A Néw York City parent organization has created a report card for Michelle Rhee. Good read.
Archives for category: New York City
Jersey Jazzman decided to analyze Joel Klein’s claims of compelling progress in New York City during his tenure.
In this post, he takes a closer look at how New York City students fared on NAEP compared to other cities.
Some gains, but not as large as other, less heralded cities who took the same tests.
New York City has been swaddled in hype and spin for the past dozen years. The mayor gained control of the schools in 2002 and he appoints the chancellor. He also appoints a majority of the school board, who serve at his pleasure. He has appointed three chancellors in a row who were not educators.
Peter Goodman, who writes a blog called Ed in the Apple, says that the next mayor should appoint a chancellor whom educators can respect. NYC has been subjected to an endless parade of reforms, initiatives, accountability measures, and reorganizations. Disruption has been the only constant. Teachers keep on keeping on.
And next year, when Bloomberg’s third term ends, a new mayor will have to figure out how to put the pieces back together again.
Two days ago, the New York Daily News published a beautiful tribute to the heroes of Sandy Hook, both the dead and the living. The newspaper called them its Heroes of the Year. The editorial was written with such eloquence and feeling that it brought me to tears.
I admit I was surprised by this editorial because the Daily News is known for its stridently anti-teacher, anti-union editorializing. (On the other hand, its reporters are unfailingly fair, and the newspaper publishes the amazing Juan Gonzalez, whose column has exposed numerous scandals.)
Today, the New York Daily News resumes its regular flaying of teachers and their union with one of the world’s dumbest opinion pieces. This one was written by a teacher who belongs to Educators4Excellence. She says she moved from Denver, where test scores count for 50% of educators’ evaluations, to NYC because of the Big Apple’s reputation for innovation. The Colorado law was written by a young state senator who is an alumnus of Teach for America.
Based on this teacher’s opinion piece, we may safely assume that Denver was not innovative enough to keep her there nor was the lure of its fabulous teacher evaluation program.
She says that she really, really wants to be a better teacher but she can’t be unless she is evaluated by her students’ test scores. Does she not know her students’ test scores now? This is puzzling indeed.
Please, someone, send this young woman the report by the National Academy of Education and the American Educational Research Association on the inaccuracy of value-added assessment. Or the statement by leading researchers published by the Economic Policy Institute.
For the uninformed, here are a few details about Educators4Excellence. The organization is two years old. In its first year, it had grants and contributions of $339,031.00. That’s pretty amazing for a start-up.
Even more amazing, E4E had receipts last year of $1,926,028. About one-quarter of the total came from the Gates Foundation.
I wish E4E would share its secrets about how a small group of teachers raised nearly $2.4 million in only two years. Inquiring minds want to know. Think what we could do to support public education if we had their fundraising secrets.
Its mission seems to be to demonstrate–in testimony before legislative bodies, advertisements, and opinion pieces like this one–that teachers want to be evaluated by test scores, and they don’t want tenure. And above all, don’t pay any attention to experienced teachers. Listen to the kids who have taught for a few months or a few years. They know best.
Joel Klein served as Chancellor of the New York City public schools for eight years. He had no previous experience as an educator. But he came to the job with a determination to reinvent the system and wipe out whatever he found. He has often boasted of the dramatic gains that occurred under his leadership, at the same time that he claims that public education is in terrible shape due to teachers’ unions and tenure laws that protect incompetent teachers.
Here Jersey Jazzman begins a multi-part dissection of Klein’s record as leader in New York City.
Fred Smith worked for many years for the New York City Board of Education as a testing expert. Now he is a watchdog to guard against the misuse of tests. He writes opinion pieces and advises parent groups about the excesses of the testing industry. For non-New York City folk, Tisch is Merryl Tisch, the head of the New York State Board of Regents, which never sees the harm in adding more tests. The Tweed Courthouse is the building that houses the leaders of the NYC Department of Education. Klein is Joel Klein, former chancellor of the schools. Walcott is Dennis Walcott, current chancellor. Polakow-Suransky is the deputy chancellor, once a progressive, who now oversees the city’s obsessive testing regime and answers very question with the promise that the Common Core will bring Utopia and an end to all concerns.
The Night Before…
‘Twas the night before Christmas and all through the state
Tisch was telling the Regents that she couldn’t wait.
The new year was coming, surely bringing the best;
Every school overflowing with test after test.
The Common Core Standards would arrive any day,
Educational nirvana was well on its way.
And in the Tweed Courthouse joy was also in season.
Tests, yet more tests on top of tests were the reason.
Dasher Klein passed the torch to Walcott, the Dancer;
Year-round testing, K-12 was the obvious answer.
