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The New York City Department of Education ("NYCDOE") proposed to co-locate Brooklyn Success Academy Charter School 3 ("BSA3") in Building K293, located at 284 Baltic Street in Brooklyn, within the geographical confines of Community School District ("CSD") 15. BSA3 would be co-located in K293 with three existing NYCDOE schools: the Brooklyn School for Global Studies, serving approximately 415 students in grades 6-12 in the 2011-12 school year; the School for International Studies, serving approximately 522 students in grades 6-12 in the 2011-12 school year; and a District 75 program serving approximately 30 students at the high school level who are autistic, mentally retarded, or have multiple handicaps. The not-for-profit charter management organization (CMO), Success Charter Network, Inc., will operate BSA3. 

The DRA is a test that very few students take because it is given only in schools that don't go above second grade. In all other elementary schools, the state uses the New England Common Assessment Program (NECAP), a series of reading, writing, math and science tests used by Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Vermomt and Maine. Those tests start in grade 3. Last year, only 6 of the state's 168 elementary schools took the DRA, which makes Blackstone Valley Prep a big fish in a very small pond. "There are a lot of schools that are high-performing that don't take this test," said Krieger.

My four children have all attended public schools in our middle-class suburban district. When my oldest was in fourth grade, in 1998, he took the state tests, and I was not even aware of it. Later, he said the tests were kind of fun; he got to miss his regular classes. Six years later, in 2004, our daughter was in fourth grade. Long before the state tests, a letter came home. Prep classes were being offered before and after school. While the sessions were not mandatory, students were strongly urged to attend. Eventually the results were printed in our local newspaper. The news was grim; the nearby districts, in wealthier towns, had creamed us. The following year, our middle school added a mandatory course to prep for the state English test. That 1998/2004 divide - what happened in the interim was the 2002 No Child Left Behind law - should be kept in mind when analyzing a new, widely publicized study that closely tracked 2.5 million students over 20 years to determine whether teachers who helped raise children's test scores have a lasting effect on their lives. The researchers conclude that having such a teacher improved students' odds of going to a good college, the quality of the neighborhoods where they lived and their lifetime earnings.

This report details how charter schools are increasingly run by private, nonprofit management organizations called charter school management organizations (CMOs). The researchers find that most CMOs serve urban students from low-income families, operate small schools that offer more instructional time, and attract teachers loyal to each school's mission, based on survey data and site visits. The authors conducted an impact analysis focused only on middle school grades, finding that a small fraction of CMO-run middle schools boosted achievement growth at notable levels. But on average, student performance in the CMO-run schools did not outpace achievement growth in other charters or in host districts for a statistically matched set of students. This review finds that the report offers an objective assessment of the comparative benefits for middle-school students of a highly select set of CMOs. It also helps to identify organizational features that operate in successful CMO-run schools that are modestly associated with stronger student growth in the middle grades. However, the authors downplay aspects of their methodology that resulted in significant selectivity concerning which CMOs were studied, raising questions regarding the population of charter schools to which they hope to generalize.

In response to low take-up, many public schools have experimented with moving breakfast from the cafeteria to the classroom. We examine whether such a program increases performance as measured by standardized test scores, grades and attendance rates. We exploit quasi-random timing of program implementation that allows for a difference-in-differences identification strategy. Our main identification assumption is that schools where the program was introduced earlier would have evolved similarly to those where the program was introduced later. We find that in-class breakfast increases both math and reading achievement by about one-tenth of a standard deviation relative to providing breakfast in the cafeteria. Moreover, we find that these effects are most pronounced for low performing, free-lunch eligible, Hispanic, and low BMI students. We also find some improvements in attendance for high achieving students but no impact on grades.

