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Raleigh, NC, Editorial Opposes Anti-Teacher Proposal

By dianeravitch
March 21, 2013 //
8

North Carolina is one of the red states with a super-majority of Republicans in control of he legislature.

So Republicans can do anything they want, as they control state government.

The editorial today in the Raleigh News Observer defends teachers. The editorialist sharply rebukes Phil Berger’s punitive, mean-spirited education “reforms.” That’s welcome news.

The editorialist points out that the predictable consequence of letter grades will be to stigmatize schools, not improve them.

What’s more, he defends teachers. Picking on teachers is a favorite ploy of the state’s politicians. Given that North Carolina is a right to work state and teacher pay is nearly the worst in the nation, this ploy looks like bullying.

Bullying is bad when kids do it in school, why is it okay for the president pro tem of the state senate to bully teachers? Phil Berger seems to think that the schools will improve if teachers have no right to due process, if they can be fired for any reason at all. He confuses tenure for university professors (which is close to an ironclad guarantee of lifetime job protection) with due process rights for teachers, which guarantees nothing more than the right to a hearing before they can fire you.

Berger wants to eliminate due process. He wants teachers to be fired if their students get low test scores. Teachers of kids with disabilities and teachers of English language learners will be axed. Students can withhold effort and fire their teachers. Does Berger have a plan to recruit teachers to work in a state where teachers are public enemy #1?

Categories Merit pay, North Carolina, Teacher Evaluations, Teacher Tenure

The Futility of Closing Schools in Chicago

By dianeravitch
March 21, 2013 //
15

The Chicago Public Schools will close about 50 elementary schools. This is the largest mass closure of public schools in U.S. history. The official announcement will be out imminently.

Approximately 90% of the children who will lose their public school are African American.

Ironically, the decision was made public soon after the release of a report saying that school closings did not save money or help children.

Here is the report by Chicago researchers:

A group of 100 or more researchers in Chicago–called CReATE– has been analyzing the issues in that city and reviewing the evidence.

Here is their brief on school closings and how they hurt children and shatter communities:

CReATE Research Brief on School Closures

When a school is closed, the facility is shut down, school staff is displaced, children are sent to other schools, and the community loses a vital resource. If Chicago Public Schools (CPS) follows the city’s Commission on School Utilization March 2013 recommendations, 80 CPS neighborhood schools (13% of the entire system) will be closed, disrupting the lives of nearly 25,000 children. CPS expects that students will need to travel an added 1 to 11⁄2 miles to get to their new schools.

Over the years, CPS has mobilized three different types of arguments to justify school closings:

underperformance, cost savings, and underutilization. We examine each of these here.

Underperforming schools

In the current round of school closures, the Chicago Public Schools has stated that it is not closing schools based on performance, but is looking strictly at the utilization of a facility. However, throughout the 2000s, the predominant justification by CPS for closing schools was the need
to shutter or turn around underperforming schools as measured by standardized test scores and attendance. It is useful to examine the evidence on how these recent school closures impacted student academic performance in Chicago. This can give us insight on what can be expected with the future round of closures.

Students from turnaround or closed CPS schools who moved to academically stronger schools, and/or schools with strong student-teacher relationships, experienced the greatest gains from school closures.1 However, the reality of school closures in the CPS system suggests that students accessing academically stronger schools are the exception, not the rule. A 2009 study by the University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research (CCSR) found that 82% of students from 18 elementary schools closed in Chicago moved from one underperforming school
to another underperforming school, including schools already on probation.2 In a follow up 2012 report, the CCSR determined that 94% of students from closed Chicago schools did not go to “academically strong” new schools.3 According to the 2009 CCSR study, “One year after students left their closed schools, their achievement in reading and math was not significantly different from what we would have expected had their schools not been closed.”4 The authors conclude that, overall, there were no significant positive or negative effects on academic achievement resulting from the closure when students transferred to comparable schools.

On the other hand, a study by Kirshner, Gaertner, and Pozzoboni (2010) contradicts the no-effect findings when examining comparable transition schools.5 The authors found that students who transitioned into new schools following closure scored lower on tests one year after closure; they were at an increased risk of dropping out, as well as an increased risk of not graduating. Interview data from this study suggests closure was viewed negatively by transitioning students and imposed a stigma upon them that followed them into their new schools. The researchers found that test score trends on standardized tests for transfer students declined after the closure was announced.

Test scores for students from the cohort that transferred to other schools continued to decline for two standardized test administrations after the closure announcement.

School closings will also negatively affect the achievement levels for students in the receiving schools. A Michigan State University study found that “while the closing of low-performing schools may generate some achievement gains for displaced students, part of these gains will likely be offset by spillover effects onto receiving schools.” For one thing, closings often lead to increased class sizes and overcrowding in receiving schools. As a result, the pace of instruction is slower and the test scores of both mobile students and non-mobile students tend to be lower in schools with high student mobility rates. One study comparing the curricular pace of stable schools and highly mobile schools in Chicago found that highly mobile schools lagged behind stable schools by one grade level on average.6

In various cities, school closures have led to several negative experiences for displaced students, including a doubling of the likelihood of dropping out of school, increased school violence, lowered likelihood of enrolling in summer school programs in the summer following school closure, higher rates of school-to-school mobility, disrupted peer relationships, and weaker relationships
with adults.7

Closures disrupted relationships students had established with adults and other students at their closed schools, leaving the students with few social and emotional supports to help them adjust to the challenges of the new school.8

Underutilization and cost savings

In the current round of school closures, Chicago Public Schools leaders have changed tack and instead are focused on saving the district money by closing underutilized schools. CPS claims they are facing a $1 billion deficit in their budget for the school year 2013-2014. However, CPS’s past history of budgeting should give caution. Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports from the school years 2011-2012 and 2010-2011 show that CPS has a recent history of overstating their budget troubles. In the 2011-2012 school year, the Chicago Board of Education (BOE) approved a budget with a $214 million deficit. However, CPS ended the school year with a $328 million surplus. And again, the BOE approved a budget anticipating a $245 million deficit for the 2010-2011 school year, but the district ended that school year with a $328 million surplus. In both cases CPS’s budgeting was off by $500 million dollars.9

Nonetheless, CPS estimates that they will save between $500,000 to $800,000 annually for each school closed. According to these estimates, if CPS closes up to 80 schools, it will gain between $40 million and $64 million from savings achieved by avoiding building upkeep and operational expenditures like heat and daily maintenance.10

CPS’s estimates of how much they will save on closures are based on the assumption that CPS can lease, sell or repurpose 50% of the shuttered buildings. CPS is already having difficulty disposing of the schools they have already closed. A Pew report determined that the City of Chicago was only able to sell, lease or repurpose 17 of its closed school buildings between 2005-2012. During that same time, 24 closed school properties remained on the market, constituting 58% of the CPS closed school properties that had originally been placed on the market.11

