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Over the summer I posted the college-ready rates for old and new schools showing how the schools that were created under Michael Bloomberg actually have lower college-ready rates than the older schools with similar populations. The DOE college-ready rates are based upon how many students passed English and Math Regents with good grades (specifics on the data appears at the end of the post). We can accept this as a good measure or not, but in any case it is a viable measure in the eyes of DOE. The DOE updated the college-ready information when it released the high school Progress Reports this autumn, so I ran the analysis again. The results are the same, or maybe even worse.

After reading the New York times op-ed on school choice in DC, I asked some folks close to what's happening in education there for their thoughts. Mary Levy sent me what is written below and (with her permission), I decided to use it as a guest post. Mary Levy has analyzed DC Public School staffing, budget and expenditures, and monitored the progress of education reform for thirty years. She is a major source for fiscal, statistical and general information on DCPS for the media, government officials and non-profit, business and civic groups. She directed the Public Education Reform Project at the Washington Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights & Urban Affairs for 19 years, during which she played a major role in developing the District of Columbia's school funding systems, wrote numerous reports on DCPS, and participated in every major reform planning initiative. Previously, in private practice with Rauh, Lichtman, Levy & Turner, she did civil litigation in civil rights, labor law, and school finance, including major litigations in New York  and Maryland.

Most of the coverage about the Department of Education's role as a charter authorizer in recent weeks has focused on the management scandals at the Believe Network and the decision to close Peninsula Prep after three years of C's (although interestingly enough, the role of for-profit charter manager Victory Schools has mostly been left out of the Peninsula Prep story, despite quotes from current Victory executive and past DOE Charter Office head Michael Duffy in the Times coverage of the school's closing). Equally important, however, was the DOE's decision to grant a two-year renewal to the third school it had placed on the closure list this year - Opportunity Charter School, a charter founded to serve students with special education needs. The DOE's threat to close Opportunity had inspired a passionate response from the school's community, including powerful presentations of evidence from the district's own progress reports showing its success in helping students with intense special education needs achieve academically and graduate from high school at rates well above other schools in the city.

Over a third of the city's public schools are failing their students, according to new state standards that paint a much bleaker picture than the one offered by the city. The New York State Education Department added some 350 city schools on Thursday to its annual bulletin of "schools in need of improvement" - but 180 of those schools earned A's or B's on their latest progress reports from the city. State Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch said the state's new list of troubled schools offers more proof of the city school system's dismal performance.

After the release of high school progress reports last week, city Education Department officials identified 21 struggling high schools and secondary schools that, because of their low performance, could be closed or subject to other interventions beginning next year.

Closing schools doesn't save very much money in the context of an urban district's budget, and selling or leasing surplus school buildings tends to be difficult because they're often old and in struggling neighborhoods, a recent report from a Philadelphia research group says. On the positive side, however, the study finds that students appear to make it through a school closure with minimal effects on their academic progress. And it says school districts can help generate some acceptance for a downsizing plan by involving the community early and establishing clear reasons for why certain schools must close.

Mayor Bloomberg turned the announcement of the 2012 state test results into a promotional event for his "reforms" on Tuesday, despite the fact that an honest appraisal of the scores showed that city students as a group made only modest progress in both math and ELA.  The mayor's presentation ignored or downplayed results that didn't fit in with his triumphal narrative, including the fact that the racial achievement gap widened last year in a number of categories. State officials, by contrast, didn't even hold a press conference, and said publicly only that the statewide results (which mirrored the city's) showed "some positive momentum" but left too many students unprepared. The mayor, however, orchestrated a big press function and handed out a shameless PowerPoint that reported highly selective numbers and featured a comparison of charters and new schools founded during his tenure with "traditional" city schools - i.e. the vast majority of schools in the city system. But the numbers are there for all to see. "His" charters and new schools combined underperform the average school, in fact (see especially slide 6), and they gained only one to two points more than the "traditional" schools in percentages of students meeting standards in math and less than a percentage point in students meeting standards in English. That, according to the mayor, was conclusive evidence for the success of his reforms. 

"President Obama and countless reports all say that improving science and engineering literacy and ensuring a next generation of U.S. scientists and engineers are vital to our future. With the notable exceptions of creationists and climate change deniers, there is little opposition to making this an educational priority. However, current education policies at the state and federal levels contradict the core values of science and engineering, and are therefore likely to inhibit rather than catalyze progress."

...the purpose of this critique is to present another perspective on the achievement progress made by the RSD after 6 years of direct control by the LDOE. This critique counters the major achievement conclusions presented in the report...

"Nearly a decade of America's test-based accountability systems, from "adequate yearly progress" to high school exit exams, has shown little to no positive effect overall on learning and insufficient safeguards against gaming the system, a blue-ribbon committee of the National Academies of Science concludes in a new report."

States are beginning to report the results from their 2010-11 standardized tests, which means we're learning how many schools are not making "adequate yearly progress" under No Child Left Behind.

At a press conference earlier this week, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced the city's 2011 test results. Wall Street Journal reporter Lisa Fleisher, who was on the scene, tweeted Mayor Bloomberg's remarks. According to Fleisher, the mayor claimed that there was a "dramatic difference" between his city's testing progress between 2010 and 2011, as compared with the rest of state.

A study released by Harvard's Program on Education Policy and Governance and Education Next yesterday compares U.S. students who performed at or above the proficient level on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (generally dubbed the "Nation's Report Card") in math to the 15-year-olds tested through the Program for International Student Assessment, administered by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. Researchers developed a crosswalk study of a sample of the graduating class of 2011, which participated in the 2007 NAEP as 8th graders and in the 2009 PISA as 15-year-olds.

In the past, administrators often looked the other way when students skipped out a few days short of the year's final dismissal. Some still do. But these days, with numbers holding so much power over the fates of schools and their leaders, some principals are counting heads. They know that empty seats, even in the waning days of the school year, can lower their average attendance rates and shave points off their annual progress reports issued by the city.

When the La Cima Elementary Charter School in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, gave out its family survey in February, administrators were thrilled that about 95 percent of families who responded were satisfied or highly satisfied with the three-year-old school. But that survey was not counted by the Department of Education in its annual progress report. The city uses a standardized environment survey that it distributes to parents and teachers every March, and La Cima refused to use it.

Latino students in California - nearly 1.3 million of them English learners - are struggling to achieve academic success at the same level as their white peers. In "State has one of nation's highest gaps in Hispanic-white reading proficiency," Sarah Garland reports that only 12 percent of Hispanic fourth-graders in California tested proficient in reading in 2009. Nonprofits, government agencies and parents have all launched campaigns over the years to close the learning gap, but little progress has been made.

A school that middle class parents once kept their distance from was now attracting them with French and Spanish dual-language classes, after-school programs and an increasingly active Parent Teacher Association. "There was a renaissance," Mr. de Voldere said. And then came the city Education Department's report card on the school's progress from 2010 to 2011: A grade of "F."

About two weeks ago, DOE officials released a list of twenty elementary and middle schools that they are considering closing.   According to the NY Times, "The schools on the list fit at least one of the following criteria: they got a D or F on their most recent progress report, or a C for a third consecutive year; they were on the state's list of persistently low-achieving schools last year; or they received a C or D from the teams of state and city officials who were sent to review them."

Tomorrow, the education world will get the results of the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), often referred to as the "nation's report card." The findings - reading and math scores among a representative sample of fourth and eighth graders - will drive at least part of the debate for the next two years, when the next round comes out. I'm going to make a prediction, one that is definitely a generalization, but is hardly uncommon in policy debates: People on all "sides" will interpret the results favorably no matter how they turn out.