Clearly our emphasis on testing and the consequent narrowing of the curriculum contributes to the problem.  School have, as George Wood of the Forum for Education and Democracy notes, "a perverse incentive to allow or encourage students to leave" especially if they are likely to be low scorers on the tests by which schools are evaluated.  Anyone who doubts this need merely look at the track record of Texas during the Governorship of George W. Bush, when its claimed remarkable improvements in state test scores later became the basis of the perversely named legislation No Child Left Behind.  In Texas, sometimes students were held back in 9th grade multiple times because the state tests were given in 10th.  After a second holding back students might be encouraged to leave, hiding the dropout rate by listing the child as having gone to an alternative educational program because s/he said s/he might eventually get a GED.  Or after being held back once, the child would be told s/he had made so much progress s/he was being skipped directly to 11th, and thus not tested.  Rod Paige became U. S. Secretary of Education, after being honored as supposedly the best Superintendent in the nation by a professional organization, largely on claims of more than a 90% graduation rate in Houston schools, at a time when only around 40% of those who entered in 7th grade graduated on time with their cohort.  Those forced out or held back and then skipped were heavily from poor families that were African-American or Hispanic.

Only a month before nearly 120 Louisiana schools are set to welcome their first voucher students, the state has finally released a slate of standards that approved schools must meet in order to receive both students and concurrent state dollars. And while the standards, created by Superintendent John White and approved by the state's Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) this week, are widely considered a step in the right direction, voucher opponents say the standards fall far short from the accountability they sought. Where every public school in Louisiana is subjected to a standardized slate of testing, the voucher students - who will bring an average of $8,000 in tuition from "failing" public schools to many that are affiliated with religious denominations - will only need to face testing if their new school has taken an average of 10 students per grade, or if the schools have accepted at least 40 voucher students into the grades testing.

Nine year olds should not have to take tests that will determine the fate of their schools or their teacher's jobs.  NCLB mandates that they do, so I decided to take a look at the New York State 3rd grade math test from 2010.

New York City's release Friday of ratings for 18,000 public-school teachers may set the stage for the eventual release of ratings for all teachers in the state, a scenario that would surely heighten parental interest in suburban class assignments. Under a new statewide system for evaluating teachers, some districts will award grades on a 100-point scale to teachers as soon as the end of this school year. It is increasingly looking like school districts will have to release the grades if faced with a public request under the state Freedom of Information law.

The latest serving of data-driven mania from the city Education Department will likely produce screaming headlines about the city's "worst teachers." This virtual wall of shame (and fame) will live online for years to come. But does it actually help parents to find the best schools and teachers? Not really. Here's why. The ratings are based on a complicated formula that compares how much 4th through 8th-grade students have improved on standardized tests compared with how well they were predicted to do. The system tries to take into consideration factors like race, poverty and disabilities. Teachers are then graded on a curve. It's known as "value-added," because it tries show how much value an individual teacher has added to a student's test scores. Here are our top five reasons they won't help and why you won't be seeing them on Insideschools. Please add your own, or tell us why you think they will be useful.

I am firmly of the belief that you lay out grading expectations for students with as much notice as possible, and so here is my grading scale for reporters and newspapers in handling the value-added scores that the city Department of Education is releasing today, after courts have mandated their release

"Insider here reviews the report on charter schools by the NYC Independent Budget Office. The report covered only the early grades, not the middle grades or high school years."

"There now exists a fair amount of evidence that Charter schools in many locations, especially high performing charter schools in New Jersey and New York tend to serve much smaller shares of low income, special education and limited English proficient students (see various links that follow). And in some cases, high performing charter schools, especially charter middle schools, experience dramatic attrition between 6th and 8th grade, often the same grades over which student achievement climbs, suggesting that a "pushing out" form of attrition is partly accounting for charter achievement levels."

