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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.

College-ready, career-ready … and citizenship-ready? Ten papers released by the American Enterprise Institute last week make the case that civics education is as critical as literacy and mathematics. They also explore what civics education should look like, how teachers can be prepared to create educated citizens, and future challenges and opportunities in the field.

"In the Michael Bloomberg era of school reform, we hear a lot about rising educational standards. "When Dennis Walcott became chancellor," Josh Thomases, a deputy chief academic officer in the city's Department of Education, tells the Voice, "one of his first acts was to say the correct bar was no longer a high school diploma, but career and college readiness." Put another way, New York City officials openly admit that a high school diploma earned in our public schools today does not mean that a student is ready for college. In fact, 80 percent of New York public school graduates who enrolled in City University of New York community colleges last fall still needed high school level instruction-also known as remediation-in reading, writing, and especially math. Despite the department's proclamations, that percentage is up, not down, from 71 percent a few years ago."

Dear 8th Graders, I'm sorry. I didn't know. I spent last night perusing the 150-plus pages of grading materials provided by the state in anticipation of reading and evaluating your English Language Arts Exams this morning. I knew the test was pointless-that it has never fulfilled its stated purpose as a predictor of who would succeed and who would fail the English Regents in 11th grade. Any thinking person would've ditched it years ago. Instead, rather than simply give a test in 8th grade that doesn't get kids ready for the test in 11th grade, the state opted to also give a test in 7th grade to get you ready for your 8th-grade test. But we already knew all of that. What I learned is that the test is also criminal.

Our guest author today is Dr. Clifford B. Janey, former superintendent for the Newark Public Schools, District of Columbia Public Schools, and Rochester City School District. He is currently a Senior Weismann Fellow at the Bankstreet College of Education in New York City, and a Shanker Institute board member. For too many students, families, and communities, the high school diploma represents either a dream deferred or a broken contract between citizens and the stewards of America's modern democracy. With the reform movement's unrelenting focus on testing and its win/lose consequences for students and staff, the high school diploma, which should signify college and work readiness, has lost its value. Not including the over seven thousand students who drop out of high school daily, the gap between the percentage of those who graduate and their readiness for college success will continue to worsen the social and income inequalities in life.

This study uses data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study - Birth (ECLS-B) Cohort to estimate associations between two important indicators of family socioeconomic status - family income and maternal education - and children's school readiness measured by academic skills, behavior, and physical health at school entry.

As I cited in my last blog, NCATE appears to be pursuing the use of Value Added Measures (VAM). In fact, NCATE president James Cibulka said, "Working within this climate of heightened expectations, [NCATE] will ask for more performance data and greater transparency in reporting performance, as these data become available." In other words, everybody is starting to use VAM and we should get ready to use it too. However, all the credible research on this use of VAM is unequivocal -- it is not ready for prime time.

"...The wide gap between the regular graduation rate and the college-ready graduation rate, which was published for the first time this year, complicates Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's effort to show steady improvement in city schools..."

According to data recently released by the city, students graduating from the high schools created under Bloomberg are less prepared for college than the students in older schools with similar populations. In fact, on average, older schools outperform newer ones by 40%. Even though students in newer schools are less prepared for college, they are being awarded classroom credits more quickly. Credit accumulation matters for Bloomberg's high-stakes accountability formulas. College-readiness does not.

"The portfolio district model adopted by Mayor Michael Bloomberg in New York City is often held up as a national model for high school "choice," touted as the best way to reduce pernicious race- and income-based achievement gaps. According to this model, student demographics are "no excuse" for poor performance: teacher quality is the single most important determinant of student success. But this AISR study on college readiness shows that in spite of a decade of efforts in New York City to expand choice and ensure that the most disadvantaged students do not invariably attend the most disadvantaged schools, student demographics still stubbornly dictate destiny."

"Editor's note: The author of this piece is an urban high school teacher who is writing under a pseudonym in order to protect the privacy of his students and his colleagues. Since I'm a public school teacher, everybody always asks me what I think about charter schools. They usually ask it with a certain expression, their eyes alert and their head poised at an angle, as if they are readying themselves for an explosion, or at least a case of spontaneous combustion. I usually respond with some variation of this: It's complicated. You got an hour?"

