, from which the couple received their professional degrees. But the camp required too much money and staff, so the couple replaced it with QuestBridge.

To scale up the new program, the two turned to Mr. Brady, who had left Yahoo after becoming one of the multimillionaires that helped get the company going in the 1990s. Mr. Brady, who declined a QuestBridge salary, says he was looking for a nonprofit to focus on and agreed to become chief executive after a mutual friend connected him with Dr. McCullough.

QuestBridge's use of the Internet has allowed it to have a big impact relatively quickly. In addition to its showing at Amherst last year, 2% to 6% of the accepted freshmen at Princeton, Wellesley and Williams last year were QuestBridge applicants, and 62 QuestBridgers were accepted at Stanford. In total, the program has placed 2,300 low-income students in top colleges in the four years of its existence. By contrast, the Posse Program has placed 1,850 students in 18 years.

QuestBridge now plans to expand the program by adding 10 more colleges as partners, capping the program at 30. And next year, they plan to launch a one-week boot camp, with hundreds of low-income students converging in Palo Alto to hear from Dr. McCullough and others on what they can expect in the Ivy League and how to thrive there.

"We hope that in 10 years we'll have added a new generation of talented and thoughtful minds to American leadership, drawn from the lowest economic spectrum," Dr. McCullough says.


------ End of Forwarded Message

The untidy revolution

A second article in The Economist on reforms nationally that features the KIPP Academy of Opportunity:

OUTSIDE New York, as usual, it is a different story. Most American mayors look longingly at Michael Bloomberg's accomplishments and wish they were equally mighty. West of the Mississippi, none has succeeded in seizing control of a school system. Nor are they likely to be able to do so:  the early 20th century progressive movement, strongest in the West, severely blunted their powers. “We haven't had reform from the top here,” says Eli  Broad, a Los Angeles philanthropist. “So instead we're seeing change from the bottom up.”
 
In the vanguard are charter schools like the Academy of Opportunity in south-central Los Angeles. Here 13- and 14-year-olds, almost all of them black or Hispanic, firmly shake your hand and outline their plans to go to Yale and Stanford. They work long hours — from 7.30 am to 5 pm, five days  a week, plus four hours every other Saturday. The grind pays off. At the end of their first year in the school just 28% of pupils are proficient or advanced in maths, compared to 48% of pupils elsewhere in California. By the time they leave, three years later, they far outperform their peers.  
 
Los Angeles has 125 charter schools, more than any other school district in America. That is partly a reflection of the dismal state of the mainstream public schools. Perhaps no city would find it easy to educate such a diverse group of children, many of them the offspring of immigrants from rural Mexico. In California, with its miserly education budget and  stifling state bureaucracy, the task is almost impossible. For many parents in poor areas, charter schools represent the only hope for a decent education.

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

The untidy revolution
Nov 8th 2007 |
From The Economist print edition

http://www.economist.com/world/na/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10104894

Elsewhere in America, school reform is slower and messier, but the pressure for change is coming from parents, which bodes well

OUTSIDE New York, as usual, it is a different story. Most American mayors look longingly at Michael Bloomberg's accomplishments and wish they were equally mighty. West of the Mississippi, none has succeeded in seizing control of a school system. Nor are they likely to be able to do so: the early 20th century progressive movement, strongest in the West, severely blunted their powers. “We haven't had reform from the top here,” says Eli Broad, a Los Angeles philanthropist. “So instead we're seeing change from the bottom up.”

The great experiment

In marked contrast, here's a much more thoughtful article from the latest Economist:

When Mr Klein took the job in 2002, having led the Clinton administration's efforts to break up Microsoft, The Economist joked that he should try to do the same thing to New York's schools monopoly. He more or less has. Under the new scheme, every school run by the city will receive a public report card, with a grade that reflects both academic performance and surveys of students, parents and teachers. The first grades were given out this week.
 