This is consistent with nationwide trends. Another 2011 Pew report summarizing the research on school closings in six cities showed that school closures did not save the school districts as much money as was hoped. In addition to the inability of these districts to sell or lease their properties, closure-related costs cut further into savings, as districts found themselves paying for closed school site maintenance or demolition, moving services, and support for both displaced students and the schools that received them.12 Closures have many upfront and, in some cases, hidden costs, as a recent audit of the 2008 Washington D.C. school closures conducted by the Office of the D.C. Auditor underscores. The audit determined that instead of saving the district $30 million, as claimed by former schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, the closures actually cost the city $40 million after factoring in the expense of demolishing buildings, removing furnishings, and transporting students. Further, the district lost another. $5 million in federal and state grants as students left the system, many to the charter schools being built in tandem with the closings.13

Chicago Public Schools claims that Chicago’s population loss is the reason why schools are underutilized. CPS officials point to Chicago’s population loss over the last decade (resulting in 144,035 fewer children living in Chicago from 2000 to 2010) as creating 139,000 empty seats in CPS. However, according to a WBEZ analysis of CPS’s Racial/Ethnic Survey data, the school system only reported a loss of 31,500 students during this period.14

Utilization is based on the physical size of a school and the number of students occupying a classroom. The Chicago Board of Education has determined that 30 children in a classroom is the ideal or most efficient class size for Kindergarten through eighth-grade classes. Classrooms under 30 students are deemed underutilized. By these standards, CPS estimates that 50% of its neighborhood schools are underutilized, and nearly 140 are half empty.

It is questionable whether 30 students per class should be the standard for the ideal utilization of a classroom. The Student Teacher Achievement Ratio (STAR) program initiated in Tennessee in the late 1980s has yielded the most comprehensive and credible studies on the impact of class sizes. In the STAR program, students and teachers were randomly assigned to two types of classes: a small class with an average of 15 students or a regular class with an average of 22 students. After four years, researchers determined that the difference of seven students had significant impacts on student achievement. Students from the smaller classes outperformed students from larger classes by the equivalent of three additional months of schooling in the first year.15 Studies of STAR also determined that African American students, lower- income students, and students from urban areas benefitted the most from smaller class sizes.16

Additionally, CPS’s calculations of utilization fail to account for students with disabilities, although in many of the targeted schools 20- 30% of students are challenged by a learning disability. These students require a class size of 10 to 15 students, but the 30-student formula does not take this into consideration.

Relation between closures and charters

Chicago Public Schools and charter schools operators consistently claim that school closures have nothing to do with charter schools and that CPS will not repurpose the closed schools into charter schools. Briefly, charter schools are funded with public money but are privately operated (either by for-profits or non-profits) and therefore are removed from public decision-making processes. Charters are not accountable to the elected Local School Councils made up of teachers, parents and community members Instead, an unelected Board of Directors helms each charter school. Charter schools admit students from across the city and select their students by an application process, test scores, and/or lottery draw. As such, charter schools do not have to admit the local neighborhood children.17 Charter schools also have a history of excluding students with learning disabilities and special needs, expelling students for discipline policy violations at higher rates than CPS, and excluding poor test takers and English Language Learners.18

Advocates of charter schools claim that the lack of union and public involvement allows the schools to innovate and elevate academic performance. This claim does not hold under scrutiny. According to CPS’s own data, an average charter school performs 10 percentile points below comparable (in terms of racial composition and number of students qualifying for Free or Reduced Lunches) traditional schools on reading test scores.19 Charters also consistently underperform by 12 percentile points on reading and 2 percentile points on math test scores relative to comparable public magnet schools.20

There are many reasons to believe that school closures are directly related to the expansion of the charter school system. First, the budget deficit, in part, can be attributed to the costs of expanding the charter school system. In FY 2012, $350 million was budgeted for the Office of New Schools, the office devoted to developing new charter and contract schools. For the upcoming fiscal year, CPS allocated an additional $23 million to fund new charter schools, nearly half of what they estimate they will save if they close 80 neighborhood schools. In addition, the United Neighborhood Organization (UNO) was successful in lobbying the Illinois General Assembly for an additional $35 million to expand their charter school network in 2012, at a time when the state cut over $200 million from the public school budget.

Second, there is a strong local and national trend of converting closed public schools into privately operated charter schools. Forty-two percent of all closed public schools across the U.S. have been turned into charter schools. Chicago parallels that trend, with 40% of its closed public schools converted into privately operated charter schools. 21 Moreover, the reopened charter schools did not necessarily benefit neighborhood children. A study of closed neighborhood schools that were reopened as charter schools in Chicago showed a transformation in the student body attending these reopened schools. The new students tended to be more affluent, with higher prior achievement, and fewer of them had special needs. The schools also served fewer students from the neighborhoods in which the schools were situated. 22

Additionally, charters do not save the district money. CPS compensates organizations for approximately 75% of charter schools’ operational expenses. Charters also receive funds from a combination of state and federal grants, non-profit grants and fund raising. In addition, many of the charter replacement schools lease their school building from the district. When examining the lease agreements between CPS and various charter schools, the Chicago Teachers Union found that CPS leased a significant number of the public buildings to privately operated charter schools for just $1.23

Third, Chicago Public Schools currently has plans to expand their charter system. In 2012, CPS signed the Gates Compact with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (a non-profit that financially supports the expansion of charter schools). As part of the Gates Compact, CPS pledged to open an additional 60 charter schools in the near future. Already CPS has plans to open 13 new charters in 2013, despite their claim that the system is underutilized. If the future location of charter schools mirrors the existing trends, then the new charter schools will be located in the neighborhoods facing traditional public school closures (see below).

Fourth, charter schools have created the conditions under which traditional neighborhood schools are considered underutilized. CPS has allowed charter schools to proliferate and absorb nearly 53,000 children into their system as of 2013, up from just 5,525 students
who attended charter schools in 2000.24 Furthermore, the district added more charter schools to the system at precisely the time it was experiencing declining enrollment. For example, in 2000, CPS had 432,000 students and 597 schools. In the current school year, CPS has 403,000 students and 681 schools. In this way, the proliferation of charter schools is a significant contributor to the underutilization that those CPS schools in danger of closure may be experiencing.25

Finally, the people in charge of the closure process and Chicago Public Schools leadership are supporters of charter school expansion. The current CPS CEO, Barbara Byrd- Bennett, is a Broad Foundation executive coach, training superintendents in the principles of business model
school reform. The Broad Foundation invests millions in transforming schools into more privately controlled entities and seeks to train the next generation of leaders to realize the charter school takeover of the public schools.

