Jose Vilson is one of New York City’s best teacher
bloggers. In
this post, he notes that Mayor Bloomberg experienced two
major setbacks within a matter of days: First, his education legacy
collapsed along with the new state test scores showing that most
students are “failing.” The Mayor felt compelled to defend the
lower scores, calling them “very good news,” when he should have
been calling foul play. Second, a federal judge said that the
Mayor’s prized policy of allowing police to “stop and frisk” anyone
at any time was unconstitutional, and ordered that the Police
Department must be monitored to see that it carries out stops in a
legal manner, one that is not racially discriminatory. Vilson
brilliantly connects these two seemingly disparate results. He
could not believe that most of his own students had “failed” and he
was suspicious of just how high the bar was raised and whether it
made any sense. Time to stop and frisk the test scores, not young
men who happen to be black or Hispanic and minding their own
business. For a terrific round-up of the best blogs about New York
State’s testing fiasco, read
Larry Ferlazzo’s roundup. Larry is a master cataloguer of
all things education.
Aaron Pallas is one of the wisest education scholars in New York, and therefore (as we New Yorkers all believe) in the world.
He consistently brings a fresh perspective to the unfolding drama and spectacle that is now U.S. education.
And he is one of the few academics willing to enter the arena and engage with current events.
That is one of the clear benefits of tenure.
In this post, Pallas says that he predicted--with uncanny accuracy–how proficiency rates would change as a result of the Common Core tests.
He also notes the incomprehensible glee with which Joel Klein and Mayor Bloomberg reacted to the news that only one in five students of color are considered “proficient” after a full decade of their policies.
As he observes, Mayor Bloomberg sees everything on his watch as good news, whether scores go up, stay the same, or go down.
Pallas writes:
Here’s the dirty little secret: no one truly understands the numbers. We are behaving as though the sorting of students into four proficiency categories based on a couple of days of tests tells us something profound about our schools, our teachers and our children. There are many links in the chain of inference that can carry us from those few days in April to claims about the health of our school system or the effectiveness of our teachers. And many of those links have yet to be scrutinized.
Does Mayor Bloomberg understand the numbers? Perhaps he’d care to share with us the percentage of children in each grade who ran out of time and didn’t attempt all of the test items, and the consequences of that for students’ scores. Or how well the pattern of students’ answers fit the complex psychometric models used to estimate a student’s proficiency. Or how precisely a child’s scale score measures his or her performance. Or how many test items had to be discarded because they didn’t work the way they were intended. Or what fraction of the Common Core standards was included on this year’s English and math tests—and what was left out.
These are just some of the factors in the production of the proficiency rates that have been the subject of so much attention. And the properties of the test are just one link in the chain.
Hmmm. When no one understands the numbers, not the Mayor who is in charge of the schools, not the scholars who study the schools, not the State Education Department, no one: What does that mean?
After much deliberation, I have decided to support Bill de Blasio for mayor of New York City.
I thought long and hard, because I know and respect some of the other candidates.
I issued the following statement to the de Blasio campaign.
Gary Rubinstein here
analyzes the unimpressive showing by Democracy Prep on
the recent disastrous Common Core tests in New York State. He takes
apart the effort by Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham
Institute to rationalize the poor performance of the
much-ballyhooed charter chain. Gary writes, “The hardest
thing about trying to have an intellectual debate with ‘reformers’
is every time they start to lose, they try to change the
rules. First they say “poverty doesn’t matter”
and when it becomes clear that it does, they start saying “Well, it
matters, but we still need to make schools as good as possible and
standardized test accountability is the best way to do that.”
First they deny that charters have a self-selected population that
is easier to teach, and then when you prove them wrong, they say
“Yes, it’s true, but it is a good thing.” Less than a
year ago, Arne
Duncan gave Democracy Prep $9.1 million to open new
schools in poor communities. But if you look at the scatterplots
that Gary constructed, it is clear that Democracy Prep is an
average school, no better than the typical New York City public
school. So why did the U.S. Department give Democracy Prep $9.1
million to open more average schools with high attrition rates in
Harlem and Camden, New Jersey?
