Over the past dozen years, former Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his schools’ chancellor Joel Klein had total control of the New York City school system. The Mayor controlled the “school board,” which dared not ever vote no. They could do whatever they wanted, and their PR team cranked out press release after press release. The news of the “New York City miracle” spread around the world, buoyed by phenomenal test score gains every year. Australia and other nations swallowed the story whole.
When the New York State Education Department admitted that the test scores had been manipulated by lowering the passing mark, the city switched its success story: now the “miracle” was soaring graduation rates.
But all the while, the Department of Education was closing schools with low scores, opening new schools, and warehousing low-scoring students in schools that sooner or later would also be closed. Schools opened, schools closed. She’ll game.
Now the New York Post tells the story of what was once a well-regarded high school that was turned into a dumping ground. After the Post wrote about Murray Bergtraum High School as a failure factory–a school that is within sight of the New York City Department of Education headquarters, at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge–students at the school wrote letters of complaint to the Post. The letters were filled with errors of grammar and syntax. The Post took this as evidence of a failed school system. The letters are indeed evidence of the quality of the school system where these students spent 11 or 12 years.
If they graduate, it will be a triumph of “credit recovery,” which the DOE encouraged to boost the graduation rate.
Conclusions: there was no New York City miracle. Judging school quality by graduation rates encourages credit recovery and fraud. What’s needed most now is a Truth Commission to sweep away false claims and to establish a record unsullied by boasting and pretense. It is not likely to happen, unfortunately, given that the de Blasio administration wants to ease quietly into a new and better world, without publicly airing the dirty laundry left behind. More revelations like this one, however, and the truth will out.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
How would one go about investigating the possibility of credit recovery fraud at one’s own school?
My school’s graduation rate rocketed from 67% to 83% in one year. I hear a lot of whispers about “credit recovery” being the cause.
I have little interest in trying to discredit my school, which has been under “transformation”. But still, I wonder. I wonder about the truth.
“But still, I wonder. I wonder about the truth.”
Well when it comes to education truth is in the eyes of the beholder. There is no truth, all is true.
You and your colleagues need to do the necessary research to prove your school is offering credit recovery illegally. Read the chancellor’s regulations on it or whatever the equivalent is in your school district. Then you on your own have got to get all of the data proving your point. It takes time and has to be done in as clandestine a manner as possible. If you are caught, they will end your career or maybe worse.
I’m pretty sure this is happening every where. I probably can’t even remember how many students I wanted tested, went to child study, was told to do more strategies, and the kids were pushed on. I am retired now, but I had lunch with my younger teammates this past summer. They told me a boy that my principal told me she knew was autistic and wouldn’t get help because his mom didn’t understand this, still isn’t getting help. Isn’t our job to help parents understand? Research says the sooner these children receive help, the better. He will go to 6th grade with no IEP. What chance does he have? We are failing our children miserably.
Credit recovery, blended learning. It’s all a farce. Students are given meaningless computer programs to sit , watch and answer questions and then given credit for the course it represents teaches them nothing, I mean absolutely nothing . Unfortunately at my school it was a way to get the kids credit before we are phased out.
I wonder a lot about what might be the best way to judge school quality. Ravitch correctly notes how graduation rates are a problematic measure. How else might one judge school quality?
Standardized test scores can be manipulated, plus they generally only test reading/math, which encourages some bad practices we all note.
Anecdotes based on visits are powerfully instructive for the people who do the visits, but others will generally base their judgment on whether the anecdote aligns with their pre-conceptions.
I’d be interested in hearing people’s opinion on the best way to judge school quality.
What is the best way to judge the quality of a hospital, or a police department?
I’m not sure. Neither of those strike me as straightforward questions, nor do they make a clear analogy with schools.
I would submit that “What is the best way to judge the quality of a hospital?”, “What is the best way to judge the quality of a police department?”, and “What is the best way to judge the quality of a school?” are all roughly equal questions in terms of straighforwardness.
Who cares if they are equal with respect to straightforwardness. Their being equally straightforward does not imply that any of them are straightforward, nor does it tell me anything about the actual mechanism by which their effectiveness ought to be judged.
What I was wondering is how one might plausibly judge school effectiveness. What I was not wondering is what other organizations can have their effectiveness judged in an equally straightforward manner to the manner in which school effectiveness is judged.
I would concur with Ron Poirier’s suggestion that no single measure can tell the full story of the quality of a school. The closer you are to the ground, to the students and teachers who inhabit the classrooms, the closer to the truth you can get to the quality of the school.
“Their being equally straightforward does not imply that any of them are straightforward…”
Indeed it does not. In fact, it may imply the opposite.
Let me put things another way. I think we can agree that hospitals and police departments are important parts of our society, and it is in all of our interests to see to it that they are functioning optimally. How are they judged, right now? Is there anything we can learn from that and use to apply to schools?
To my knowledge, the equivalent of corporate education reform’s VAM (for example) is NOT used. Police officers are NOT judged based on the per capita crime rates of their districts, or the recidivism rates of the criminals that they catch. Doctors are NOT judged based on the health of their patients, or if they are we do not see oncologists continually shamed because “cancer is not destiny” as their superiors trot out individuals who survived “so-called terminal” cancer as “proof” that when oncologists blame the high mortality rate of their patients on cancer, they are making “excuses”.
What does that teach us about how schools, and the people who work in them, should be judged?
Hospitals are judged by their readmission rates.here is one story about Medicare penulties imposed on hospitals with high readmission rates: http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/stories/2013/august/02/readmission-penalties-medicare-hospitals-year-two.aspx
I don’t know if this is the best way to judge hospitals, but it does not seem to be a terrible way to do it.