Over more than 20 years in the field of education-including two with Teach For America-I have helped promote state standards, the Common Core, the hiring of teachers with strong content knowledge, longer class periods for math and reading, and extra support for struggling students, to name a few. I have recently discovered, however, that what I believe as an education policy wonk is not always what I believe as a father. I am incredibly fortunate that my two young daughters are ready learners who attend a high-functioning school. That said, I make the following confessions

The office of Gov. Andrew Cuomo is touting some unflattering figures about New York's educational system today-"73 percent of New York's students graduate from high school and 37 percent are college ready." The stat is contained in the official press release announcing the creation of the New York Education Reform Commission, a group that will meet across the state to gather input on education and then make recommendations to the governor by Dec. 1 2012, or, "such other date as the Governor shall advise the Commission." So you know expect recommendations on their time. Here is the full release from Cuomo's office

Several weeks ago, Chris Lehmann tweeted from the Ed Innovation Summit in Scottsdale, Arizona, "Educators - if you don't see that there is a billion dollar industry wanting to take over schools using tech as the Trojan Horse, wake up." If I were to have one quibble with the metaphor, it would be this: the free marketeers are not hiding inside the horse, ready to jump out only after they are let in the gates of schools. They are riding right on top of the horse, shouting "Hey, this is a great horse! Let me tell you how we plan to use this horse to advance our free-market ideology in the education sector."

While the school's founding administration fought unionization, new administrators say they're ready to work with teachers on a contract.

So, let's look at a few big old schools and the new ones that replaced them in the same building. In particular let's look at the schools' comparative reading levels and comparative math. Until very recently, I didn't have these files, and until very recently I didn't think about same-building schools (called campus schools) too much, either. But then, the DOE made an inaccurate and unsupported claim about one of these campuses, and a few weeks later, Communities for Change set the record straight. The DOE's claim was the usual one ("similar" kids, astronomically better results). But the report from Communities for Change, showed that campus schools across the city were serving much lower concentrations of high-need special education students than the schools that they replaced. Before the old Seward shut down, for example, the concentration of self-contained students was 9%. In 2011, the new campus schools served 0%. Seward Park campus is in Manhattan, and the new schools earned As and Bs. Like disability averages, school wide average scores give us a good indicator of whether or not kids are ready for high school. Here is a comparison between incoming scores at closed old high schools and at the new schools on their campuses. These are actually relative rankings, and the details are explained below.

For those who pine for film over digital movies, miss the clackety-clack of typewriters, or even rotary dial phones, well, get ready for the slow-motion demise of brick-and-mortar schools. Watching the surge of media attention for online schooling from both official and entrepreneurial sources, it sure looks like blended schools soon and, in the not too distant future, kiss goodby to those familiar red-brick, steepled, and factory-look-alike buildings called schools ( see: EEG_KeepingPace2011-lr). Cautious reports of educators not yet swooning for online schooling are lost in the swirl of hype.

The U.S. Education Department is offering the waivers to states that adopt an "index" system of multiple measures that go beyond annual test results in determining school performance. These include test score growth over time, graduation rates and other evidence that schools have produced students who are college- or career-ready. States also must show plans for evaluating teachers and principals by multiple measures.

New York's draft of its request for a waiver of ESEA requirements is now ready for review and public comment. By submitting this request, New York is requesting flexibility through the waiver of specific ESEA provisions and their associated regulatory, administrative, and reporting requirements.

The Connecticut classroom of the future may not be limited by a traditional school year, the four walls of a classroom, or even the standard progression of grades, based on a proposed packageof unusually bold changes that are being advanced by the state's school superintendents. Instead, the current system would be replaced by a "learner-centered" education program that would begin at age 3; offer parents a menu of options, including charter schools and magnet schools; and provide assessments when an individual child is ready to be tested, rather than having all children tested in a class at the same time.