Four years ago, New
York Times’ columnist David Brooks declared Geoffrey
Canada’s charter schools to be miracle schools. The
column was titled “The Harlem Miracle.” He did so based on the
assurances of Harvard economist Roland Fryer and his colleague Will
Dobbie. Fryer said in an email to Brooks that the charter schools
of the Harlem Children’s Zone had produced “enormous gains.” Brooks
wrote: “In math, Promise Academy eliminated the
achievement gap between its black students and the city average for
white students. Let me repeat that. It
eliminated the black-white achievement gap. “The results changed my
life as a researcher because I am no longer interested in marginal
changes,” Fryer wrote in a subsequent e-mail. What Geoffrey Canada,
Harlem Children’s Zone’s founder and president, has done is “the
equivalent of curing cancer for these kids. It’s amazing. It should
be celebrated. But it almost doesn’t matter if we stop there. We
don’t have a way to replicate his cure, and we need one since so
many of our kids are dying — literally and
figuratively.” Canada is a very charming man, and I
personally like him. We have appeared on various TV shows together,
including a debate on NBC’s “Education Nation.” But I don’t believe
in miracle schools. Not even when they are run by the immensely
personable Geoffrey Canada. And I don’t like it when someone with
the vast resources of Canada, far more than any neighborhood public
school, trashes public
schools because they can’t succeed as his schools do.
(The link takes you to a TED talk where Geoffrey Canada
speaks with his usual charm and passion about “our failing public
schools.”) As this story in the New York Times pointed out, the
Harlem Children’s Zone has two billionaires on its board, assets of
more than $200 million, two teachers in every classroom, small
classes, medical care for students, and an array of resources and
services unavailable to public schools in poor neighborhoods. I
have always wished that every public school, especially in poor
neighborhoods, could offer the same services as Canada’s schools,
and I salute Canada for providing them for the students at his
charter schools. But are they miracle schools, as Roland Fryer told
David Brooks? After all, miracles should not be a one-time deal;
they should go on forever, right? The short answer: No. They face
the same problems as other schools serving poor kids, and their
results are not miraculous. Below are the scores of Canada’s
charter schools on the recent Common Core tests. The city’s public
schools had an average passing mark of 25% in ELA and 30% in
mathematics. The charters of the HCZ have scores all over the map.
Some are higher than the city average, some are lower. Some are
dramatically higher (like grade 5 in math at HCZ 1 at 46%), some
are dramatically lower (like grade 6 in English language arts at
HCZ 1 at 9%). Bottom line: There is no miracle here.
Harlem Children’s Zone 1
22%
26%
21%
9%
24%
27%
2
56%
20%
43%
31%
26%
28%
Earlier today, I published Judith Shulevitz’s brilliant essay on “disruption” as a business strategy.
As we know, mega-corporations believe they must continually reinvent themselves in order to have the latest, best thing and beat their competitors, who are about to overtake them in the market.
They believe in disruption as a fundamental rule of the marketplace.
By some sloppy logic or sleight-of-hand, the financial types and corporate leaders who think they should reform the nation’s schools have concluded that the schools should also be subject to “creative disruption” or just plain “disruption.”
And so we have the unaccredited Broad Superintendents Academy, underwritten by billionaire Eli Broad, sending out superintendents who are determined to “disrupt” schools by closing them and handing them over to private management.
Unfortunately, Secretary Arne Duncan agrees that disruption is wonderful, so he applauds the idea of closing schools, opening new schools, inviting the for-profit sector to compete for scarce funds, and any other scheme that might disrupt schools as we know them.
He does this believing that U.S. education is a failed enterprise and needs a mighty shaking-up.
First, he is wrong to believe that U.S. public education is failing. I document that he is wrong in my new book, Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and The Danger to America’s Public Schools, using graphs from the U.S. Department of Education website.
Second, “disruption” is a disaster for children, families, schools, and communities.
Think of little children. They need continuity and stability, not disruption. They need adults who are a reliable presence in their lives. But, following the logic of the corporate reformers, their teachers are fired, their school is closed, everything must be brand new or the kids won’t learn. No matter how many parents and children turn out at school board meetings to plead for the life of their neighborhood schools, the hammer falls and it is closed. This is absurd.
Think of adolescents. When they misbehave, we say they are “disruptive.” Now we are supposed that their disruptive behavior represents higher order thinking.
But no one can learn when one student in a class of thirty is disruptive.
Disruptive policies harm families because after the closing of the neighborhood school, they are expected to shop for a school. They are told they have “choice,” but the one choice denied to them is their neighborhood school. Maybe one of their children is accepted as the School of High Aspirations, but the other didn’t get accepted and is enrolled in the School for Future Leaders on the other side of town. That is not good for families.
Disruption is not good for communities. In most communities, the public school is the anchor of community life. It is where parents meet, talk about common problems, work together, and learn the fundamental processes of democratic action.
Disruption destroys local democracy. It atomizes families and communities, destroying their ability to plan and act together on behalf of their community.
By closing their neighborhood school, disruption severs people from the roots of their community. It fragments community.
It kneecaps democracy.
City after city is now suffering a “disruptive” assault on public education. Mayor Rahm Emanuel closed dozens of schools in Chicago; Mayor Michael Bloomberg closed dozens of schools in New York City; public education in Detroit is dying; Philadelphia public schools are on life support, squeezed by harsh budget cuts and corporate faith in disruption and privatization.