Here is another good way to measure the quality of hospitals: rates of hospital acquired infections. This costs us about 30 billion a year according to the CDC as quoted in this article: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/29/nyregion/hospitals-struggle-to-get-workers-to-wash-their-hands.html?_r=0
I should add that hospital acquired infections are estimated to cause 100,000 patient deaths a year.
Re: police, you might be surprised to find out how quantitative police office evaluations are.
I’m not sure if this is current, but here’s an example:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/70443250/NYPD-Operations-Order?secret_password=2fu6ylqv53aljzxucnot
Why is it SO necessary to measure and rank EVERYTHING????
Louisiana Purchase, you’re right. My 3 children went to the same elementary school. It wasn’t a “high ranked” school, but the teachers were professional and treated my children with kindness and respect. I’m so glad that they all attended that school.
Louisiana Purchase: so you know where to hand out the [few] rewards and [many] punishments.
Didn’t you get the memo?
And never forget: only to be applied to the unworthy many. The select few occupying the upper rungs, like the self-styled rheephorm leaders of the “new civil rights movement,” are exempt from said forced ranking system.
Makes ₵ent¢ to all those in mad dog pursuit of $tudent $ucce$$.
To the rest of us, non-sense…
😎
I’m quite against *ranking* schools, but does anyone seriously think that schools shouldn’t be measured in any way? Keep in mind that qualitative measures are still measures. I’m not saying there is some mathematical algorithm out there that can spit out a 1-100 score that tells you how good a school is. I’m just saying that there are definitely quality differences between schools (nobody who is serious disputes this, pseudo-philosophical posturing aside) and it is worthwhile to think about what the most reasonable method is for going about determining that quality difference.
CTee, ask yourself what purpose you seek by ranking schools. You could rank them by test scores. You could rank them by their demographics, what proportion of children are poor or minorities or special education. You could rank them by resources. You could rank them by class sizes. You could rank them by curriculum. If one school has the most resources, the fewest poor kids, and the highest test scores, choice won’t help but because there would not be any empty seats.
This is exactly what I and thousands of other NYC parents have been going through this year with the middle school applications process. It’s terrible.
CTee,
“. . . judged in an equally straightforward manner to the manner in which school effectiveness is judged.”
And there is the crux of your problem in attempting to determine “THE best way to judge school quality.” [my emphasis]
In presenting it that way the assumption is that there is ONE BEST way to judge school quality. And there never can be one best way. A school is conglomeration of hundreds of thousands of human interactions every minute of everyday through days, weeks, semesters, years so that any attempt too judge such a complex interactive environment is futile and will by definition be less than accurate, leaving out so many variables that one is left holding nothing of value.
Do the kids show up eagerly each morning and hang out after classes are over? Is there an ease in their exchanges with one another and with their teachers? Is there laughter and playfulness in the corridors, lunchroom and classes? Is there a feeling of purposefulness in daily activities? Are kids comfortable seeking out grownups? Is there a camaraderie among the staff and faculty? When bad stuff happens – it always does – is there a sense of community and shared responsibility for one another – grownups and kids alike?
In a quality school, the answer to these questions is yes.
Another little secret of the Bloomberg years- I know for a fact, at least in the high school that I taught ( now since closed), the Leadership Academy principal deliberately changed the scores of both Regents and teacher generated grades, in order to make it appear that students were doing better than they were.
How was changing the grades of students any way to help them, other than for social promotion purposes, and to make the Bloomberg administration look good? Frankly, I wonder how many other schools this was happening in.
When President Obama took office he didn’t want to waste valuable time trying to find justice in the insanity that had happened to this country for the last eight years. Our new mayors has so much to do to try and bring the city back for everyone. It is up to the academics to find the truth and expose it for the horrific lie it was. Our Academics have been asleep for twenty years buying in to programs that they knew weren’t working for children, but go along to get along, everyone was sworn to secrecy never to expose the big lie, blame everyone else but not ourselves, Mr. Mayor.
I hear Ms. Quinn is now working for a non-profit another group she will create much pain and suffering for. The academics’ at Harvard who embraced anything that the Bloomberg machine told them to, can now figure out how to whitewash this mesh. After all we can look at the Bloomberg machine at work in Newark N.J.. One City concept which is NYC in a smaller version for the destruction of public schools
In our school with a Leadership Academy Principal, self-contained Special Education students were given 18 credits of credit recovery in one semester. they were given 3 credits for a weekend of work at the behest of the Principal. So much for graduation rates!.
Good luck to Mayor deBlasio in airing out the nefarious doings at Tweed ( NYCDOE headquarters).
A good way to begin would be to get rid of the Leadership Academy, replace most of the Bloomberg stooges in administrative positions, and to make the NYCDOE adhere to what it’s supposed to be doing – truly EDUCATING the students of NYC, instead of fabricating test scores and graduation rates.
P.S.: It would be nice to have textbooks and consumable workbooks in our classrooms, instead of constantly having to generate our own materials to work with.
And after the Truth commission, NYCDOE should follow South Africa’s lead of a Reconciliation Commission.
This is a strange statement: “It is not likely to happen, unfortunately, given that the de Blasio administration wants to ease quietly into a new and better world, without publicly airing the dirty laundry left behind.”
I work for a New York State public school that is graduating students in a fraudulent manner in an attempt to improve its graduation rate and make the principal look like the messiah of urban education. These students are being pushed through without meeting state required mandates. Furthermore, the local department of education clearly delineates requirements for credit recovery, all of which are being ignored. Would the families’ of these students be able to sue based educational malpractice? The school is simply breaking several laws and not giving its students the education it is required to give them. Urban and lower income students are taken advantage of like this because they do not always have the means to fight back. Maybe a class action suit will teach this administration a lesson and send a message out to others who are doing the same.
Please comment and feel free to forward me an email with any thoughts. If you are an interested attorney, I am willing to listen.