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In part 1 I demonstrated there was little correlation between how a teacher was rated in 2009 to how that same teacher was rated in 2010.  So what can be more crazy than a teacher being rated highly effective one year and then highly ineffective the next?  How about a teacher being rated highly effective and highly ineffective IN THE SAME YEAR. I will show in this post how exactly that happened for hundreds of teachers in 2010.  By looking at the data I noticed that of the 18,000 entries in 2010, about 6,000 were repeated names.  This is because there are two ways that one teacher can get multiple value-added ratings for the same year.

The New York Times, yesterday, released the value-added data on 18,000 New York City teachers collected between 2007 and 2010.  Though teachers are irate and various newspapers, The New York Post, in particular, are gleeful, I have mixed feelings. For sure the 'reformers' have won a battle and have unfairly humiliated thousands of teachers who got inaccurate poor ratings.  But I am optimistic that this will be be looked at as one of the turning points in this fight.  Up until now, independent researchers like me were unable to support all our claims about how crude a tool value-added metrics still are, though they have been around for nearly 20 years.  But with the release of the data, I have been able to test many of my suspicions about value-added.  Now I have definitive and indisputable proof which I plan to write about for at least my next five blog posts.

Though most of the critiques so far focus on the inherently volatile nature and large margins of error in any such calculation, here in NY State we have a special problem: the state tests themselves have been fatally flawed for many years.  There has been rampant test score inflation over the past decade; many of the test questions themselves are amazingly dumb and ambiguous; and there are other severe problems with the scaling and the design of these exams that only testing experts fully understand.  Though the State Education Department claims to have now solved these problems, few actually believe this to be the case. As further evidence, see Fred Smith's analysis below.  Fred is a  retired assessment expert for the NYC Board of Education, who has written widely on the fundamental flaws in the state tests.  Here, he shows how deep problems remain in their design and execution -- making their results, and the new teacher evaluation system and  teacher data reports based upon them, essentially worthless.  He goes on to urge parents to boycott the state exams this spring.

The recent agreement to clarify and refine the New York teacher evaluation law took up an issue that has a special importance for New York City public school educators- the appeals process for ineffective ratings on end-of-the-year summative evaluations. Readers of Edwize know that last December the ship of teacher evaluation negotiations for the 34 Transformation and Restart schools sunk on the rocky shoals of this very issue, when Mayor Bloomberg and the NYC Department of Education refused to negotiate a meaningful and substantive appeals process. For there to be renewed progress on those negotiations, as well as on the negotiations for the evaluations of all New York City public school educators, the issue of the appeal process had to be resolved. The agreement settled the issue of the appeals process for New York City by guaranteeing vital and indispensable due process rights in the teacher evaluation process. With these rights, the educational integrity and fairness of the teacher evaluation process are secure. To understand the importance of the appeals process, and why the agreement secured what New York public school teachers need from due process in such a process, we must first examine the background and context of this issue.

"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."

"Publicly funded, privately run charter schools enroll less than half as many English-language learners and fewer kids with disabilities than district-run schools do. "

"Testimony before the NYC Council Education Committee Leonie Haimson, Executive Director, Class Size Matters"

In prominent Hollywood movies and even in some research studies, New York City (NYC) charter schools have been held up as unusually successful. This research brief presents a new study that analyzes the resources available to those charter schools, and it also looks at their performance on state standardized tests

A New York state appellate court has ruled New York City must release reports that measure public school teachers' effect on their student test scores - complete with the teachers' names.

Decision to release Teacher Data Reports on NYC teachers.

I knew that if I had enough patience the corporate reformers would eventually let slip some data which would prove, once and for all, how unscientific are the metrics they've been using to shut down schools. That day came earlier this week. I'll encourage anyone to recheck my calculations, just in case, but if I've found what I think I've found, it will be the 'death blow' to the New York City 'value-added' model they use to rate and close down schools.

In 2009, the state law granting the Mayor control of the New York City public school system was renewed. That renewal included a requirement that the New York City Independent Budget Office "enhance official and public understanding" of educational matters of the school system. The law also requires the Chancellor of the school system to provide IBO with the data that we deem necessary to conduct our analyses. That data began to flow to IBO at the beginning of the 2010-2011 school year. This report is our first annual summary of that data. Over the course of the last year, we have issued a number of detailed analyses of specific topics, and we will continue to produce those types of reports. This current report is designed as a descriptive overview of the school system rather than as an in-depth look at particular issues. It is organized into three main sections. The first presents demographic information on the students who attend New York City's public schools. The next section describes the resources-budgets, school staff, and buildings-that the school system utilizes. The final section describes the measurable outcomes of the school system's efforts for particular subgroups of students.

New York State Education Law requires that when a district provides space or services to a charter school it shall do so " at cost", and yet the NYC Department of Education provides free space and services for nearly one hundred co-located charter schools. Using figures from the Independent Budget Office, we estimate that the space and services they currently receive is worth more than $100 million annually, and that this practice contributes to the fact that these schools receive about $3,000 more per student in public funds annually than traditional public schools.   Our lawsuit seeks to stop the New York City Department of Education from violating the law.  Their illegal provision of free space and services has created a separate and unequal school system across the city, sparked divisive battles between parents and community members, and encouraged rapid charter school expansion at the expense of our public schools. 

This is the latest in a back-and-forth between Joel Klein, former New York City Schools chancellor, and Aaron Pallas, a Teachers College professor and statistician.

The city's annual A-through-F grading system for its public schools should be interpreted with caution, according to a report by the Independent Budget Office released Thursday. But overall the system is a "significant improvement" over simply looking at student test scores alone.

The results of the Gifted and Talented exams are in, and according to the NY Times, more than half of the children tested in wealthier districts like District 2 and District 3 were found to be "gifted", while only six children made the grade in District 7 in the South Bronx.  Why the disparity? Are these tests merely a way of sorting children by race and class, as Debbie Meier pointed out in 2007, when Klein first proposed to base all admissions to gifted programs on the basis of high stakes exams, or do the results really reflect children's inherent abilities?  And does the proliferation of G and T programs across the city help or hinder the goal of equity and systemic reform?

State lawmakers have introduced legislation that would repeal mayoral control of the city school system - a move that would undo one of Mayor Bloomberg's crowning achievements, The Post has learned. Sen. Velmanette Montgomery (D-Brooklyn) and Assemblyman Keith Wright (D-Harlem) claim that the 10-year experiment giving City Hall sole power over educational matters has been a failure. And Montgomery has won the support of the ranking Democrat on the Senate Education Committee, Suzi Oppenheimer (D-Westchester), who has signed on as co-sponsor to the measure.

The SUNY committee decided to table the motion to double the fees of Eva Moskowitz's controversial charter network, probably because of a dynamite column by Juan Gonzalez today.  Here is the account of what happened by Noah Gotbaum, chair of the Overcrowding and Charter Committee of Community Education Council in District 3.