Why the school progress reports and NYC education reporters deserve a big fat “F”

Gary Rubinstein, a math teacher at Stuyvesant, totally outclasses the numerous education reporters in this city in his analysis of the recent school grades.  

He shows via this graph to the right and discusses in his blog how there is little or no correlation in rank order for schools between last year or this year's progress reports. 

(Incidentally, in a subsequent posting, Rubinstein also points out that NYC charters are twice as likely to get "Fs" in progress than non-charters.)

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. 

See the Daily News oped I wrote in 2007, in which I offer even more criticisms of the progress reports, including their inherent instability, “Why parents and teachers should reject the new grades”.  

 Researchers have found that 32 to 80% of the annual fluctuations in a typical school’s scores are random or due to one time factors alone, unrelated to the amount of learning taking place. Thus, given the formula used by the Department of Education, a school’s grade may be based more on chance than anything else.

Yet here is one typical headline from last week: School report cards stabilize after years of unpredictability. Here is the NY Times account:

“We have a really high level of stability this year, which is a good thing,” said Shael Polakow-Suransky, chief academic officer for the city’s Department of Education…. There is movement and that’s good because we are measuring one year of data and we expect schools will go up and down, but we don’t want to see movement caused by something that’s external to the kids,” Mr. Polakow-Suransky said, referring to changes in the state exams that caused incredible increases and then a drop-off in schools’ grades.

Of course, if one year’s movement up and down is primarily random, that by definition is “external.” 

Nor have any education reporters bothered to report that Jim Liebman, who designed the system, testified to the City Council when the grades were introduced that the DOE would improve the reliability of the system to incorporate three years worth of test score data instead– which both he and Suransky have refused to do.

Indeed, as recounted on p. 121 of Beth Fertig’s book, Why can’t U teach me 2 read,  Liebman is quoted as responding to Michael Markowitz’s observations that the grading system was designed to provide essentially random results this way:

“There’s a lot I actually agree with, he said in a concession to his opponent…He then proceeded to explain how the system would eventually include three years’ worth of data on every school so the risk of big fluctuations from one year to the next wouldn’t be such a problem.”

And yet no one, including Fertig, has mentioned this discrepancy and DOE’s lack of rationale for intentionally allowing an essentially single unreliable grade to determine a school’s future – with 10% of schools now guaranteed to be given a failing grade and thus liable to being closed, based largely on chance. 

Read my earlier 2010 column, Why the school grading system, and Joel Klein, still deserve a big "F".

Fact-checking Beth Fertig on the charter co-location issue

See Beth Fertig’s story today on WNYC about the UFT/NAACP co-location lawsuit.  Here are some problematic assertions in her piece:

Success Academy is a chain of charters run by former City Councilwoman Eva Moskowitz. Recently, her organization used city data to conduct its own study of 81 charters that share space with regular schools. It found average class sizes in the district schools only went up by about one student over four years, which was no more than the citywide average.

This is the wrong comparison to use; charter co-locations tend to occur in the least crowded schools and neighborhoods.  For example,  in Queens, where the overcrowding is intense, and class sizes are increasing fast, there are very few co-locations.  The comparison in class size should NOT be to schools citywide, but with a similar set of schools nearby.   Class sizes should not be increasing in any school, but particularly not in struggling schools in  communities like Harlem which otherwise would have the space to keep class sizes small.

Genevieve Foster, who has a daughter attending Harlem Success Academy 1 in the same building as PS 149... " If you look at our classrooms we have more children," she said. We have less space, and we're also receiving less money to really provide the resources necessary for our children. ... We can also say we have issues with space.  "

First of all, co-located charters like Harlem Success are getting more public funding per student than regular public schools; see the recent IBO study on this.  This doesn’t even count the millions of dollars that they privately raise.  It’s astonishing to me that charter advocates are still proclaiming this myth, no less reporters letting them repeat it without any rebuttal.

If you count the lower need level of the students enrolled in charters, as this report did, the disproportion in public funding is even greater, since charter schools have smaller proportions of ELL and poor students.
Secondly, if HSA charters feel squeezed, why not get their own space?  With the millions Eva has raised, she could afford it.  Finally, there are many claims about the larger class sizes at HSA charters.  What’s rarely mentioned is  that Eva ensures that there are at least two teachers in every classroom.

There's no doubt sharing isn't always easy, but charter parents accuse the teachers union and the NAACP of inflaming the situation. They note that the Success Academy renovated the playground for everyone at PS 149.

No one who has been paying attention to the fierce battles over co-locations in recent years would believe that the UFT or the NAACP could possible “inflame” the situation.  All the lawsuit has done is to provide parents in the co-located schools a weapon to fight for the rights of their children not to be unfairly deprived of adequate space to learn.  And the playground is a huge issue for the parents and kids at PS 149 – HSA came in, and without their consent, tore up the playground and installed an Astroturf soccer field which deprived the 149 kids of their baseball playing area.  See Juan Gonzalez on this.

More broadly, why is it that this article and others like it do not mention the prospective loss of the PS 149 art room, the fact that there is no space for special needs students to get their services, that their counseling room has to share space with the PTA room separated only by a curtain, or that the D75 school is now forced to have gym on the auditorium stage?

If you have other observations about the effects of this or other co-locations, you can email Fertig at bfertig@wnyc.org