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Today, Rachel Monahan reported in the Daily News that the DOE is going forward with a contract for Joel Rose's new company to run the School of One in NYC public schools. Joel Rose devised and ran the "School of One" for DOE, a much-hyped online program to teach middle school math, starting in the summer of 2009.  Rose has had a pretty standard trajectory for a corporate reformer: he started as a TFA recruit, then worked for seven years at Edison charter schools under Chris Cerf, moved over to DOE as Cerf's chief of staff in 2006, and started the "School of One" as a summer school program in a few middle schools.

The Cuomo Education Commission had its first and only public hearing in NYC for three scant hours this morning and they packed us all in a small cafeteria room at Hostos College in the Bronx.

How, for example, if I was the principal of a given, average sized school in NYC, might I use the VA data on my teachers to council them? to suggest personnel changes? assignment changes, or so on? Would these data, as they are, provide me any useful information about my staff and how to better my school? For this exercise, I've decided to look at the year to year ratings of teachers in a relatively average school. Now, why would I bother looking at the year to year ratings when we know that the multi-year averages are supposed to more accurate - more representative of the teacher's over time contributions? Well, you'll see in the graphs below that those multi-year averages also may not be that useful.

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.

For more on how credit recovery has led to accelerated rates of credit accumulation, especially at the new small schools, see Jackie Bennett at EdWize.  But the practice of passing students, regardless of whether they have actually attended class or done homework, has become widespread at many, if not most, high schools throughout NYC, as schools are pressured to raise their statistics or else be threatened with closure.  Below is the account of a teacher who, for obvious reasons, would like to remain anonymous.

Unfortunately the mainstream media continue to repeat without dispute Suransky's claim that the progress reports were much more "stable" this year, even though 60% of schools changed grades.     Not one reporter, to my knowledge anyway, has bothered to point out how experts have shown that 32-80% of the annual gains or losses in scores at the school level are essentially random - and yet 60% of the school grade is based upon these annual gains or losses. 

Yesterday morning, parent groups, including Class Size Matters, the NYC Parents Union, and individual parent plaintiffs, took the city to court over charter co-locations, and the way in which DOE provides free space and service to charters for free, which we believe violates state law.

"New York City has just released the new round of results from its school rating system (they're called "progress reports"). It relies considerably more on student growth (60 out of 100 points) than absolute performance (25 points), and there are efforts to partially adjust most of the measures via peer group comparisons.* All of this indicates that the city's system is more focused on school rather than student test-based performance, compared with many other systems around the U.S. The ratings are high-stakes. Schools receiving low grades - a D or F in any given year, or a C for three consecutive years - enter a review process by which they might be closed. The number of schools meeting these criteria jumped considerably this year. There is plenty of controversy to go around about the NYC ratings, much of it pertaining to two important features of the system. They're worth discussing briefly, as they are also applicable to systems in other states."

This past Thursday, April 26th, the NYC PEP ended 137 years of history at Flushing High School.  A faculty of nearly 200 is now updating their resumes and preparing for interviews and high-performing students are filling out transfer forms to other high schools--they do not believe that the "new school" will be better, as the DOE continuously suggests. Here are some facts that the DOE and PEP have never mentioned during this entire process

Check out Darren Marelli's brilliant video below, using clips from the press conference before the Feb. 9 PEP meeting.

George Carlin is rolling over in his grave. The New York City Department of Education is waging a war on words of sorts, and is seeking to have words they deem upsetting removed from standardized tests. Fearing that certain words and topics can make students feel unpleasant, officials are requesting 50 or so words be removed from city-issued tests.

I have argued previously that unadjusted absolute performance measures such as proficiency rates are inappropriate for test-based assessments of schools' effectiveness, given that they tell you almost nothing about the quality of instruction schools provide, and that growth measures are the better option, albeit one that also has its own issues (e.g., they are more unstable), and must be used responsibly. In this sense, the weighting of the NYC grading system is much more defensible than most of its counterparts across the nation, at least in my view. But the system is also an example of how details matter - each school's growth portion is calculated using an unconventional, somewhat questionable approach, one that is, as yet, difficult to treat with a whole lot of confidence.

Voters have gotten to know city schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott since he assumed the important post last spring, but a new poll shows many haven't liked what they've seen. The Quinnipiac University poll, released Wednesday, showed that 34% of those who were questioned disapproved of the way Walcott is handling the job, up from 21% last May, the month after he took the job.

I work at one of the thirty-three PLA schools Mayor Bloomberg has publicly stated that he wants to close.  As part of this plan, he is also seeking to replace up to 50% of the teachers.  I have worked in the same school for the past nine years.  I can dismiss the sensationalistic claim from Mayor Bloomberg that 50% of teachers are ineffective, because it is simply not true.  Likewise, when I hear defenders of educators claim that all teachers do great work, I know this is not correct either.  The answer lies somewhere in between-in this case, much closer to the defenders of teachers. 

There is but one conclusion that can be drawn from the NYC Department of Education's last minute walk out of negotiations over a teacher evaluation system for 33 schools placed in the Transformation and Restart models: it was always Tweed's intention to refuse to enter into an agreement for teacher evaluations.

The city is threatening to shut down six poor-performing charter schools, officials said Wednesday.

I began teaching at Washington Irving in the fall of 2002, not knowing a thing about what I was in for. I had moved to New York from Chicago a few months before, and before that I had been in San Francisco. As well, I had never been inside a public school. After two days, I felt sure I would fail the students and myself. After two years I thought I could last a couple more years maybe. Now I look back and see how this experience of teaching at Irving has sustained me and given me purpose. As well, it answered this question: what is New York City?

After spending more than $80 million on a controversial online student achievement database, the NYC Department of Education's portal is about to become obsolete as the state rolls out its own nearly-identical system as part of a federal education grant, DNAinfo.com New York has learned. The city is quietly making the transition from its $81 million data system - known as ARIS, or "Achievement Reporting and Innovation System" - to a new statewide database being developed with federal education funding, according to officials and city and state documents.

I can think of no other profession in the public or private sector in which this kind of unreliable and potentially damaging data is made public.  The only effect of this will be to further undermine teacher morale -- already at an all-time low in this city -- and to dissuade teachers from working in our public schools and with the highest needs children.  Yet so far, GothamSchools is the only media outlet that has pledged not to publish them.  Meanwhile, the Governor is pushing a deadline of Thursday for the state and city teacher unions to agree on a statewide evaluation system, called APPR,  for the Annual Professional Performance Review, that will rate teachers 20-40% on test scores, and the rest on principal evaluations. Yet nearly one third of all principals in the state have signed onto a letter protesting this system, for reasons that are further explained here and here.  In the city there is even more discord, because the DOE refuses to give teachers the right to appeal a principal's negative rating to an independent arbiter, despite numerous documented cases in which NYC principals have arbitrarily delivered unsatisfactory ratings to teachers for political or personal reasons. Below is a letter from eight esteemed Teachers of the Year, originally posted on the NY State Teachers website, sent to the NY State Board of Regents last spring, pointing out how the proposed APPR is likely to unfairly penalize many excellent professionals, especially those work with at-risk students.  Nevertheless, on Monday, the Regents voted to go full speed ahead with its NCLB waiver application to the US Department of Education, that will further commit them to this damaging evaluation system.

First, let's quickly summarize the imprecision associated with the NYC value-added scores, using the raw datasets from the city. It has been heavily reported that the average confidence interval for these estimates - the range within which we can be confident the "true estimate" falls - is 35 percentile points in math and 53 in English Language Arts (ELA). But this oversimplifies the situation somewhat, as the overall average masks quite a bit of variation by data availability.