A recent memo issued by the Foundation proposes what the Washington Post quotes as “a series of strategic shifts in the foundation’s education programs designed to ‘accelerate’ the pace of ‘disruptive’ and ‘transformational’ change in big city school districts.”26 The Broad Foundation released a 2009 report detailing the political tactics and strategies public officials should employ when conducting mass school closures. We see many of their recommendations implemented in this current round of school closures in Chicago, including: using the language of how a school is designed for X number of children but only Y number are using it; emphasizing declining enrollment; stating that the current use is an inefficient utilization of facilities; and insisting that closures will allow officials to “right-size” the system.27 Additionally, CPS’ communications department acknowledged that the Walton Foundation, founded by the family who owns Wal-Mart, gave CPS a grant for $478,000 to finance the community engagement process around the “utilization crisis.”28

The Walton Foundation is an avid supporter of charter school proliferation, giving $700 million to “choice” schools in a bid to transform public education into a privately controlled domain.

Racial Disparities of School Closings

School closures are especially contentious in Chicago as they disproportionately affect working-class communities of color.29 Since 2001, 98 of the 100 schools being closed or phased out in Chicago have been located in predominantly African American and Latino communities.30 Of the 129 schools CPS identified as underutilized in February 2013, 88% of the students attending these schools are African American, with 103 of the schools composed of a student body that was over 90% African American. Nine of the 129 schools have student bodies that are predominantly Latino.31

Disinvestment in public schools and empty buildings will deepen the hardship confronting neighborhoods already suffering from community disinvestment and may contribute to even further population loss of African Americans in Chicago. For example, WBEZ aggregated data on abandoned properties, city-owned vacant lots, and community area census figures from the city’s data portal site, and mapped them on top of the locations of the schools targeted for potential closure.32 They found that school closures directly correspond to the locations of troubled mortgages, foreclosures, and population loss. Closing neighborhood schools will discourage people from moving back into these disinvested communities. Furthermore, closures may exacerbate tensions between communities and lead to violence. Since 2004, school closures that transfer students to schools outside their immediate neighborhoods have resulted in spikes of violence in and around elementary and high schools.33 We strongly caution policy makers to consider the added stressors that closures bring to these communities.

School closures also disproportionately impact African American teachers. The Chicago Teachers Union reports that African Americans made up nearly 40% of all CPS teachers in the 1990s. By 2012, that proportion was reduced to under 20%.34 In previous rounds of Chicago school closings, 65% of the teachers displaced were African American women.35 A 2012 report by the Consortium
on Chicago School Research on school closings and turnarounds determined that, “The teacher workforce after intervention across all models was more likely to be white, younger, and less experienced, and was more likely to have provisional certification than the teachers who were at those schools before the intervention.”36

Conclusion
At present, the data reviewed in this research brief does not support Chicago Public Schools’ claim that closures are a viable solution to the current issues in the district. Instead, their greatest potential is to inflict deeper harm on African American and Latino/a communities. In addition to the current issues of privatization (via charter school
expansion) and displacement, massive school closings
are poised to continue the legacy of mass displacement, marginalization and isolation of low-income communities of color in Chicago. Contributing to our concern is the revelation by the Chicago Sun-Times that Tom Tyrell, a former Marine colonel whose military credentials include hostage negotiation in the war in Kosovo, has been appointed by CPS as the official in charge of administering school closings. As CReATE, we are charged to pose the following question: If CPS has hired a former military official to administer school closings, what is the assumption of the central office regarding the potential of conflict if the closures are implemented? In so doing, we predict a heavy-handed response from law enforcement if the current closures, which do not even serve their stated purposes, are implemented.

Notes

1 de La Torre, M., & Gwynne, J. (2009). When schools
close: Effects on displaced students in Chicago Public Schools. Chicago, IL: Consortium on Chicago School Research. Accessed at http://ccsr.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/ publications /CCSRSchoolClosings-Final.pdf; Engberg, J., Epple, D., Gill, B., & Sieg, H. (March, 2011). Closing schools in a shrinking district: Does student performance depend on which schools are closed? Conference presentation at the American Education Finance and Policy Conference, Seattle, Washington. Accessed at http://www.sree.org/ conferences/2011/program/downloads/abstracts/34.pdf.
2 de La Torre & Gwynne, 2009.
3 de la Torre, M., Allensworth, E., Jagesic, S., Sebastian, J.,
Salmonowicz, M., Meyers, C., & Gerdeman, R. D. (2012). Turning around low-performing schools in Chicago. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research and American Institutes for Research.
4 Ibid., p. 2.
5 Kirshner, B., Gaertner, M., & Pozzoboni, K. (2010). Tracing
transitions. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 32(3), 407-429; Lipman, P. (2011). The new political economy of urban education: Neoliberalism, race, and the right to the city. New York, NY: Routledge.
6 Sunderman, G. L. & Payne, A. (2009). Does closing schools cause educational harm? Information Brief for the Mid- Atlantic Equity Center.
7 Dowdall, E. (2011). Closing public schools in Philadelphia: Lessons from six urban districts. Philadelphia, PA: Pew Charitable Trust Philadelphia Research Initiative. Retrieved from http://www.pewtrusts.org/uploadedFiles/ wwwpewtrustsorg/Reports/Philadelphia_Research_Initiative/ Closing-Public-Schools-Philadelphia.pdf; de La Torre & Gwynne, 2009; Kirshner et. al, 2010; Lipman, 2011.
8 Kirshner et. al, 2010.
9 Lewis, K. (2013, January 28). Extra! Extra! The curious tale of
the CPS “press release” budget [Web log post]. Accessed at http://www.ctunet.com/blog/extra-extra-the-curious-tale-of- the-cps-press-release-budget
10 Lutton, L., & Vevea, B. (2012, December 10). Truth squad: Enrollment down in CPS, but not by much. WBEZ. Accessed at http://www.wbez.org/news/truth-squad-enrollment-down- cps-not-much-104297
Disinvestment in public schools and empty buildings will deepen the hardship confronting neighborhoods already suffering from community disinvestment and may contribute to even further population loss of African Americans in Chicago. For example, WBEZ aggregated data on abandoned properties, city-owned vacant lots, and community area census figures from the city’s data portal site, and mapped them on top of the locations of the schools targeted for potential closure.32 They found that school closures directly correspond to the locations of troubled mortgages, foreclosures, and population loss. Closing neighborhood schools will discourage people from moving back into these disinvested communities. Furthermore, closures may exacerbate tensions between communities and lead to violence. Since 2004, school closures that transfer students to schools outside their immediate neighborhoods have resulted in spikes of violence in and around elementary and high schools.33 We strongly caution policy makers to consider the added stressors that closures bring to these communities.
School closures also disproportionately impact African American teachers. The Chicago Teachers Union reports that African Americans made up nearly 40% of all CPS teachers in the 1990s. By 2012, that proportion was reduced to under 20%.34 In previous rounds of Chicago school closings, 65% of the teachers displaced were African American women.35 A 2012 report by the Consortium
on Chicago School Research on school closings and turnarounds determined that, “The teacher workforce after intervention across all models was more likely to be white, younger, and less experienced, and was more likely to have provisional certification than the teachers who were at those schools before the intervention.”36

