Over the past decade of mayor control in New York City, the newly established Department of Education has had a free hand to do whatever it wanted with the city’s 1.1 million students, free of any concern about the reaction of parents, teachers, principals, or the public.
One reform after another has rolled out of City Hall, after Mayor Bloomberg or Chancellor Klein or someone else got a new idea or had a conversation at a dinner party. Sometimes these ideas are announced with great fanfare, and almost always they are announced as the solution to some problem, trumpets blaring, success preceding implementation.
The state scores went up and up, evidence of the New York City “miracle,” until 2010, when the New York State Education Department acknowledged that the state scores were a hoax. Someone at the SED had decided to help raise test scores by lowering the passing mark, and had done the same year after year, creating the illusion of progress. This was enough to enable New York to win Race to the Top funding, enough to help Mayor Bloomberg win a third term in 2009, and enough to get mayoral control extended in 2009 by the Legislature for another six years , all because of those amazing but phony test scores.
When the test score mirage dissolved, we learned that graduation rates had gone up into the low 60%, but there were no press conferences to talk about the persistently high remediation rates for entering college students, nor about their low persistence or graduation rates in postsecondary education.
A new blog by Peter Goodman, a veteran observer of the New York education scene, reveals a new round of thick-headed decisions:
City and state policymakers are now applying what they think is a sure cure for low academic performance: They will raise the bar, make the courses harder, more demanding. High schools will be incentivized to offer more college-level courses to students who are three or four grade levels behind in reading and/or math. This is supposed to incentivize students who can’t read or do math to take advanced placement courses, to work harder and to get higher test scores.
Here is the theory: If you raise standards, students will get higher scores.
What exactly is the logic here? If a student can’t jump over a four-foot bar, how exactly does it help if you raise the bar to six feet?
Goodman sensibly asks: What is the evidence that taking a “college level” course for which a student is not prepared will increase college readiness?
Other changes now about to be imposed involved the placement of special education students, not decided on a case-by-case basis by experienced professionals, but by fiat.
And Goodman sensibly suggests: Policy should be based on peer-reviewed research and years of experience in teaching and leadership positions within an urban school system.
But that is no longer the way things work these days.
Diane
Diane Ravitch's blog 
A similar policy is being rolled out in LAUSD. The total number of credits needed for graduation have been reduced so that students can retake and retake courses they have failed. However, the stakes are even higher because a “D” is no longer considered a passing grade. Again, there is no pilot program to base the efficacy of such a move. As class sizes increase and services are cut, there is no plan to address the cause of poor performance that leads to failure in high school.
Many feel that this policy will actually increase the dropout rate and/or create pressure on schools to demand that teachers inflate student grades in order to get a positive evaluation.
When this policy eventually fails, as it most certainly will, who will take the blame? Most likely, the school board will have new members and the district will have hired a new superintendent. So, who will be left to take the blame? Could it be the teachers?
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You know, I’ve always wanted to be able to dunk a basketball, but I’ve never come close. To think, all these years I’ve missed the obvious solution: raise the rim to 12 feet.
Diane, I fear the Common Core ELA standards (and the accompanying tests) will, like the policy Goodman addresses, only further demotivate struggling students.
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Jason, as a basketball fan, I can really relate. Wonderful analogy!
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I love Jason’s basketball metaphor, and I also appreciate that this madness primarily harms poor and inner-city schools struggling to save students from learning deficits suffered through poverty’s dire impacts. As a teacher and department head in happier-placed suburban schools, I have faced a variation on the theme. For years I have fought my district administrators’ insistence that open admission to AP classes is the way to close our achievement gap. (And yes, my schools have faced an economic and racial achievement gap). I mostly wanted to stem the tide of parents (and some guidance counselors) who strive to pad their students’ transcripts with “name brand” courses without regard for the stress and burn-out that ill-prepared students suffer, based purely upon the claim that “raising the bar” will inevitably lead to a rise in performance. They have wanted me to agree with the national AP folks whose research “proves” that taking an AP course is the best way to prepare students for college work, making them better college freshman candidates no matter how they eventually score on the AP exams. Part of their “evidence” is citation of the Newsweek and/or U.S. News & Report listings of “top schools” — those that enrolled the highest percentage of students in AP courses. I think this is a great example of “begging the question.” I think the whole concept — that all students are “advanced” if given a spot in “advanced placement” — is ridiculous. Am I wrong?
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Perhaps basketball is where raising the bar/Race to the Top came from?
Arne’s a basketball player, correct?
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I’m with you, Del. I’m all for giving kids every opportunity to challenge themselves, but if a child is struggling in a standard-level class–and there’s evidence that the struggling stems from a legitimate difficulty grasping the subject, not from boredom–then there’s no sense in pushing them into a far more difficult class.
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The Little Napoleon had to get into a third term somehow so this is no surprise about test scores. I follow his horrible record as head of the NYC Animal Care & Control, which the 1894 charter gives the mayor control of, and am not surprised. Hopefully when a new mayor gets in they will straighten out this mess. NYC can only hope.
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