But the disruptive strategy won’t be confined to urban districts. As the tests for the new national Common Core standards are introduced in state after state, disruption and havoc will produce what corporate reformers are hoping for: a loss of faith in public education; a conviction that it is broken beyond repair; and a willingness to try anything, even to allow for-profit vendors to take over the responsibilities of the public sector. That is already happening in many states, where hundreds of milllions of dollars are siphoned away from public schools and handed over to disruptive commercial enterprises. It doesn’t produce better education, but it produces profits.
Maybe that is the point of disruption.
We have often heard that charter schools will “save poor kids trapped in failing public schools.”
We have also often heard that NYC has the best charter schools in the nation because the city chooses the authorizers so carefully and monitors them frequently.
It is interesting, therefore, to look at the performance of the charter sector on the absurdly hard Common Core tests, where most kids across the state of New York allegedly “failed.”
Here is a link to the charter scores, as reported by the New York City Charter Schools Center.
Unfortunately, the Center can’t stop boasting about how many ways the charters “beat” public schools, an obnoxious habit those folks have, when they should be interested in collaboration with public schools towards a common goal.
If you scroll down to the list of charter schools and their scores, you will find they are spread out all over the place.
Some are high, some are very low. Most are in the middle.
Some saw their 2012 proficiency rates drop more than those of public schools, as much as 50-60%.
Deborah Kenny’s much-celebrated Harlem Village Academy Leadership Charter School, for example, fell from a proficiency rate of 86.5% to 33.7%, a drop of 52.8%. (Now I understand why my interview with Katie Couric–lasting 30 minutes–never was aired. She is on the board of Kenny’s HVA, as is publishing magnate Rupert Murdoch.)
I don’t mean to pick on charter schools as such. I just think it is ridiculous that they are seen as a systemic answer to the problems of public education when they enroll so few students, have high teacher attrition, and have the freedom to exclude or push out kids they don’t want. Some have high test scores, some have low scores, but they are a distraction from the needs and problems of a city with 1.1 million public school students. I wish they were all successful. I wish all the public schools were successful. What these rotten scores show is that what we are doing now (No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top) doesn’t work.
The status quo has failed.
We need education with a human face. 1.1 million of them.
I will be discussing my new book, “Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools” at Judson Memorial Church, near New York University, on September 11 at 6 pm.
The event is sponsored by Class Size Matters and New Yorkers for Great Public Schools
Wednesday, Sept.11th
6-7:15 PM at Judson Memorial Church
55 Washington Square South, Manhattan
Trains: A, B, C, D, E, F, M to W 4th St.
N, R to 8 St.; #6 to Astor Place; #1 to Sheridan Sq.
New Yorkers are ready for a new direction for public education, and as the whole country watches our mayoral election, Ravitch will discuss how we can move away from failed policies of the past and towards a successful school system that will work for every student. A question and answer session will follow.
RSVP at http://reignoferror-eorg.eventbrite.com/
Or call 212-328-9271 for more information
In November, New Yorkers will elect a new mayor.
It matters a lot for the future of public education in the city.
The mayor has complete control of the city school system.
The mayor appoints 8 of 13 members of the city school board, who serve at his pleasure. If one of his appointees dares to disagree with him, the mayor may fire him or her on the spot.
Mayor Bloomberg has closed more than 100 schools and opened hundreds more. He has closed some of the schools that he opened. What matters most to the mayor is test scores. He grades students, schools, teachers, and principals by test scores.
The scores went up and up until 2010, when the State Education Department admitted the tests got easier every year. Overnight the “Néw York City miracle” disappeared.
Recently, the mayor embraced the Common Core standards. When the test results came out, the scores of 2012 collapsed, the achievement gaps grew larger, and the mayor said all this was “very good news.”
The mayor is devoted to charter schools. Although he is responsible for the public schools, he prefers privately managed charters and plans to open four of his own, as soon as he leaves office. His DOE is already setting aside the free space for these schools that will be created by billionaires Bloomberg and George Soros.
The results of Bloomberg’s “reforms” are unimpressive. Despite boasts to the contrary, he did not close the achievement gaps.
A recent study by the Economic Policy Institute found that the three “market-reform” districts–NYC, DC, and Chicago–got worse results than other urban districts.
The public is fed up with the Bloomberg era of imperial, autocratic “reform.” The latest polls show that only 22% want the next mayor to continue Bloomberg’s school reforms.
What’s next?
I fear that most of the candidates are trapped in Bloomberg’s cramped data-driven vision of schooling.
I want the next mayor to think about how to improve education, not how to raise test scores.
I want the next mayor to stop closing public schools. I want him or her to abandon Bloomberg’s obsession with testing and measurement. I want the mayor to stop giving absurd letter grades to schools. We learned from the Tony Bennett scandal just how malleable and how meaningless the A-F letter grades are.