Conclusion

At present, the data reviewed in this research brief does not support Chicago Public Schools’ claim that closures are a viable solution to the current issues in the district. Instead, their greatest potential is to inflict deeper harm on African American and Latino/a communities. In addition to the current issues of privatization (via charter school expansion) and displacement, massive school closings
are poised to continue the legacy of mass displacement, marginalization and isolation of low-income communities of color in Chicago. Contributing to our concern is the revelation by the Chicago Sun-Times that Tom Tyrell,
a former Marine colonel whose military credentials include hostage negotiation in the war in Kosovo, has been appointed by CPS as the official in charge of administering school closings. As CReATE, we are charged to pose the following question: If CPS has hired a former military official to administer school closings, what is the assumption of the central office regarding the potential of conflict if the closures are implemented? In so doing, we predict a heavy-handed response from law enforcement if the current closures, which do not even serve their stated purposes, are implemented.

Notes

1 de La Torre, M., & Gwynne, J. (2009). When schools
close: Effects on displaced students in Chicago Public Schools. Chicago, IL: Consortium on Chicago School Research. Accessed at http://ccsr.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/ publications /CCSRSchoolClosings-Final.pdf; Engberg, J., Epple, D., Gill, B., & Sieg, H. (March, 2011). Closing schools in a shrinking district: Does student performance depend on which schools are closed? Conference presentation at the American Education Finance and Policy Conference, Seattle, Washington. Accessed at http://www.sree.org/ conferences/2011/program/downloads/abstracts/34.pdf.
2 de La Torre & Gwynne, 2009.
3 de la Torre, M., Allensworth, E., Jagesic, S., Sebastian, J.,
Salmonowicz, M., Meyers, C., & Gerdeman, R. D. (2012). Turning around low-performing schools in Chicago. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research and American Institutes for Research.
4 Ibid., p. 2.
5 Kirshner, B., Gaertner, M., & Pozzoboni, K. (2010). Tracing
transitions. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 32(3), 407-429; Lipman, P. (2011). The new political economy of urban education: Neoliberalism, race, and the right to the city. New York, NY: Routledge.
6 Sunderman, G. L. & Payne, A. (2009). Does closing schools cause educational harm? Information Brief for the Mid- Atlantic Equity Center.
7 Dowdall, E. (2011). Closing public schools in Philadelphia: Lessons from six urban districts. Philadelphia, PA: Pew Charitable Trust Philadelphia Research Initiative. Retrieved from http://www.pewtrusts.org/uploadedFiles/ wwwpewtrustsorg/Reports/Philadelphia_Research_Initiative/ Closing-Public-Schools-Philadelphia.pdf; de La Torre & Gwynne, 2009; Kirshner et. al, 2010; Lipman, 2011.
8 Kirshner et. al, 2010.
9 Lewis, K. (2013, January 28). Extra! Extra! The curious tale of
the CPS “press release” budget [Web log post]. Accessed at http://www.ctunet.com/blog/extra-extra-the-curious-tale-of- the-cps-press-release-budget
10 Lutton, L., & Vevea, B. (2012, December 10). Truth squad: Enrollment down in CPS, but not by much. WBEZ. Accessed at http://www.wbez.org/news/truth-squad-enrollment-down- cps-not-much-104297

11 Dowdall, E., & Warner, S. (2013). Shuttered public schools: The struggle to bring old buildings new life. Philadelphia, PA: The Pew Charitable Trust Philadelphia Research Initiative.
12 Dowdall, E. (2011). Closing public schools in Philadelphia: Lessons from six urban districts. Philadelphia, PA: Pew Charitable Trust Philadelphia Research Initiative. Accessed
at http://www.pewtrusts.org/uploadedFiles/wwwpewtrustsorg/ Reports/Philadelphia_ Research_Initiative/Closing-Public- Schools-Philadelphia.pdf
13 Office of the D.C. Auditor. (2012). Audit of the closure and consolidation of 23 D.C. public schools. September 6.
14 Kattan, W. (2013). Letter to Barbara Byrd-Bennett. Raise Your Hand. Accessed at http://ilraiseyourhand.org/content/ letter-barbara-byrd-bennett
15 Krueger, A. B. (1999). Experimental estimates of education production functions. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 115(2), 497–532.
16 Krueger, 1999; Nye, B., Hedges, L. V., & Konstantopoulos, S. (2000). Do the disadvantaged benefit from the small classes? Evidence from the Tennessee class size experiment. American Journal of Education, 109, 1–26.
17 Vevea, B., Lutton, L., & Karp, S. (2013, January 15).
Map: 40 percent of closed schools now privately run.
Catalyst Chicago. Accessed at http://www.catalyst-chicago. org/news/2013/01/15/20741/map-40-percent-closed-schools- now-privately-run
18 Lipman, 2011.
19 Caref, C., Hainds, S., Hilgendorf, K., Jankov, P., & Russell,
K., (2013). The black and white of education in Chicago’s public schools. Report for the Chicago Teachers Union. Ac cessed at http://www.ctunet.com/blog/the-black-and-white- of-education-in-chicagos-public-schools
20 Ibid.
21 The Pew Charitable Trusts, 2013.
22 de la Torre et al., 2012.
23 Caref et al., 2013.
24 Lutton & Vevea, 2012.
25 As Lutton and Vevea (2012) show, although the City of
Chicago has experienced population loss, a higher percentage of Chicago kids are attending CPS schools: from 69% of all Chicago children attending CPS in 2000 to 79% of all Chicago children attending CPS in 2010.
26 Libby, K., & Karp, S. (2012, August 21). Broad Foundation’s plan to expand influence in school reform. Washington Post. Accessed at http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer- sheet/post/broad-foundationsplan-to-expand-influence- in-school-reform/2012/08/20/c118e134-eb0a-11e1-b811- 09036bcb182b_blog.html
27 Raise Your Hand. (2013). Right-sizing the district: A page out of the 2009 Broad Foundation Handbook [Web log post]. Accessed at http://ilraiseyourhand.org/node/2363
28 Karp, S. (2013, January 30). For the record: Walton Foundation funds community engagement. Catalyst Chicago. Accessed at http://www.catalyst-chicago.org/ notebook/2013/01/30/20778/record-walton-foundation- funds-community-engagement
29 Fleming, J., Greenlee, A., Gutstein, E., Lipman, P., & Smith, J. (2009). Examining CPS’ plan to close, phase out, consolidate, and turn-around 22 schools (Paper #2). Data and Democracy Project: Investing in Neighborhoods.
Chicago, IL: Collaborative for Equity and Justice in Education, College of Education, University of Illinois Chicago.
30 Caref et al., 2013.
31 Fitzpatrick, L., & Golab, A. (2013, March 6). Black students
most likely to have their school on CPS closure list. Chicago Sun-Times.
32 Ramos, E. (2013, February 18). Which comes first? Closed schools or blighted neighborhoods? WBEZ. Accessed at http://www.wbez.org/news/which-comes-first-closed-schools- or-blighted-neighborhoods-105511
33 Fleming et al., 2009. 34 Caref et al., 2013.
35 Caref et al., 2013.
36 de la Torre et al., 2012.

