Education Links

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.

On Monday, parents and guardians will be able to access individual student scores from this year's state tests. SchoolBook asked some teachers to help put the scores in the context of classroom learning. Their overall response: consider the test results as a snapshot and take them with a proverbial grain of salt, or two.

Mayor Bloomberg turned the announcement of the 2012 state test results into a promotional event for his "reforms" on Tuesday, despite the fact that an honest appraisal of the scores showed that city students as a group made only modest progress in both math and ELA.  The mayor's presentation ignored or downplayed results that didn't fit in with his triumphal narrative, including the fact that the racial achievement gap widened last year in a number of categories. State officials, by contrast, didn't even hold a press conference, and said publicly only that the statewide results (which mirrored the city's) showed "some positive momentum" but left too many students unprepared. The mayor, however, orchestrated a big press function and handed out a shameless PowerPoint that reported highly selective numbers and featured a comparison of charters and new schools founded during his tenure with "traditional" city schools - i.e. the vast majority of schools in the city system. But the numbers are there for all to see. "His" charters and new schools combined underperform the average school, in fact (see especially slide 6), and they gained only one to two points more than the "traditional" schools in percentages of students meeting standards in math and less than a percentage point in students meeting standards in English. That, according to the mayor, was conclusive evidence for the success of his reforms. 

The biggest new thing in American public education these days is a two-volume, 230-page, written-by-committee document called the Common Core State Standards. Forty-five states have pledged to the federal government that they will adopt the standards-which specify the math and English skills that students must attain in each grade from kindergarten to the end of high school-within the next several years. Some of these states genuinely believe that doing so will make more of their students ready for college and careers. Others are on board primarily because the Obama administration has enticed them with billions of dollars from its Race to the Top competition, part of the administration's economic-stimulus program. Within the school-reform community, the standards have set off a virtual civil war. It pits those who believe that America desperately needs national standards to catch up to its international competitors against those who think that the administration, by imposing the standards on the states, is guilty of an unwise, or even illegal, power grab.

There have now been several stories in the New York news media about New York City's charter schools' "gains" on this year's state tests (see here, here, here, here and here). All of them trumpeted the 3-7 percentage point increase in proficiency among the city's charter students, compared with the 2-3 point increase among their counterparts in regular public schools. The consensus: Charters performed fantastically well this year. In fact, the NY Daily News asserted that the "clear lesson" from the data is that "public school administrators must gain the flexibility enjoyed by charter leaders," and "adopt [their] single-minded focus on achievement." For his part, Mayor Michael Bloomberg claimed that the scores are evidence that the city should expand its charter sector. All of this reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how to interpret testing data, one that is frankly a little frightening to find among experienced reporters and elected officials.

The study claims they found that if they gave teachers several thousand dollars at the beginning of the year and told them they'd have to return it if their students didn't do well on math tests, then students did better on those tests (there was no impact on score improvement for students of teachers in the group that were offered bonuses after the test -- the more typical merit page scheme).  The study only included teachers from nine schools and student scores were also not tracked past one school year.

Tomorrow, ACTING NJ Education Commissioner Cerf will finally have his long-overdue confirmation hearing. In anticipation, I've put out a good deal of reporting this week about Cerf's career and his reign at the NJDOE. For me, it all comes down to three things (click through each link for all the details):

The AFT, led by its President Randi Weingarten, advocates vigorously on behalf of what it views as best for students in the public schools of America. In the current environment of test-driven accountability systems, there is a danger of narrowing the education our children receive to improve test scores. This leads to a "one-size-fits-all" approach that is justified on the grounds of the supposedly poor performance of U.S. schools on international comparisons. But too often, those who rely upon such comparison neither understand what the results mean nor do they examine what things high-scoring countries do. The AFT has never opposed the proper use of tests as one means of assessment. One can see AFT's well-thoughtout positions on proper use of testing on its website, including its position statement on Accountability and its publications and reports on Standards and Assessments. Now the AFT is running a petition drive against the idea of One Size Fits All in education, which has been the impact of current policies at the national and state level on assessment and accountability. 

It's probably too early to say whether Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are a "tsunami" or a "seismic shift," but, continuing with the natural disaster theme, the last few months have seen a massive "avalanche" of press commentary about them, especially within the last few days. Also getting lots of press attention (though not as much right now) is Adaptive/Personalized Learning. Both innovations seem to fascinate us, but probably for different reasons, since they are so fundamentally different at their cores. Personalized Learning, like more traditional concepts of education, places the individual at the center. With MOOCs, groups and social interaction take center stage and learning becomes a collective enterprise. This post elaborates on this distinction, but also points to a recent blurring of the lines between the two - a development that could be troubling.

This is all happening just before the release of a major movie called "Won't Back Down," a pro-parent trigger film with Viola Davis, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Holly Hunter that was produced by Walden Media, a company owned by uber-conservative entrepreneur Philip Anschutz. Walden helped distribute "Waiting for Superman," a tendentious documentary that mischaracterized charter schools as a systemic answer to public education's problems and hailed Michelle Rhee as a reform hero. You don't have to guess about the message of "Won't Back Down" - watch this trailer.