I want the next mayor to take responsibility for the 95% of the students in the city’s public schools, not act as a cheerleader for the charter sector that enrolls 5% and kicks out or excludes low-scoring students.
I want a mayor who has a different vision.
I want a mayor who believes that it is his or her responsibility to provide a good school in every neighborhood. I want a mayor who is devoted to strengthening the schools, not closing them or privatizing them. I want a mayor who understands that improving the lives of children, families, and communities will improve schools. I want a mayor committed to early childhood education, to class size reduction, and to the arts in every school.
I want a mayor determined to make sure that every school has a full curriculum, experienced teachers, daily physical education, foreign languages, and adequate resources to help children who are learning English and children with disabilities.
I have an even more radical idea: Here is an interview I did recently on NY1, the local news station. Watch to hear what I propose. If the mayor acted on my proposal, he or she would become a national figure and an instant hero to millions of parents, students, and teachers.
This letter was written by a New York City teacher to his union president.
“I am writing as a loyal union member and as a special education teacher in a middle class ethnically diverse neighborhood who knows a lot about testing because I spent nearly two decades assessing disabled children as part of a school assessment team.until this Mayor deemed my psychometric skills to be worthless Nevertheless, under my belt is a lot of graduate level coursework as well as thousands of hours of field experience in administering and analyzing valid and reliable norm-referenced educational assessments.
“Therefore, based upon a lot of research and reading, I have to respectfully disagree with your statement that the Common Core Standards were developed by educators and that these standards represent a valid instrument to determine if a student is college or career ready.. The Common Core Standards were not developed by educators. Many of those who developed these standards are deeply involved in the corporate educational reform movement. Many articles I have read about its development stated that the developers basically worked backwards and often disregarded some basic tenets of child development. Furthermore, we are taking on faith standards that have not even been longitudinally tested. We are basically taking on faith that these standards will make students college or career ready. We all know that so many reforms in the past half a century failed because, like the Common Core, research was lacking. Where are those “open classrooms” or the “New Math” of my childhood? Both were just fads, just as I believe the Common Core is a fad, that led to no significant educational achievement.
“I, and many others, could only accept the efficacy of the Common Core Standards if there were real research over a number of years showing that students who learned by a curriculum derived from these standards had higher achievement than those students taught by a more traditional curriculum. I have a sense that many of your rank and file teachers are unwilling to put their careers on the line based on standards that I feel was developed with a political agenda. The agenda is to convince the American people that our present public school system is a failure and that only a privatized charter-based system is the way to go. A system, that will in the end, destroy our progressive union movement.
“Any assessment in which only 25% to 35% of students can pass is invalid. A valid test is standardized in such a way that it creates a bell curve. These assessments do not come even close to creating a bell curve. Instead these assessments look more like cliffs. Many students are set to fall off such a cliff–especially students with disabilities. Special educators are taught that to help students with learning challenges, one must start where they are at. One does not start at the bottom of an unclimbable precipice. I work with many students who have, through no fault of their own, significant language impairments that make this curriculum impossible to master. What will become of many of these students when they reach 8th grade and modified promotional standards terminate? How many times are we willing to leave back such students and destroy their self esteem before we realize that what is really needed are many vocational programs that will serve the needs of a very diverse disabled population? There is a big difference between a high IQ child with minor sensory problems and one who may have a severe language impairment which results in a borderline IQ. Sadly, this curriculum will result in many special education teachers, like me, who are willing to work with the latter child, being punished by someday being rated ineffective because of an invalid assessment based upon invalid standards that work against the educational needs of such children.
“Every child needs to reach their potential. Unfortunately, I see these Common Core Standards setting up roadblocks based upon a student’s economic class, language proficiency and disability. Those born economically advantaged will either go to private schools or charters exempt from these standards or whose parents have the resources to get them the extra tutoring needed to pass these tests. Those children born to parents who do not have the resources will end up in schools that will not have the funds necessary to create the academic intervention services needed to compensate for their parent/guardian’s inability to afford the extra tutoring needed to pass from grade to grade.
“Our focus is completely wrong. These standards are broken and unrepairable. I fear, in the end, it will lead to the dismantling of our system of public education and social stratification in this great nation. In the 18th century, our founding fathers created a flawed constitution called the Articles of Confederation that they realized was unworkable. But they were smart. They scraped the document and started anew. Many of the best and brightest, at that time, got together, and through compromise and negotiation, came up with something workable. They came up with a constitution that was flexible enough to change with the times. These Common Core standards are unchangeable stone monoliths that block our way to creating a society and nation that has always believed in education as the great leveler as well as creator of economic opportunity and social mobility.
“Let us think before we jump!”
Diane Ravitch's blog 