FOR MORE INFORMATION ON CReATE reports, activities, or membership, please contact createchicago@gmail.com

This briefing paper was prepared by Stephanie Farmer, Isaura Pulido, Pamela J. Konkol, Kate Phillippo, David Stovall and Mike Klonsky.

CReATE

Public education in a democratic society is based on the principle that every child is of equal and incalculable value. This guiding principle requires the fullest development of every member
of our nation. Effective public schools are necessary to enable every member of our nation to reach his or her fullest potential. Schools in a democracy aim to prepare the next generation to
be knowledgeable and informed citizens and residents; to be critical thinkers and creative problem solvers; to be prepared to contribute positively to communities, workplaces, and societies that are characterized by diversity and inequities; and to be healthy, happy, and prepared to support the well-being of others with compassion and courage. The children and youth of Chicago deserve no less.
CReATE, a volunteer group of Chicago-area education researchers, conducts, reviews, and distributes studies to address the needs of our students, parents and schools, and promotes citywide learning and dialogue about educational issues through free public events. CReATE partners with educators, public interest groups and community-based organizations. Our university-based scholars and educational workers are available for comment and discussion on topics raised here and in our policy statement, available online at: http://createchicago.blogspot.com

Categories Charter Schools, Chicago, Closing schools, Corporate Reformers, Emanuel, Rahm, Privatization, Students

Open Letter from Parents to NYC Chancellor

By dianeravitch
March 20, 2013 //
16

Parents in NYC called on Chancellor Dennis Walcott to pledge not to use this year’s tests to punish students, teachers, or schools.

Change the Stakes (www.changethestakes.org), an activist group comprised of parents, teachers and teacher educators – argues that this year’s tests are so fundamentally flawed that the scores should not be used. Here’s our letter to the Chancellor:

OPEN LETTER TO CHANCELLOR WALCOTT

By Change the Stakes

March 20, 2013

Dear Chancellor Walcott,

In four weeks, public school children across New York City will begin two weeks of intensive, high-stakes standardized testing. Change the Stakes – an organization of parents and educators committed to replacing such tests with more meaningful forms of assessment – urges you to publicly pledge that scores from this year’s state English Language Arts (ELA) and math tests will not be used to penalize students, teachers or schools. The upcoming testing cycle represents an unprecedented grand experiment: the exams, and the standards on which they are based, are new and untested.

Educators, parents and students alike are painfully aware that this is a “transitional year” in the state testing program. Two years ago, New York State adopted its own version of the new national education standards known as the “Common Core” and this year’s tests are the first to be aligned with them. Not only are the standards new and unproven, the heart of the program – the curriculum – is still being developed. Teachers haven’t been given sufficient time to transition students to the new learning standards, yet children are being tested on them next month anyway.

You yourself acknowledge the serious challenges inherent in using scores from the looming April 2013 exams to assess student performance – and presumably, by extension, the performance of teachers and schools. In a recent letter to parents, you state:

“In past years, decisions about summer school were made based on estimates of each student’s performance level on the State tests: 1, 2, 3, or 4. This year, because the tests are new, we cannot predict how the State will determine performance levels.”

If the purpose of your letter was to reassure parents, you did not succeed. As far as we can tell, the letter has had the opposite effect by setting off alarms among parents who weren’t already focused on the sweeping changes taking place. Another Department of Education (DOE) document developed for parents, Tips for Talking with Your Elementary School Child about the Common Core Standards & Changing State Tests, is even more disturbing: it says that young children should be told to expect school work and tests to be more difficult this year and that feelings of struggle, anxiety and nervousness are common reactions. These new pressures are likely to be particularly onerous for English Language Learners.

In short, the DOE has acknowledged the harmful nature of the abrupt transition to the Common Core – in a year when schools and families also endured a devastating hurricane, a bus strike and a mass elementary school shooting in a nearby community – and yet offers only platitudes about how to help children, parents and educators cope.

Given the poorly managed phase-in of the Common Core and the experimental nature of this year’s assessments, we call for you to immediately and publicly announce that:

§ All student promotion decisions will be made on the basis of a range of indicators, including a review of a substantive portfolio of work representative of a child’s academic progress throughout the year.

§ Teachers will not be evaluated on the results of this year’s tests as the scores are not comparable to last year’s.

§ School Progress Reports, which are almost entirely based on student test scores, will be either suspended or significantly changed to incorporate additional evidence of student achievement. No schools will be closed using this year’s test scores.

§ Parents have a right to opt their children out of the tests, as Deputy Chancellor Shael Polakow-Suransky has publicly stated, and the DOE will put in writing procedures about how to do so.

It is unacceptable for city students, teachers and schools to be judged by the results of these new exams, which are unpredictable by your own admission, especially when other means of assessment already exist.

The time has come for the DOE to finally acknowledge and respond to the growing concerns among public school parents about high-stakes testing. The current direction of policies and practices MUST change.

Sincerely,

The Members of Change the Stakes

http://www.changethestakes.org

Categories New York City, Parents, Testing

How to Beat VAM

By dianeravitch
March 20, 2013 //
43

A teacher writes:

I went to a meeting today and had my eyes opened – WIDE. As a teacher at a ruraL schoo, we are a little behind on this VAM thing. Needless to say at district wide meetings I get to meet teachers from all over, some from much larger suburban districts. They already have their pay based on students’ and the school’s improvement on tests.
WELL, the teachers have figured the whole student improvement thing out- DISTRACT THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS OUT OF THE STUDENTS DURING THE BEGINNING OF THE YEAR TEST – Yep, that is exactly what many of them are doing. Play music, talk on the phone, talk to other teachers very loudly, clean the room…do what ever you can to lower your students scores at the beginning and then have a silent, well ordered room, with hints everywhere at the end of the year, Success. The test isn’t fair, why should teachers have to play fair

Categories Teacher Evaluations

Gary Rubinstein: TFA Propaganda Videos

By dianeravitch
March 20, 2013 //
40

This is one of Gary Rubinstein’s most powerful posts.