The parent trigger, an idea presented by the voices of corporate education "reform" as parent empowerment, won a round in court this week. Ironically, the court came down firmly in favor of disempowering parents, as the parent trigger's sponsors had requested. The ruling by a California Superior Court judge decreed that parents who have signed a parent trigger petition do not have the right to change their minds and may not rescind their signatures. The ruling cast the future of the targeted school, Desert Trails in Adelanto, in Southern California's high desert, into confusion. Charter operators will now be invited to bid for the school, even though Desert Trails parents on both sides of the controversy say they don't want the school to become a charter - disempowering them even further.

The narrative surrounding Khan Academy has, it seems, gotten a bit out of hand. It's not Sal's fault. He didn't set out to become one of the biggest celebrities in education but simply to help his cousins with their math homework. But Ann Doerr, wife of venture capitalist John Doerr, picked up on it. Then Bill Gates. Then the San Jose Mercury, 60 Minutes, the New York Times ... and all of a sudden Khan Academy, a collection of low-res videos offering step-by-step instructions for how to solve math problems, was being hailed as the Next Big Thing in education. And big it is: Khan Academy boasts almost 3,300 videos that have been viewed over 160 million times. That's a heroic achievement. But there's a problem: the videos aren't very good.

A cooperative effort of the New York City Department of Education, the Chancellor's office, and the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) resulted in a specially designed educational program under which all elementary and middle schools in the Chancellor's District would operate. The program included five components: a research-based curriculum focused heavily on literacy and mathematics; a staffing model designed to ensure a qualified teacher in every classroom; a strong principal for every school; high quality professional development for teachers and administrators; and smaller classes with added dollars for materials and supplies.

In 1972 I spent considerable time interviewing individuals and groups of young children in order to learn more about how they went about solving test questions on standardized tests. My interest was spurred by the discovery that my fluent bookworm son did badly on a 3rd grade test, and that the students who left our cozy 4-room Pre-K to 3rd grade mini-program at PS 144 were scoring poorly in 3rd grade. I knew virtually nothing about tests until that experience. I was a good test-taker and assumed such tests were good at detecting my talents. I was stunned by what I learned. I wrote a publication.

ACTING NJ Education Commissioner Chris Cerf recently invoked Albert Shanker, the legendary teachers union leader, in supporting Cerf's expansion of charter schools

While the fight over closing schools may be hotter than the weather this summer, the evidence shows that this is not a strategy that works to help all New York City kids get the education they deserve. Yet Mayor Bloomberg has adopted it with a single-mindedness that makes no sense. He has closed more than 140 schools since he took control of the city's school system in 2002. Bloomberg's agenda has disrupted school communities, alienated parents and destabilized neighborhoods. College-readiness rates in the new schools created to replace closing schools are abysmally low, and overall grad rates in these new schools have actually been falling, even as overall grad rates remained flat. Instead of closing schools, there is a better and more effective intervention to turn them around. The Chancellor's District was an innovative program involving nearly 60 schools that flourished from 1996 to 2003 under a joint agreement between then-Chancellor Rudy Crew and the UFT. It's an approach we can use in the 24 schools that are now the subject of litigation between the Department of Education and the principals' and teachers' unions over how they will be staffed.

The signature Bloomberg administration reform of shutting down failing schools and replacing them with new schools has - itself - failed thousands of city students, a Daily News analysis finds. The new schools opened under the mayor were supposed to have better teachers, better principals, and, ultimately, better test scores than the dysfunctional failure mills they were replacing. But when The News examined 2012 state reading test scores for 154 public elementary and middle schools that have opened since Mayor Bloomberg took office, nearly 60% had passing rates that were lower than older schools with similar poverty rates.

Will a new set of standards and more tests help students?

It all started a few days ago when Edison scoundrel and Broadyte Chris Cerf published a fact-free diatribe extolling the charter school solution to a non-existent problem. To say that Cerf plays fast and loose with facts would be the understatement of the summer, but his most mendacious statements (and a grievous factual error) occur in regards to the venerable Albert Shanker. The incorrigible Cerf isn't the first corporate snake oil salesman to try and misrepresent the late President of the American Federation of Teachers' views, or for that matter, spin the original purpose of charters to be a gateway drug to vouchers. The latter argument is usual spun as "charter schools were created to be schools of choice." Anyone familiar with actual history knows that Shanker intended charters to supplement public schools by serving the most difficult to educate students (the ones current charters avoid like the plague), he never supported the core segregationist tenet of "school choice." In fact, most high profile corporate education privatizers have perpetuated these outrageous lies at one time or another.

Are charters really doing a better job educating the city's public school students than the traditional public schools? That was the question of the week, after state test scores came out on Tuesday showing not only far greater proficiency in English and math by third through eighth graders who attend the city's charters, but also far more improvement this year.