Schools that do well will get a boost to their budget; the principal may get a bonus of up to $25,000 on top of a base salary of  $115,000-$145,000. Schools graded D or F (about 12% of them this year) will have to submit  improvement plans that will be implemented with support from Mr Klein's  department. Principals whose schools are still faltering after two years will be fired. Schools still failing after four years will be closed. Though each element of what is happening in New York has been tried elsewhere, this seems to be the most far-reaching urban school accountability initiative in America.  Mr Klein claims that no school system on earth has innovated on the scale of New York.

----------------------
New York's schools

The great experiment
Nov 8th 2007 |
From The Economist print edition
http://www.economist.com/world/na/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10104912

Bringing accountability and competition to New York City's struggling schools

THE 220 children are called scholars, not students, at the Excellence charter school in Brooklyn's impoverished Bedford-Stuyvesant district. To promote the highest expectations, the scholars — who are all boys, mostly black and more than half of whom get free or subsidised school lunches — are encouraged to think beyond school, to university. Outside each classroom is a plaque, with the name of a teacher's alma mater, and then the year (2024 in the case of the kindergarten), in which the boys will graduate from college.

Little Progress for City Schools on National Test

It would be hard to find a better example of lousy (either biased or unintelligent) journalism than this highly negative cover story in today's NYT, which is headlined: "Little Progress for City Schools on National Test". That's the only conclusion I can come to after carefully going through this article and comparing it to the actual data, which can be found in a 47-page Powerpoint presentation posted at: http://schools.nyc.gov/daa/reports/2007_NAEP_TUDA_Results.pdf (the DOE's press release is at: http://schools.nyc.gov/Offices/mediarelations/NewsandSpeeches/2007-2008/20071115_naep.htm)

Let's analyze the just-released NAEP scores, which cover four areas: 4th grade math, 4th grade reading, 8th grade math and 8th grade reading. Here's how I'd score it (note that I exclude the gains from 2002-2003, since critics claim that Klein only became Chancellor in July 2002 and doesn’t deserve the credit for these first-year gains):

- 4th grade math: Students at or above basic rose from 67% in 2003 to 73% in 2005 to 79% in 2007, far bigger gains than for other large cities and the nation as a whole. Notably, New York City’s biggest gains were by black and Hispanic students, who are now exceeding both the national and big-city averages. There was an even bigger gain for students at or above proficient, from 21% in 2003 to 26% in 2005 to 34% in 2007 – a 62% increase (from 21% to 34%) in four years. These are exceptionally strong results.

- 4th grade reading: the key to making fair comparisons here is to adjust for the fact that nearly double the number of English Language Learners (ELL) took the test in 2007 vs. 2005 (8% of all test takers to 15%; see slide 19). Without adjusting, the scores are flat; with the adjustment (looking only at English proficient students), the students at or above basic rose from 55% in 2003 to 60% in 2005 to 63% in 2007, a strong positive trend (see slide 26). And for English proficient students at or above proficient, the increase has also been strong: 23% in 2003, 24% in 2005 and 28% in 2007 (slide 27). Again, black and Hispanic students showed the largest gains. Overall, this is good performance.

- 8th grade math: Students at or above basic rose from 54% in 2003 and 2005 to 57% in 2007 -- OK performance.

- 8th grade reading: At or above basic declined from 62% in 2003 to 61% in 2005 to 59% in 2007. These numbers are weak, but keep in mind that they are also impacted by the greater number of ELL students, though not as much as the 4th graders.

In summary, there is progress in three of four areas, with strong progress for 4^th graders. If I were to give letter grades, they would be one A, a B+, a B- and a D. Though there is certainly plenty of room for improvement, this is a respectable report card and, when considered in the context of other evidence, reinforces my belief that Bloomberg and Klein’s reforms are showing positive results, which I believe will accelerate over time as the mutually reinforcing reforms kick in.

And it certainly doesn't warrant this headline: "Little Progress for City Schools on National Test". How about: "Mixed Results for City Schools on National Test" or, if you wanted to be biased (ignoring the 4th grade results) but at least accurate: "Little Progress for City's 8th Graders on National Test".

This stuff really matters because most people will only read the headline and the first few paragraphs and such a falsely negative article erodes support for the bold reforms Bloomberg and Klein have undertaken and gives ammunition to those trying to protect the status quo (for example, here's Randi's predictable quote: "Randi Weingarten, president of the United Federation of Teachers, described the scores as ‘bad news’.”). Shame, shame!