He analyzes a series of TFA videos that are shameless propaganda for the view that high expectations overcome poverty and that TFA has cracked the secret code of education.

This sort of rhetoric reveals the basic sin of TFA. The organization encourages policymakers to believe that they don’t need to do anything to reduce poverty. Maybe that’s why the corporate giants and rightwing foundations such as Walton love TFA.

No new taxes, just higher expectations from teachers with five weeks of training.

Categories Poverty, Teach for America TFA

Ten Ways to Tell If You Are a Transphormer

By dianeravitch
March 20, 2013 //
0

EduShyster has developed a list of 10 signs of a real, true Transphormer. You know, the ones who are so motivated to arrange the lives of other people’s children that they can’t wait to get their parents’ okay. The ones who are so gripped by a sense of urgency that they feel called to close schools in poor communities and fire the staff without a moment’s delay, even though the students and parents beg them not to do it.

Categories Administrators, superintendents, Alabama, Alternate Route To Certification, Closing schools, Corporate Reformers

Is NECAP a Valid Test for Graduation?

By dianeravitch
March 20, 2013 //
4

A reader sends this information about the Néw England assessment:

In terms of cut scores, this data from New Hampshire puts things in perspective:

2010-2011 graduation rate: 86% (3rd in US)
2011 Science and Engineering Readiness Index (SERI) ranking: 4th in US

2011 NAEP Mathematics:
4th grade scale score state rank: 2nd
4th grade % of students below basic: 8% (2nd)
8th grade scale score state rank: 6th
8th grade % of students below basic: 18% (4th)

2009 NAEP 11th Grade Mathematics Pilot (of 11 participating states)
Scale score state rank: 2nd of 11
% of students scoring below basic: 26% (3rd)

2012 NECAP Mathematics
4th grade % of students substantially below proficient: 8%
8th grade % of students substantially below proficient: 15%
11th grade % of students substantially below proficient: 36%

Percentage of current New Hampshire high school juniors who would be at risk of not graduating under Rhode Island’s 2014 requirements: 36%

Categories Testing

How to Make Big Bucks as a Teacher

By dianeravitch
March 20, 2013 //
19

Teachers at a charter school in Louisiana received eye-popping bonuses.

One got a bonus of $43,000–more than 75% of her annual salary–for raising test scores by 88% in one year.

Five teachers shared bonuses of $167,000,

The money comes from a federal grant.

One teacher saw a gain of nearly 200%, but she teaches kindergarten, so she received only $4,086.

The school got a grade of D from the state. Last year, it was D-.

The scores, the grades, the gains, the bonuses. Are the children better educated? Who knows?

In other districts, gains of this size usually are grounds for an investigation. But this is Louisiana, so forget about it.

Categories Louisiana, Merit pay

Sgouros to Gist: If I Am Wrong, Tell Me Why

By dianeravitch
March 20, 2013 //
11

As we saw in the previous postTom Sgouros explained in detail why it was wrong for Rhode Island to use the NECAP as a graduation requirement. It was not designed for that purpose, and many students will fail who should have passed.

State Commissioner of Education Deborah Gist said Sgouros was wrong because he is not a psychometrician. She did not explain why he was wrong, not did she understand that psychometricians would likely agree with Sgouros. The cardinal rule of testing is that tests should be used only for the purpose for which they were designed.

Here is Sgouros’ account (if I hear from Gist, I will print hers):

Gist Offers Logical Fallacies On NECAP Value

By Tom Sgouros on March 20, 2013

I was on the radio ever so briefly this afternoon, on Buddy Cianci’s show with Deborah Gist. Unfortunately, the show’s producer hadn’t actually invited me so I had no idea until it had been underway for an hour. I gather they had a lively conversation that involved belittling the concerns about the NECAP test that I expressed here.

While I was on hold, I had to get on a bus in order not to leave my daughter waiting for me in the snow. Then Buddy said the bus was too loud but he’d invite me back on. So I was only on for about five minutes, long enough to hear Gist say I may be good at math, but I’m no psychometrician.

Guilty as charged, but somewhat beside the point.

I’ve heard the commissioner speak in public in a few different ways since I published my letter last week. She tweeted about it a couple of times last week and over the weekend. She was quoted in the paper this morning about how it was an “outrageous act of irresponsibility” for adults to take the NECAP 11th grade math test at the Providence Student Union event on Saturday. And today she spent a while on the WPRO airwaves insulting me.

But I have yet to hear any of the points I’ve made taken on directly.

Only what is called the argument from authority: I’m education commissioner and you’re not. Or in this case: I’m education commissioner, and you’re not a psychometrician.

As a style of public argument, this is highly effective, especially if salted with a pinch of condescension. It typically has the effect of shutting down debate right there because after all, who are you to question authority so?

The problem is if you believe, as I do, that policy actually matters, this is a dangerous course to take.

After all, the real point of any policy discussion is not scoring debate points, but finding solutions to the problems that beset us. This is a highly imperfect world we live in, filled with awful problems, some of which we can only address collectively. If you don’t get the policy right, here’s what happens: the problems don’t get solved. Frequently, bad policy makes the problems worse, no matter how many debate points you scored, or how effectively you shut up your opponent.

So, do I care that Deborah Gist thinks I’m an inadequate excuse for a psychometrician? It turns out that, upon deep and lingering introspection, I can say with confidence that I do not. But I do care about the state of math education in Rhode Island, and I believe she has us on a course that will only damage the goal she claims to share with me.

Now I may be wrong about my NECAP concerns, but nothing I’ve learned in the past week has made me less confident in my assessment. On the one hand, I’ve seen vigorous denunciations of the PSU efforts, and mine, none of which have actually addressed the points I’ve raised. These are specific points, easily addressed. On the flip side, I’ve quietly heard from current and former RIDE employees that my concerns are theirs, but the policy is or was not in their hands.

Those points again: there are a few different ways to design a test. You can make a test to determine whether a student has mastered a body of knowledge; you can make a test to rank students against each other; you can make a test to rank students against each other referenced to a particular body of knowledge. I imagine there are lots of other ways to think about testing, but those are the ones in wide use. The first is a subject-matter test, like the French Baccalaureate or the New York State Regents exams. The second is a norm-referenced test like the SAT or GRE, where there are no absolute scores and all students are simply graded against each other on a fairly abstract standard. NECAP is in a third category, where it ranks students, but against a more concrete standard. The Massachusetts MCAS is pretty much the same deal, though it seems to range more widely over subject matter.