On Bloomberg’s A team was no reindeer named Cupid,
But Polakow-Suransky was left to play stupid,
Explaining how tests were mere all-purpose tools
For holding back kids, judging teachers and schools:
If test prep and drilling took the entire school day,
Such a sacrifice was but a small price to pay.
If History was lost and Music and Art,
Well, you know everybody has to do their part.
If kids are nervous and are sick or are stressed,
That’s kinda sad, but the state and Fed say we must test.
When tests make special need and ELL kids feel dumb and sob,
Again, blame the Fed, we’re only doing our job.
If teachers feel pressured and are tempted to cheat,
We’re sure that’s so rare it’s not worth a tweet.
When teachers are rated by tests that won’t let them teach,
Hmm. I’ll get back to you soon. That’s not part of my speech.
If teachers don’t add value and their names make the press,
I really don’t like that either, I must confess.
When teachers quit because they can’t stand the grinding,
We’ve not done a survey that proves what you’re finding.
And so on and so forth on this Christmas Eve.
Here’s a list to check twice of things I believe:
If children come first, then parents come second.
That’s a clear truth that never gets to be reckoned.
So Albany and Tweed, you must let in the sun;
You and the privateers are not Number 1.
And that goes for Pearson and all of the charters;
We’ll call you if we need you! How’s that for starters.
Don’t keep parents in the dark about testing you’ve planned.
And spring tests on our children with your high hand.
Inform us of field tests and all other exams;
We’re not here to be led around like little lambs.
Let us decide to opt out or give our consent,
If we think taking these tests is time that’s well spent.
Be sure to assess what’s important to measure,
The work kids can do and the growth that we treasure.
Not the bubble sheet tests sold by grubby green vendors
To the grinches on Tweed Street—education’s pretenders.
That’s the kind of New Year that I hope will be seen;
Merry Christmas to all and Happy 2013.
~fred
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A regular reader in New York City is a data hound. He gets annoyed when he sees the media repeating things that are factually wrong. Recently he noticed the repetition of inflated claims of charter success. Here, he goes to the sources to set the record straight.
A recent series of articles in the New York Times’ SchoolBook site examined charter schools in New York City. While the series was more honest than most reporting on charter schools, charter school advocates were still able to get away with untruths and the media reported them as the truth.
Throughout the series charter advocates claimed to be preparing students for college. Does their rhetoric match their results? The data suggests not. The average SAT score for charter high school graduates in New York City was 430 in reading and 438 in math versus the national average of 497 in reading ad 514 in math. Less than a quarter of their graduates earned a passing score on the state exams in Trigonometry or Physics or Chemistry, and only 8.4% of their graduates earned a score of 3 or above on an AP exam. This would not strike anybody as a result that can be truthfully called “students prepared for college.”
In another story in the series Democracy Prep, a charter organization, acknowledged that their policy of holding many students back “drove some families away.” If only they copped to this fact when Mayor of New York City praised them for taking over and turning around a failing charter school. The truth is that they accomplished this by threatening to hold back about 100 of the 247 students in the school according to the Wall Street Journal and, as a result, only 70% of the students returned. The test scores then went up 30%, but they got rid of 30% of their struggling students. Not a great model for improving a school. Brings back memories of the Vietnam-era idea that it made sense to destroy villages in order to save them.
One KIPP school was said to have “a greater share of students with special needs than the citywide average.” The citywide average of students with special needs in middle schools is 18.8%. In the KIPP school, 18.6% of their students have special needs. In what should come as no surprise, the school has only 2.5% of students with the highest level of special needs as opposed to 9.1% in the average New York City middle school. So the truth is that the KIPP school actually has fewer students with special needs and a lot, lot fewer students with the highest special needs than the average city middle school. The KIPP school also accepts many, many fewer students with incoming math scores in the lowest third than the city middle school average (14.3% at KIPP vs. the 38.3% public middle school average). Believe it or not, this KIPP school is accepting more disadvantaged students than the other KIPP schools in New York City, so you can imagine what the average student profile at the other KIPP schools is like. It would appear despite the charter school claim to make “no excuses” they have plenty of excuses for not educating the same students as their public school colleagues.
While I was watching the television coverage of the tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut, an ad came on that was very upsetting. Sponsored by StudentsFirst ad, it was a typically deceptive TV ad depicting teachers and parents who demand that teachers be evaluated by test scores. It implies that teachers are slackers and need a swift kick to get to work. If they are evaluated, they claim, this will have a revolutionary effect on the schools.
Showing this anti-teacher ad at this moment in time was utterly tasteless. Just as we are watching stories about teachers and a principal and school psychologist who were gunned down protecting little children, we have to see this tawdry ad. Given the timing, it is political pornography.