As for the differences between the state and NAEP scores, the article at least gets this partly right: it's a combination of what students are prepped for and lower NY state standards, which should indeed be strengthened (but this is a state legislature issue, not a Bloomberg/Klein one). I'm not buying what Randi's selling here -- that the state tests are bogus and/or there's widespread cheating:

“When scores become so high-stakes, then you have to really think about and ensure the reliability of these testing systems,” she said, adding that the federal scores “call into question the reliability of the New York State testing system.

“Is it right?” she continued. “Is it wrong? I’m not a psychometrician. But what I do know is when everything is so high-stakes, you have to be doubly, triply, quadruply sure of the accuracy of the data.”

I think the difference is mainly that the bar for passing is set much lower at the state level (which is true for the vast majority of states, sadly).


-------------------------
Little Progress for City Schools on National Test

By JENNIFER MEDINA
Published: November 16, 2007
www.nytimes.com/2007/11/16/education/16scores.html

New York City’s eighth graders have made no significant progress in reading and math since Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg took control of the city schools, according to federal test scores released yesterday, in contrast with the largely steady gains that have been recorded on state tests.

Study Compares States' Math and Science Scores With Other Countries'

Gee, we beat Egypt, Chile and Saudi Arabia. Break out the champagne!

Concern that science and math achievement was not keeping pace with the nation’s economic competitors had been building even before the most recent Times survey, in which the highest-performing nations were Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Japan. American students lagged far behind those nations but earned scores that were comparable to peers in European nations like Slovakia and Estonia, and were well above countries like Egypt, Chile and Saudi Arabia.

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

November 14, 2007
Study Compares States’ Math and Science Scores With Other Countries’
By SAM DILLON
www.nytimes.com/2007/11/14/education/14students.html

American students even in low-performing states like Alabama do better on math and science tests than students in most foreign countries, including Italy and Norway, according to a new study released yesterday. That’s the good news.

Comment on the Muscota New School

Regarding the NYT article about grades for schools I sent around a few days ago (www.nytimes.com/2007/11/07/education/07schools.html ), which quoted one parent saying this:

some parents whose children attend those celebrated schools, largely in well-to-do neighborhoods, said they were perplexed by the way the grades were calculated. Others dismissed them as meaningless, saying they overemphasized standardized tests and improvement from 2006 to 2007.
 
“I find the methodology to be confusing, problematic and flawed,” said Emily Horowitz, who has a daughter at the Muscota New School in the Inwood section of Manhattan,  which received an F. Ms. Horowitz said that the grade “doesn’t mean anything” to her, and that parents were planning a rally this morning to “celebrate our  school.”

A friend wrote:

I worked at the school in District 6 where Muscota is located.  The school was passed from one building to another due to the fact that it always felt it did not have to have any accountability and no principal wanted it. The school does not believe in grades, texts, standardized tests, accountability, and takes pride in the fact that the students call staff by their first names. At the time, the school also, strangely, served a 90% + non-minority population in a district that is heavily latino ... interesting.

It's hard to find a better case study of why schools need to be rigorously evaluated and graded, with the results shared widely.  It's not high on my list of concerns if parents knowingly choose to send their kids to loosy-goosy schools in which kids, for example, aren't taught to read (though I feel sorry for the kids), but I think many parents don't realize what's really going on.  The schools sound so wonderful and tug at all of the liberal heartstrings, but if parents really knew that very little real learning was going on, they might have a different view.

An opportunity for both parties at the intersection of education and faith

Speaking of Democrats supporting educational tax credits, below is an article by Michael Tobman on this topic.  You know he's written something great if the AFT blog has this to say about it:

“Tobman has broken new ground with this piece: It is as cynical and shallow as education commentary can get and still be publishable.”

What a badge of honor -- LOL!


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A Winning Idea

An opportunity for both parties at the intersection of education and faith.
by Michael Tobman

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/014/322ohahi.asp

PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES, who say everything in just the perfect way and actually do nothing, know in their bones how vacant their words are and cling to the one poll-tested and focus-group ratified act that cannot be reasonably challenged: they profess faith.