The problem comes when you imagine that these are pretty much interchangeable. After all, they all have questions, they all make students sweat, and they all require a number two pencil. How different could they be?

Answer: pretty different. If your goal is ranking students, you choose questions that separate one student from another. You design the test so that the resulting distribution of test scores is wide, which is another way to say that lots of students will flunk such a test. If your goal is assessing whether students have mastered a body of knowledge, the test designer won’t care nearly so much about the resulting distribution of scores, only that the knowledge tested be representative of the field. (The teacher will care about the distribution, of course, since it’s a measure of how well the subject has been taught.) The rest was explained in my post last week.

The real question is, if you don’t know what the NECAP is measuring, why exactly might you think that it’s a good thing to rely on it so heavily as a graduation requirement?

Deborah Gist is hardly the first person to call me wrong about something. That happens all the time, as it does for anybody who writes for the public about policy. But like so many others who claim I am wrong, she refuses to say — or cannot say — why.

Categories Testing

Why NECAP Should Not Be Used as a Graduation Test

By dianeravitch
March 20, 2013 //
6

Tom Sgouros, an engineer, wrote an open letter to the chair of the Rhode Island Department of Education, explaining succinctly why NECAP should not be used as a graduation test. It was not designed for that purpose. It will fail students who deserve to pass.

Anyone who reads and understands this letter will recognize that using NECAP for a graduation test is educational malpractice. If they persist in the face of clear evidence to harm children, they should resign or be fired.

The open letter:

Open Letter About NECAP To Eva Mancuso

By Tom Sgouros on March 14, 2013

Eva Marie Mancuso, Chair,
Rhode Island Board of Education,
Rhode Island Department of Education,
225 Westminster Street,
Providence RI 02903

Dear Ms. Mancuso:

I read with interest in this morning’s news about the Providence School Board’s suggestion to the Board that you not rely on the NECAP test as a graduation requirement. I would like to second that suggestion, and offer some words of explanation that I believe have been largely absent from the debate until now.

The Providence board points out that the NECAP test was “not designed” to be a graduation requirement. That is quite true, but few go on to say why that makes it inappropriate to use as performance threshold for graduating students.

First, a little about me. I have worked as a freelance engineer and policy analyst for 30 years, and both occupations have required me to acquire an expertise in statistics. I speak not as a statistical layman, but as an expert hoping to translate important concepts for people who may not have deep familiarity with p-values and confidence intervals. I do not wish to condescend, but I am afraid that some basic statistical concepts have not been well understood by policy makers in the past, and consequently decisions have been made that are deeply damaging to our students, and to education in Rhode Island generally.

The important point I wish the board members to understand is what exactly is the difference between a test like NECAP, designed to rank schools and students, and a test designed to evaluate student proficiency. The short version: when you design a test like NECAP, test designers ensure that a certain number of students will flunk. What’s more, for the purposes of the test designers, that’s a good thing.

Here’s the longer version. The original goal of NECAP was to evaluate schools, and, to some extent, students within the schools. In order to make a reliable ranking among schools, you need to ensure that the differences between one school and another (or one student and another) is statistically significant. This is simply how you ensure that the rankings are the result of real differences between schools, and not the result of chance.

A traditional test, such as the final exam a teacher might give to her class at the end of the term, will likely enough have a distribution of grades that looks something like the graph below. (I use a class size of 5000 here. This is obviously a lot of students for a single class, but only a fraction of the number who take the NECAP tests.)

Suppose the teacher set the passing grade at 70, then about 4% of her students failed the class. That’s a shame, but it’s not unusual, and those students will have to take the class again or take the test again or whatever. If the goal is to see which of the students in the class have properly understood the material, this is a useful result.

But if the goal was to rank the students’ performance, this result won’t help much. A very large number of students scored between 80 and 84. In the graph, 1200 students, a quarter of the population, have almost the same score, and 6% of them have exactly the same score, 83. How can you rank them?

Furthermore, like any other measurement, a test score has an inherent error. For any individual student, a teacher can have little confidence that a student who scored an 80 didn’t deserve an 84 because of a bad day, a careless mistake, or, worse, someone else’s error: a misunderstood instruction, an incomplete erasure, or a grading mistake. Of course, any errors could also move the score in the other direction.

The problem is that moving a student’s score from 80 to 84 moves the student from the 18th percentile to the 38th, a huge jump. In other words, a test score might rank a student in the 18th percentile, but one can have no confidence that he or she didn’t belong in the 38th — or the 5th. Conversely, a student in the 92d percentile might really belong in the 69th or the 99th, depending on the same four-point error.

The designers of tests understand this, and so try to avoid ranking students based on the results of tests that give distributions like the above. Instead, they try to design tests so the distribution of scores looks more like the one here:

With a test that gives results like this, there are many fewer students in most of the score ranges here. Assuming the same level of error, you can be much more sure that a student who scored in some percentile belongs there, or nearby. With the same four-point error as above, you can be confident — in the statistical sense — that a student who scored in the 18th percentile on this test belongs somewhere in between the 14th and 22d percentiles, a much smaller range. A student in the 92d percentile belongs somewhere between the 89th and 95th percentile.

In other words, if a test designer wants to rank students, or schools, he or she designs the test to spread the scores out. You don’t want scores to be bunched up. This is confirmed by details provided in the technical manuals that document the test design process. For example, in section 5.1 of the NECAP 2011-2012 technical report (“Classical Difficulty and Discrimination Indices”)

“Items that are answered correctly by almost all students provide little information about differences in student abilities, but do indicate knowledge or skills that have been mastered by most students. Similarly, items that are correctly answered by very few students provide little information about differences in student abilities, but may indicate knowledge or skills that have not yet been mastered by most students.”

This section goes on to discuss how the designers evaluate test items for their capacity to discriminate among students, and demonstrates that most of the questions used in the various NECAP tests do exactly that. In other words, very few of the questions are correctly answered by all students. In Appendix F of the 2011-12 manual, you can see some item-level analyses. There, one can read that, of the 22 test questions analyzed, there are no questions on the 11th grade math test correctly answered by more than 80% of students, and only nine out of 22 were correctly answered by more than half the students.

Contrast this with the other kind of test design. In the first graph above, even the students who flunked the test would have answered around 60% of the questions correctly. The NECAP designers would deem those questions to “provide little information about differences in student abilities.” According to this theory of test design, such questions are a waste of time, except to the extent that they might be included to “ensure sufficient content coverage.” Put another way, if all the students in a grade answered all the questions properly, the NECAP designers would consider that test to be flawed and redesign it so that doesn’t happen. Much of the technical manual, especially chapters 5 and 6 (and most of the appendices), are devoted to demonstrating that the NECAP test is not flawed in this way. Again, the NECAP test is specifically designed to flunk a substantial proportion of students who take it, though this is admittedly a crude way to put it.

