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The Daily News reported yesterday that fully 1/3 of the Teacher Data Reports - 4000 reports - are unreliable. And just to add a little context: They all have multiple years of data, which are supposed to be more reliable. Hundreds and hundreds have margins of error of less than 10 percentage points - five on either side - giving the public, parents, and teachers assurances that these reports are quite correct. In fact, the DOE was so confident in its findings that 46 of these reports had no margins of error at all! That's 4000 reports. And that means since teachers are ranked against each other, that all the reports are unreliable. Or, let's just get right to it: "unreliable" is a euphemism for wrong.

Within hours of the publication of the Teacher Data Reports (TDRs) last Friday, the UFT began to hear stories of teachers and their families being hounded by news reporters from the New York Post. On Friday evening, New York Post reporters appeared at the door of the father of Pascale Mauclair, a sixth grade teacher at P.S. 11, the Kathryn Phelan School, which is located in the Woodside section of Queens. They told Mauclair's father that his daughter was one of the worst teachers in New York City, based solely on the TDR reports, and that they were looking to  interview her. They then made their way to Mauclair's home, where she told them that she did not want to comment on the matter. The Post reporters rang Mauclair's bell and knocked on her window all Saturday morning. She finally called the police, who told the reporters that since they were inside her private housing development, they were on private property and had to leave. The reporters rang the bell again, leading to a second visit from the police and a final warning to leave. Later, Mauclair's neighbors told her that that the Post reporters had been asking them questions about her.

Thirty years ago, a Reagan administration report warned of "a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and a people." The report, "A Nation at Risk," tied that mediocrity to the alleged failure of America's schools. Fast forward to 2012, and the story hasn't changed, former New York City schools chief Joel Klein and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice wrote in a report provided to The Huffington Post slated to be released Tuesday. "The sad fact is that the rising tide of mediocrity is not something that belongs in history books," said the report produced by a Council on Foreign Relations task force they co-chaired. The report, called the U.S. Education Reform and National Security report, argues for treating education as a national-security issue, noting that deficiencies in areas like foreign languages hold back America's capacity to produce soldiers, diplomats and spies. It calls for increased standards, accountability and school choice -- charter schools and vouchers -- to increase America's international educational standing.

Last week, I reported that the city's charter school sector was on the verge of releasing a trove of data about its schools. I began my reporting after I learned about the plan in February, and a week ago, I learned that the organization in charge of the report had big plans for the report's release. The organization, the New York City Charter School Center, sent an advisory a week ago announcing Monday as the big day and inviting reporters to an 11 a.m. press conference to learn about the report, which would compile data about the schools' performance and their students. But those plans were scrapped over the weekend. On Sunday afternoon a spokeswoman for the charter school center emailed to say that the "State of the Sector" report was being delayed because all of the data had not been verified.

This report finds that the exclusion of thousands of students with disabilities from reported Connecticut Mastery Test results has distorted reported trends in test scores. Following test scores from year to year in the same grade, the study finds that statewide improvements in standard Connecticut Mastery Test (CMT) scores reported by the Connecticut State Department of Education (SDE) between 2008 and 2009 -- the period of the largest reported gains -- were largely the result of the exclusion of students with disabilities from these standard test results, rather than overall improvements in performance. For example, 84% of the reported improvement in 4th grade math proficiency between 2008 and 2009 and 69% of the improvement in 8th grade reading proficiency could be attributed to the exclusion of these students. Much of the reported improvements in later years could also be attributed to this exclusion, though there were some modest overall gains as well.

Imagine you're a parent of a seven-year-old who has just come home from school with her end-of-year report card. And the report card provides marks for only two subjects, and for children who are in grade-levels different from hers. Furthermore, there's nothing on the report card to indicate how well these children have been progressing throughout the year. There are no teacher comments, like "great participation in class" or "needs to turn in homework on time." And to top it off, the report gives a far harsher assessment of academic performance than reports you've gotten from other sources. That's just the sort of "report card" that was handed to America yesterday in the form of the National Assessment of Education Progress. And while the NAEP is all well and good for what it is -- a biennial norm-referenced, diagnostic assessment of fourth and eighth graders in math and reading -- the results of the NAEP invariably get distorted into all kinds of completely unfounded "conclusions" about the state of America's public education system.