"Given the magnitude of the recent recession, and the high-stakes testing the U.S. has implemented under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), it is important to understand the effects of large-scale job losses on student achievement. We examine the effects of state-level job losses on fourth- and eighth-grade test scores, using federal Mass Layoff Statistics and 1996-2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress data. Results indicate that job losses decrease scores. Effects are larger for eighth than fourth graders and for math than reading assessments, and are robust to specification checks. Job losses to 1% of a state's working-age population lead to a .076 standard deviation decrease in the state's eighth-grade math scores. This result is an order of magnitude larger than those found in previous studies that have compared students whose parents lose employment to otherwise similar students, suggesting that downturns affect all students, not just students who experience parental job loss. Our findings have important implications for accountability schemes: we calculate that a state experiencing one-year job losses to 2% of its workers (a magnitude observed in seven states) likely sees a 16% increase in the share of its schools failing to make Adequate Yearly Progress under NCLB. "

One out of three public school educators report pressure from bosses, parents or others to change grades, and nearly 30% say pressure to cheat on standardized tests is a problem at their school, according to a voluntary Free Press survey of Michigan educators. At schools that don't meet federal standards, the tension is higher: About 50% say pressure to change grades is an issue, and 46% say pressure to cheat on the tests is a problem.

Key findings from this study include the following: Achievement on state reading and math tests has improved for Title I students in most states with sufficient data. Gaps between Title I and non-Title I students have narrowed more often than they have widened since 2002, although trends were less encouraging at grade 4 than at grade 8 or high school.  When gaps narrowed, it was most often because achievement improved at a faster rate for Title I students than for non-Title I students. The size of achievement gaps between Title I and non-Title I students varied greatly among states but was often smaller than gaps for low-income students or for certain racial/ethnic groups.

State data show that 53 percent of African-American youngsters in New Orleans scored at grade level or better on state tests this spring, compared with 51 percent of black students across Louisiana. Just four years ago, only 32 percent of black students in New Orleans had achieved grade level, compared with 43 percent statewide.

The challenge of designing effective performance measurement and incentives is a general one in economic settings where behavior and outcomes are not easily observable. These issues are particularly prominent in education where, over the last two decades, test-based accountability systems for schools and students have proliferated. In this study, we present evidence that the design and decentralized, school-based grading of New York's high-stakes Regents Examinations have led to pervasive manipulation of student test scores that are just below performance thresholds. Specifically, we document statistically significant discontinuities in the distributions of subject-specific Regent scores that align with the cut scores used to determine both student eligibility to graduate and school accountability. Our results suggest that roughly 3 to 5 percent of the exam scores that qualified for a high-school diploma actually had performance below the state requirements. Moreover, we find that the rates of test manipulation in NYC were roughly twice as high as those in the entire state. We estimate that roughly 6 to 10 percent of NYC students who scored above the passing threshold for a Regents Diploma actually had scores below the state requirement.

A prep course designed to help low income middle school students prepare for the city's elite specialized high schools will be cut from 16 months to three beginning in 2012, sources tell Insideschools. The program is falling victim to "budget constraints" which will "change the structure" of the Specialized High School Institute, according to a letter written by City lawyers obtained by Insideschools. Eligible students would begin the intensive SHSI program in the spring of 7th grade, rather than the summer after 6th grade, according to the proposed changes.

It's been a busy week.  On Wednesday there was a spirited rally on the steps of Tweed to protest the continued cuts to school budgets, the loss of art, music & afterschool program, and the sharp increases in class sizes; a good summary of the event is on the  Ed Vox blog.  There were great speeches by parents and elected officials, and I met a large contingent from PS  217 in Roosevelt Island, protesting Kindergarten classes of 28 and 5th grade classes of 34, even though there are empty rooms in the building.   On Thursday, I joined a UFT press conference at Murry Bergtraum HS, where Michael Mulgrew  reported  on the 7,000 classes that violate the union limits, with more than 250,000 students sitting (or standing) in these oversized classes during the first ten days of school.  (Contractual class size limits - already far too large - are 25 students in Kindergarten; 32 students in grades 1-6:  33 students in non-title I MS; 30 in Title I MS; 34 students in HS; and 50 students in gym.)