11th Grade Math Before leaving the subject of students flunking the NECAP tests, it’s worth taking a moment to consider the 11th grade math test specifically. Once the NECAP test was designed, the NECAP designers convened panels of educators to determine the “cut scores” to be used to delineate “proficiency.” The process is described in appendices to the technical manual:

Standard

Grades 5–8, in Appendix D, 2005-06 report
Grade 11, in Appendix F, 2007-08 report
Grades 5 & 8 Writing in Appendix M, 2010-11 report

After consulting these appendices, you will see that — at the time they were chosen — the cut scores for the 11th grade math test put 46.5% of all test takers in the “substantially below proficient” category (see page 19 of Appendix F 2007-08). This is almost four times as many students as were in that category for the 11th grade reading test and more than twice as many for any other NECAP test in the other grades.

There is no reason to think that the discussions among the panels that came up with these cut scores were not sincere, nor to think that the levels chosen not appropriate. However, it is worth noting that the tests occur almost two years before a student’s graduation, and that math education proceeds in a fundamentally different way than reading. That is, anyone who can read at all can make a stab at reading material beyond their grade level, but you can’t solve a quadratic equation halfway.

Rather than providing a measure of student competence on graduation, the test might instead be providing a measurement of the pace of math education in the final two years of high school. The NECAP test designers would doubtless be able to design questions or testing protocols to differentiate between a good student who hasn’t hit the material yet, or a poor student who shouldn’t graduate, but they were not tasked with doing that, and so did not.

Testing

To be quite clear, I am not an opponent of testing, nor even an opponent of high- stakes testing. The current testing regime has produced a backlash against testing in a general way, but this is a case where bad policy has produced bad politics. It’s hard to imagine running something as complex as a school department in the absence of some kind of indicator of how well one is running it. Since educated students are the output, it is crucial to the success of the overall enterprise that we find some way to measure progress in improving that level of education.

Similarly, high-stakes graduation tests are hardly anathema. Over the past half-century, the entire nation of France has done very well with a high-stakes test at high school graduation. Closer to home, the New York State Regents’ tests are a model that many other states would do well to copy. There is nothing wrong with “teaching to the test” when the test is part of a well-designed and interesting curriculum.

However, if evaluation of progress is the goal, and if you want an accurate measurement of how well a school is doing, there is a vast body of evidence available to say that high stakes testing won’t provide that. When there are severe professional consequences for teachers and school administrators whose classes and schools perform badly on tests, you guarantee that the tests will provide only a cloudy indication of a school’s progress. Teaching to the test is only one of the possible sins. School systems across the country have seen cheating scandals, as well as such interesting strategies as manipulating school lunch menus to improve test performance. In other words, raising the stakes of a test almost certainly makes the test a worse indicator of the very things it is supposed to measure.

Furthermore, a sensible evaluation regime would be minimally intrusive, and take only a small amount of time away from instruction. After all, testing time is time during which no instruction happens. But the imposition of high stakes have rendered that nearly impossible, so instead, we have tests that disrupt several weeks of classes in most school districts, not to mention the disruption to the curriculum it has caused.

Unfortunately for the students of Rhode Island, our state has tried to take the easy way out, and use a test designed for evaluation to serve many purposes. Today, the NECAP test affects the careers of students, teachers, and administrators. It is used in a high-stakes way which guarantees that it is an inaccurate indicator of the very things it is supposed to measure. It is used for purposes far beyond its original design, producing perfectly needless pain and heartbreak across the state.

Worst of all, none of this is news to education professionals. They know how to read technical manuals and to sort through statistical exegeses of test results. They know about the harm done to students by cutting electives to focus on improving reading results. They know about the other corners cut to try to improve test results at all costs. They know that we don’t abuse the NECAP test in order to help students. They know we did this strictly to save money.

I urge you and the new education board to reconsider the state’s use — and abuse — of the NECAP test. It could be a valuable tool with which to understand how to improve education in our state. Unfortunately, poor decisions made in the past have done much to undermine that value, to our state’s detriment, and that of all the students in our schools.

Yours sincerely,

Tom Sgouros

Rating: 10.0/10 (2 votes cast)

Related posts:
NECAP Grad Requirement Trumps Good Grades
Students Call On Chafee To Stop High Stakes Tests
Protest High-Stakes Testing Wednesday At State House
Why High Stakes Tests Shouldn’t Grade Students
Why you can’t simply can’t trust Education Reformers with the facts
Posted in Education, Featured | Tagged Education, gist, mancuso, necap, tsgouros | 5 Responses

Tom Sgouros
Tom Sgouros is a freelance engineer, policy analyst, and writer. Reach him at ripr@whatcheer.net. Buy his book, “Ten Things You Don’t Know About Rhode Island” at whatcheer.net
5 responses to “Open Letter About NECAP To Eva Mancuso”

tom_hoffman March 14, 2013 at 10:51 am | Permalink | Log in to reply.
Good work, Tom. I hadn’t dug into how the cut scores were set, but it is plainly obvious from the results across three states that the 11th grade math is just way, way, harder to pass than the rest of the tests.

Rating: 0 (from 0 votes)

Walt48 March 14, 2013 at 2:18 pm | Permalink | Log in to reply.
I am afraid. Why do I think that we now have a Queen Ghidorah that devoured Rhode Island at hand (Raimondo, Gist and Mancuso)?

Bill Daly March 14, 2013 at 3:44 pm | Permalink | Log in to reply.
Tom, thank you for a well reasoned analysis. School Committees throughout the state should follow the example of the Providence School Committee and register their disatisfaction with the statistically flawed NECAP test. As you point out it was never designed by the test developers to serve as a graduation requirement.

leekhat March 15, 2013 at 8:56 am | Permalink | Log in to reply.
A great letter. I did not know some of that information, but, as an educator who is experiencing some of the pain of state ed reform initiatives, I will be educating all who will listen about NECAP test design and it’s intended use. I am also relieved that the Providence School Committee is confronting this issue and also hope that other school committees give this some thought.
Mark Williams
NKHS

Beleaguered Teacher March 17, 2013 at 11:12 am | Permalink | Log in to reply.
Thank you, Mr. Sgouros, for a cogent and coherent explanation. It gives me hope to know that there are individuals out there do who, indeed, “get it”. May I respectfully suggest that you share it with the newspapers, in order to reach a wider audience?

Categories Students, Testing
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