As advocates for public education, The Learning Community has grave concerns about the RI-CAN school report cards that evaluate every Rhode Island public school based on faulty methodology. RI-CAN claims that their report cards "are designed to help families in Rhode Island access online information about their local schools" when in truth the report cards spread misinformation to concerned citizens. Instead of providing access to accurate data, RI-CAN summarizes a school's performance by using only one grade level's achievement on state standardized tests and mathematically incorrect calculations.  No efforts at holding schools accountable will succeed unless the measures used are fair and accurate. It is worth mentioning that we are expressing our strong opposition to the report cards despite the fact that The Learning Community ranked in the Top 10 schools in Rhode Island on 7 of the 14 indicators. The methodological deficiencies of the RI-CAN report cards render them at best useless and, at worst, harmful to our state's efforts to support the education of every child.

Incomplete: How Middle Class Schools Aren't Making the Grade is a new report from Third Way, a Washington, D.C.-based policy think tank. The report aims to convince parents, taxpayers and policymakers that they should be as concerned about middle-class schools not making the grade as they are about the failures of the nation's large, poor, urban school districts. But, the report suffers from egregious methodological flaws invalidating nearly every bold conclusion drawn by its authors. First, the report classifies as middle class any school or district where the share of children qualifying for free or reduced-priced lunch falls between 25% and 75%. Seemingly unknown to the authors, this classification includes as middle class some of the poorest urban centers in the country, such as Detroit and Philadelphia. But, even setting aside the crude classification of middle class, none of the report's major conclusions are actually supported by the data tables provided. The report concludes, for instance, that middle-class schools perform much less well than the general public, parents and taxpayers believe they do. But, the tables throughout the report invariably show that the schools they classify as "middle class" fall precisely where one would expect them to-in the middle-between higher- and lower-income schools. 

In The Louisiana Recovery School District: Lessons for the Buckeye State, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute criticizes local urban governance structures and presents the decentralized, charter-school-driven Recovery School District (RSD) in New Orleans as a successful model for fiscal and academic performance. Absent from the review is any consideration of the chronic under-funding and racial history of New Orleans public schools before Hurricane Katrina, and no evidence is provided that a conversion to charter schools would remedy these problems. The report also misreads the achievement data to assert the success of the RSD, when the claimed gains may be simply a function of shifting test standards. The report also touts the replacement of senior teachers with new and non-traditionally prepared teachers, but provides no evidence of the efficacy of this practice. Additionally, the report claims public support for the reforms, but other indicators-never addressed in the report-reveal serious concerns over access, equity, performance, and accountability. Ultimately, the report is a polemic advocating the removal of public governance and the replacement of public schools with privately operated charter networks. It is thin on data and thick on claims, and should be read with great caution by policymakers in Ohio and elsewhere.

The most interesting part of the new Condoleezza Rice-Joel Klein report, which bemoans how American national security is threatened by the poor state of public education, is not in the body of the document itself. The real story is in the dissents at the end of the report. You can read the report here, and then find out all of the many problems with it in the dissenting views attached at the end of the report, which was written by several members of the Council of Foreign Relations task force. Some of the dissenters - including Linda Darling-Hammond and Randi Weingarten - express such broad disagreement with the actual thesis that national security is threatened by our public schools, as well as with some of the recommended solutions, that one could wonder why they agreed to stay on the commission and put their names to the document. Here's why: To ensure that their viewpoint was at least included somewhere in the document.

This technical report contains four main sections:  1) Data. Description of the data used to implement the student growth model, including data processing rules and relevant issues that arose during processing.  2) Model. Statistical description of the model.  3) Reporting. Description of Reporting metrics and computation of effectiveness scores.  4) Results. Overview of key model results aimed at providing information on model quality and characteristics. It is important to note that results presented in this report are based on 2010-11 and prior school years' data. The model will be re-estimated with 2011-12 data when they are available"

I've written before about KIPP attrition in response to reports that had been released studying it.  When reports conclude that KIPP does not have high attrition, they tout it on their websites.  When reports concluded that they do have high attrition, KIPP responds with a rebuttal. The problem with most of these reports is that the data they give us has already been analyzed and then turned into percentages, which are only relative measures.  This is why I finally got around to navigating the New York START data system to find the actual raw data for myself which I could then compare to KIPPs annual report card that they release.

"Several recent reports, including one from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, have found that charter schools generally under-enroll special education students when compared to conventional public schools. A new report from the Center on Reinventing Public Education, however, asserts that charter schools' special education rates are much closer to those of district public schools than is described by these other recent reports. A review of that new report concludes that, even though it was touted as reaching different conclusions - more favorable to charter schools - than past research, in fact the results are very much consistent. It confirms that charter schools are systematically under-enrolling students with special needs."

