William Stroud was the founding Principal of the Baccalaureate School for Global Education and is now Assistant Director for the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) at Teachers College–Columbia University. He sent me this explanation of what he saw during this time as principal of a small school in New York City.

Given the results of the recent mayoral election, and the arrival of a new administration under the new Mayor Bill de Blasio, this is a good time to review the condition of public education.

Just weeks ago, Mayor Bloomberg and Department of Education administrators celebrated the success of twenty-two high performing schools with a “victory lap” (NYT, 9/16/13). As the founding principal of one of these schools, the Baccalaureate School for Global Education, I would like to offer a more tempered, alternative perspective on the current state of education in the city and suggest different priorities as a way forward for the Department.

 

Mayor Bloomberg was quoted in the article, “Our administration’s core philosophy, when it comes to education, has always been, if we raise our expectations, our kids will meet them.”  This is not an effective improvement strategy. Of course there are some high performing schools in New York City. Evidence indicates that student achievement closely correlates with in-school factors (the quality of teaching and learning in classrooms and school leadership) and out-of-school factors (family income and educational attainment of parents, stability of housing and employment, nutrition and health care).

On closer scrutiny, it is clear that these high performing schools cream the top students through the student admission process, or exist in consistently high performing neighborhoods. No news there. That the administration celebrates a testing initiative where 20% of Black and Latino students are proficient is a travesty. These are the officials responsible for looking out for all communities of New York City. Cause for celebration would be a tour of previously low performing schools in disenfranchised communities where high quality schooling is part of the fabric of the community. Perhaps they exist too. Which ones are they?

 

Raising expectations has been a critical catalyst in a high stakes accountability system that prioritizes investing in a new regimen of standardized tests (the Common Core assessments), establishing school report cards and teacher evaluations, and closing consistently low performing schools. This is fundamentally rooted in a free market strategy that purports to offer more, and better, opportunities for students and families. Several years ago in a public forum with Sir Michael Barber, one of the early consultants for the Department, I asked if there were any examples in history where a free market strategy had successfully addressed social inequality. He responded that we must get the controls right. We have not succeeded in this, and, I believe, the free market strategy is proving to be a failure.

 

Department of Education officials have claimed that the public doesn’t understand what the new Common Core assessment numbers mean. DOE officials either don’t understand what the numbers mean or are disingenuous with the public, because at this point there are too many uncertainties and inconsistencies in the testing and accountability processes to inspire confidence in the initiatives.

How do high schools with a graduating cohort of 40% of their incoming students deserve an “A” on their progress reports?  How is it that in states where teacher evaluation systems are used, error rates are high and significant percentages of top-tier teachers one year can be in the bottom tiers the next year? When the new assessment exam items are written at a level of text difficulty two years above grade level, what are they really measuring? Student cut scores for performance levels are arbitrary, and new baselines are established with each new exam. And, if we are to take the most recent student assessment data at face value, the performance gap of Black and Latino students relative to White and Asian students has widened. Although we would not know this from a casual reading of the media, this would belie some general performance improvements on the National Assessment of Educational Progress over the last decades.

 

Although I have not recently been involved in the reform work in New York City, I can say that the impact of the policies on one school, the Baccalaureate School for Global Education appears to be harmful. In 2002, we created the school to combat elitism and to use diversity, academic and social, as a tool for improving the achievement outcomes of all students and developing a community that is committed to understanding each other’s cultures, dreams, and hopes for building a better world than we are confronted with now. We joined a promising initiative, the Empowerment Zone, where schools were required to admit at least 25% of students scoring below grade level on standardized tests. The more recent focus on testing and accountability, with its consequent rewards and sanctions, has resulted in the school becoming less diverse ethnically and academically, an ethnic cleansing of Black and Latino students in favor of already high-performing White and Asian students – more or less like the specialized high schools.

High stakes accountability has narrowed the opportunities for students who were not already achieving at high levels. This is the antithesis of the original mission.

 

The DOE measures, intended or unintended, are driving schools to this defensive strategy – seeking already high performing students as a way to avoid the draconian consequences for schools comprised of lower achieving students. Research would indicate that students of color benefit enormously from attending integrated schools.  New York City, along with Chicago and Dallas, resides in the upper echelons of school segregation. We don’t need policies that encourage greater segregation rather than greater diversity.  We need policies that result in less segregated schools, more long-term attention to the development of instructional capacity and school leadership, and does not mistake high stakes testing for educational progress.