A New Effort to Remove Bad Teachers

 
Three cheers to Bloomberg and Klein for having the guts to tackle this supremely important issue.  Every study shows two critical things: A) Teacher quality matters far more than anything else when it comes to student learning and achievement (see <http://www.tilsonfunds.com/Personal/Teacherquality.pdf>  for my slides on the importance of teacher quality, how and why teacher quality has been declining for decades, and what can be done to improve this); and B) Low-income and minority students overwhelmingly get the least effective teachers (see:
 <http://www.tilsonfunds.com/Personal/Ineffectiveteachers.pdf> ).

To get a sense of the magnitude of this problem, see the 4th slide (page 3) at (www.tilsonfunds.com/Personal/Teacherquality.pdf <http://www.tilsonfunds.com/Personal/Teacherquality.pdf> ), which shows that 1/3 (!) of the teachers in Boston, according to a 1998 Bain study, failed to impart any knowledge to students over the course of an entire school year.  This is consistent with the many answers I've gotten to a simple question I always ask of people who've taught in an inner-city NYC school: "If you were to group the teachers at your school into three categories: good/great, OK and awful/beyond any hope of redemption/you'd rather stick hot pokers in your eyes before putting your own child in this teacher's classroom, what are the rough percentages?"  
 
Without much variation, the answers are generally 1/3 in each category, and regarding the last category, I've never once heard a number lower than 20% (just last week, the answer was 50% from a teacher who taught in a South Bronx elementary school 10 years ago -- hopefully it's gotten better since then!).  Keep in mind that these are not all NYC schools, but rather the toughest ones (with the students who most need -- and show the greatest progress with -- the best teachers (see slide 9/page 8 of the presentation).

These estimates aren't very scientific of course, but it's 100% certain that the problem of highly ineffective teachers in urban schools, esp. those with a high proportion of low-income and/or minority students, is a massive one -- orders of magnitude larger than the 0.5% or 1% mentioned in the article below -- and dealing with this problem is fundamental to reforming schools and closing the achievement gap.

Of course, there is no issue -- not vouchers, not charter schools, not pay hikes -- that the teacher unions will fight harder against, which is why what Bloomberg and Klein are doing is so revolutionary -- and courageous.  Check out Randi's quote:

Randi Weingarten, the president of the city’s teachers union, the United Federation of Teachers, called the  lawyers a “teacher gotcha unit” and said she found it “disgusting” that the Education Department would issue such a memo after the release of new school report cards that bluntly grade schools A through F.
 
“We’ve always been concerned that the first thing that would  happen after somebody put out progress reports would be principals would go  after teachers,” Ms. Weingarten said. “Basically, it’s signaling to principals that rather than working to support teachers, the school system is going to give you a way to try to get rid of teachers.”  

Let's be clear: the only disgusting thing here is that tens of thousands -- and probably hundreds of thousands -- of NYC schoolchildren (and millions of other students nationwide), right now, today (and every year for the past few decades) are suffering in classrooms headed by ineffective, incompetent, barely literate, and/or burned out teachers, who are protected by their union and its onerous contract, kids be damned.  This is more than disgusting -- it's a complete, total, utter disgrace and positively un-American!

As I've said before and will say again: some will choose to interpret what I've written here as anti-teacher, but the reality is completely the opposite.  I'm proud to be against crappy teachers, but am even more proud to be a huge champion of the majorty of teachers who are dedicated to their craft and are effective at it -- and one of the most important things we can do to attract and retain good teachers is get rid of the bad ones who bring shame and disrepute to an honorable, critically important profession.

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November 15, 2007
A New Effort to Remove Bad Teachers
By ELISSA GOOTMAN
www.nytimes.com/2007/11/15/education/15teacher.html

The Bloomberg administration is beginning a drive to remove unsatisfactory teachers, hiring new teams of lawyers and consultants who will help principals build cases against tenured teachers who they believe are not up to the job. It is also urging principals to get rid of sub-par novices before they earn tenure.