In November 2007, when our school received its first progress report grade, an A, I wrote a letter to our staff to say that I was pleased with our grade. However, I also told our staff that "I believe the progress report fails to capture the essence of a school, and it fails to measure the things that make our school such a great place." Four years later, with the progress report on its fifth iteration, I think my letter remains an accurate appraisal of the most important rating tool now in use by the Department of Education.

Note that the four dissenters on the Council on Foreign Relations' task force are never quoted in the news reports. Their dissent needs to be read. But what struck me, aside from the make-up of the committee, was the sponsor. Would they publish a task force report on Russian/U.S. relations written by people who had no background experience or expertise on the subject? Someone like me-although I suspect I know as much about that subject as their experts do on American public schooling. (I follow it.) But why is it that they think education belongs on their plate? I suppose that it's seen as one of our weapons for defeating our foreign enemies. Besides, as Jack Jennings of the Center on Education Policy, points out: "Everything the report recommends is already being done ... It's Joel Klein beating the same old drums in a different forum.'" Klein's reported rejoinder: "But it's not happening at the level we're needing ... we need to do it in a much more accelerated way." That sounds like a prescription for dismissing the democratic process-which is deliberative and thoughtful-conducted at the level appropriate to changing the way young people are raised-close to home. Or at least no further away than the Constitution permits. That's bad enough. After all, nearly all of the states adopted the several hundreds of pages of the new Common Core curriculum. How many do you believe read ANY of it?

In confronting any other national security threat, the U.S. wouldn't trust unreliable and unproven solutions. We would go with what works. Why, then, do some in the education sector insist we gamble on the privatization of our public schools? A new report from the Council on Foreign Relations, written by Joel I. Klein and Condoleezza Rice, rightly identifies a problem in our nation's education system, namely, that we are not educating our students well enough to maintain our country's economic vitality, international competitiveness or vibrant democracy. The report argues that this, in turn, poses a national security risk. But simply encouraging more competition, choice, and privatization within our nation's schools, as Klein and Rice advocate, does not constitute the systemic, scalable or sustainable solution that our country needs or that the report claims to present. The dissenting opinions included with the report criticize the authors' policy recommendations for promoting a reform agenda that is based on inconclusive evidence and that fails to address the serious issue of inequity in education funding and opportunity.

A recent report from the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution examines three school organization reforms that may yield positive results but have not captured the attention of policymakers or the media. The report concludes that at least two these less-publicized organizational reforms deserve greater attention in the education reform discussion. Think Twice think tank review project reviewer Patrick J. McEwan of Wellesley College finds the report to offer a solid, fair presentation of the research. McEwan's review was published today by the National Education Policy Center, housed at the University of Colorado Boulder School of Education.

ALEC's 17th edition of the Report Card on American Education contains a comprehensive overview of educational achievement levels (performance and gains for low-income students) for the 50 states and the District of Columbia (see full report for complete methodology). The Report Card details what education policies states currently have in place and provides a roadmap for legislators to follow to bring about educational excellence in their state.

K12 Inc. enrolls more public school students than any other private education management organization in the U.S. Much has been written about K12 Inc. (referred to in this report simply as "K12") by financial analysts and investigative journalists because it is a large, publicly traded company and is the dominant player in the operation and expansion of full-time virtual schools. This report provides a new perspective on the nation's largest virtual school provider through a systematic review and analysis of student characteristics, school finance, and school performance of K12-operated schools. Using federal and state data, this report provides a description of the students served by K12 and the public revenues received and spent by the company at the school level. Further, the report presents evidence from a range of school performance measures and strives to understand and explain the overall weak performance of these virtual schools.

Late yesterday, the New Jersey Department of Education Released its long awaited report on the state school finance formula. For a little context, the formula was adopted in 2008 and upheld by the court as meeting the state constitutional standard for providing a thorough and efficient system of public schooling. But, court acceptance of the plan came with a requirement of a review of the formula after three years of implementation. After a change in administration, with additional legal battles over cuts in aid in the interim, we now have that report.  The idea was that the report would suggest any adjustments that may need to be made to the formula to make the distributions of aid across districts more appropriate/more adequate (more constitutional?). I laid out my series of proposed minor adjustments in a previous post. Reduced to its simplest form, the current report argues that New Jersey's biggest problem in public education is its achievement gap - the gap between poor and minority students and between non-poor and non-minority students.  And the obvious proposed fix? To reduce funding to high poverty, predominantly minority school districts and increase funding to less poor districts with fewer minorities. Why? Because money and class size simply don't matter. Instead, teacher quality and strategies like those  used in Harlem Childrens' Zone do! Here's my quick, day-after, critique