The ad is meretricious. It does not mention that the city published the names and ratings of thousands of teachers a year ago, generating anger and controversy, not any wonderful transformation. The ratings a year ago were rife with error, but all that is now forgotten in the new push to get tough with teachers.
Who are those teachers and parents in the ad with no last names? Are they paid actors? If they believe what they say, why no last names? Why no school names?
Does StudentsFirst know that most of New York City’s charter schools have refused to submit to the teacher evaluation system? May we expect to see a TV attack ad demanding that charter schools adopt the same test-based evaluation system that Governor Cuomo and Mayor Bloomberg want? Or is it only for public schools?
Andrea Gabor wrote an excellent post providing the context for ad and the stand-off between the New York City United Federation of Teachers and the city (and state). She writes:
“Governor Cuomo has threatened to withhold funding if the city and the union cannot come to an agreement by January. And Mayor Bloomberg has said that he would rather lose the money than compromise on the evaluations.
“The StudentsFirst ad and the mayor’s tough talk highlight one of several problems with the teacher-evaluation debate. While employee evaluations work when they are part of a system-wide effort at continuous improvement, they are often counterproductive when used as a cudgel against employees.
The cheerful-sounding teachers in the StudentsFirst ad not withstanding, everything about the teacher-evaluation debate has been framed in punitive terms.”
Not only has the debate been framed in punitive terms, but as Gabor points out, VAM is rife with technical issues. As I have written repeatedly on this blog, VAM is so inaccurate and unstable that it is junk science. And as Bruce Baker has written again and again, teachers with the neediest students are likely to get worse ratings than those with “easier” students.
No wonder charter schools in New York City refuse to submit their teacher ratings.
The issue now is whether the governor and the mayor, with the help of StudentsFirst, can beat the union into agreeing to a process for evaluating teachers that is demonstrably harmful and demoralizing to its members, that does nothing to improve education, and that is guaranteed to waste many millions of dollars.
Frankly, StudentsFirst should have had the decency to stop their attacks on public school teachers until the public had gotten over the massacre at the Sandy Hook Elementary School. At long last, have they no decency?
*UPDATE: Micah Lasher of StudentsFirstNY informed that the organization asked the city’s television stations on Monday morning to pull the ad, in light of the tragedy. I saw it on CNN or MSNBC on Monday night. Someone goofed. I appreciate the clarification.
The New York City teacher evaluations were released, and there was nearly no media coverage.
Mayor Bloomberg noticed. Ad Peter Goodman points out on his blog,
“The mayor didn’t like the original law, didn’t like the law which protected teachers from the public release of the scores and doesn’t like the requirement that the details of the plan must be negotiated with the collective bargaining agent, the union.
“On his weekly radio program he made it clear – he has no intention of negotiating a plan – he’ll accept the $250 million cut in state funding unless the union succumbs to all his preconditions. Apparently he “forgot” that the current law prohibits the release of the scores.”
Goodman checked with principals and teachers and they seemed genuinely puzzled by the ratings.
They don’t know what they mean or how they are supposed to help.
“UFT President Mulgrew announced that 6% of teachers were rated “ineffective” and 9% rated “highly effectively.” In order to be charged a teacher must be rated “ineffective” on their overall score or on the VAM and “locally negotiated” section for two consecutive years. When we consider the “instability” of the scores – wide year to year variation – the percentage of teachers impacted will be quite low.”
So very few teachers will be found ineffective, and anyone who is discharged on the basis of these flawed metrics is likely to sue.
Think of the hundreds of millions wasted on this junk science and how the money might have been used to improve schools.
I usually ignore editorials and opinion articles about education in the tabloids of New York City because 99% say the same things: public schools are bad, public school teachers are awful or criminal or should be fired, and charter schools are all great. (By contrast, both the New York Post and the New York Daily News have excellent reporters, and the Daily News have the amazing Juan Gonzalez, who has done great investigative journalism.)
Today, however, someone on Twitter asked me about an opinion piece in the Daily News. I read it and discovered it was written by someone who said he was the father of twin daughters in kindergarten in Brooklyn. The girls were in different classes. The father is upset because he can tell that one teacher is great and the other is not. He insists that the city and the union quickly agree to the state evaluation system so one teacher can be paid more than the other.
How does he know which one is better? She assigned homework every day after Hurricane Sandy and the other one didn’t.
At the end of the article, I noted that the father belongs to a group that is part of StudentsFirst. Why was I not surprised?
A New York City blogger dissected the article, noting that the writer is a NYC Department of Health employee. The South Bronx blogger wondered what evaluation system ranks employees in that city department.
Question: why does he think the proposed evaluation system will agree with what he thinks?
Diane Ravitch's blog 