Education beat losing its best reporters...and now Elizabeth Green

We have lost several terrific reporters from the education beat recently. Erin Einhorn of the Daily News, perhaps the best investigative reporter on schools over the last five years, has moved on to covering City Hall.

Michael Meenan of NY1 has recently departed the station; Mike was the hardest working reporter I've ever seen, in terms of covering hearings, meetings, rallies, and doing his best to cover both sides of every story – including the deep dissatisfaction that many parents and other educational stakeholders have with the Bloomberg/Klein policies.

Today, the NY Sun is closing its doors, which will end Elizabeth Green's peerless education reporting for the paper.

In her short time at the Sun, Elizabeth had one scoop after another: The fact that the Department of Ed had been spying on Diane Ravitch and had enlisted Kathy Wylde of the NYC Partnership to smear her in an oped for the NY Post. That the DOE launched a "truth squad" to scan blogs and list servs for critical coverage. A big cheating scandal at the Ross charter school, founded by the multimillionaire Courtney Ross and located in the basement of Tweed itself.

She also produced a lot of great reporting on the city's vaunted test results, breaking the story that the state scores were likely inflated, according to experts, and that there had been an unusually high level of special ed accommodations in NYC on the national exams.

She led everyone on what will be one of the biggest political stories of this year, the fate of mayoral control of the schools. She was the first to report on the unusually high level of discontent among legislators with the Bloomberg administration's handling of education; and provided leaked testimony from some biggies to the Gotbaum commission studying the subject. Elizabeth was also the first to reveal the likely successor to Randi Weingarten as the head of the UFT, weeks before it was announced.

Many prominent commentators recognized her talent. Eduwonkette called her "the sharpest and most inquisitive education reporter in New York City." Eduwonkette's main rival, Eduwonk, entitled a post about one of her scoops: "Elizabeth Green Strikes Again!"

Alexander Russo, a well-known blogger, included Elizabeth in his 2008 national "Hot...For Education" list, and described her work as follows:

With ability (and ambition) to spare, the NY Sun's relatively new education reporter Elizabeth Green regularly breaks news and scoops her competitors. All the while looking snazzy. Watch out, big-time education reporters. Elizabeth is eating your lunch.

Elizabeth intends to keep reporting on education, and I have no doubt that given her talent, energy and ability to spot the big story wherever it can be found, she will land on her feet very quickly. But it is a huge loss nonetheless to have her missing from the daily education beat – especially now, when we need her most.

More statistical malpractice from Tweed: Joel Klein and his claims do not measure up

Check out Elizabeth Green’s article today in the NY Sun, in which she asked three academics to scrutinize the validity of the administration’s claim of narrowing the achievement gap between ethnic and racial groups.

See, for example, Bloomberg’s recent testimony before Congress, in which he said that “over the past six years, we’ve done everything possible to narrow the achievement gap – and we have. In some cases, we’ve reduced it by half.”

Yet the evidence for this is weak to non-existent. On the national tests called the NAEPs, there has been no narrowing of the achievement gap in any area since the Bloomberg/Klein reforms were instituted:

An analysis by the National Center for Education Statistics, the research arm of the federal Education Department, concludes that no achievement gaps have narrowed at all in New York City between 2003 and 2007. The only gap that moved in any significant direction is the one between poor students and the rest of the population, which widened slightly, that analysis said. The National Center for Education Statistics also concludes that upward trends in the reading scores of black and Hispanic fourth-graders lauded by Mr. Klein are not statistically significant.

In the article, Joel Klein reveals his statistical illiteracy:

“Those are just confidence levels. Nobody is saying this is a science," Mr. Klein said. He added: "If three points is flat, and four points is statistically significant, then what you're doing is, you're playing something of a game."

Chief press officer David Cantor called the memo from NCES "a politicized gloss.”

Instead, it is the DOE who insists on playing games – and politicizing the issue, by continuing to slander experts as somehow biased when they provide objective evidence that the non-stop PR spin issuing from Tweed has no basis in reality.

This is hardly the first time the DOE has revealed such statistical malpractice. Jim Liebman, law professor and head of the DOE accountability office, is a repeat offender. I recall one episode in particular when Liebman, testifying before the City Council, insisted that he wasn't basing school grades primarily on the results of a few tests, since each test was really "multiple assessments" given out over "multiple days," resulting in "multiple measures" of proficiency.

Another instance of this was the presentation of Jennifer Bell-Elwanger, head of testing for DOE, who was giving a power point presentation to the Panel for Educational Policy in late November, following the release of the NAEP results. She continually pointed out gains that, according to the NCES, were not statistically significant. Patrick Sullivan, Manhattan rep to the PEP and fellow blogger here, who seems to understand data better than anyone currently employed by the DOE, questioned her closely, saying, "But by definition these are insignificant gains, no?" Which she, of course, fervently denied.

Indeed, the memo from the NCES was prepared in response to a highly misleading email that Klein sent to nearly every NYC resident after NAEP results were first reported. In his email, he falsely claimed that the results showed “good progress that is consistent with the overall picture” and said that the NAEP showed a narrowing of the gap in nearly all areas, when the data itself revealed quite the opposite.

According to NYC’s results on the state exams, the situation is more complicated. The achievement gap is narrowing in some areas when one looks at “proficiency” levels, that is whether a student is at a level 1, 2, 3, etc., but not in terms of the actual scale scores.

Some testing experts consider proficiency levels less meaningful than scale scores, as they can be arbitrary, subjective and easy to manipulate. Daniel Koretz, a professor at Harvard and a national expert on testing, has just published the must-read book of the summer, Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us. Here is what Koretz has to say about proficiency levels:

….the percents deemed proficient [on state tests] are largely unrelated to states’ actual levels of student achievement…are also often inconsistent across grades or among subjects in a grade....[This system] obscures a great deal of information [because] of the coarseness of the resulting scale.

Even more importantly, why should we trust the state scores at all, when we know that the gains that they purport to show are not reflected in more trustworthy measures like the NAEPs?

The best thing about the Koretz’ book is his lucid explanation of why “test score inflation” inevitably occurs when you attach high-stakes to exams, and how this undermines the integrity and validity of the results; this has increasingly been the case throughout the nation as a result of NCLB, but even more here in NYC, as a result of the increasingly high-stakes policies of the Bloomberg/Klein administration.

Steve Koss has written about this eloquently on our blog, in relation to Campbell’s Law: “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”

I have tried to explain this phenomenon to many elected officials, staff, and reporters over the years, apparently with little success. I certainly don’t know a single NYC media outlet that has ever mentioned it, though Campbell’s Law was cited in some recent letters to the NY Times in response to the administration’s experiment to pay students for high scores.

I recall a lengthy discussion of this issue several years back with NY Times reporter David Herszenhorn while he was still on the education beat, to explain my opposition to the Mayor’s newly-proposed 3rd grade retention policy. One of the reasons I so vociferously opposed this policy, and still do, was not just that it was unfair to the student to base such a life-altering decision on the basis of one single, fallible test score, with such large margins of error; and not just that retention has been shown to have a racially-disparate impact and hurt rather than help most low-performing students.

My opposition was also due to the fact that the more significant consequences are attached to any test, the less its results can be trusted as a reliable gauge of real learning.

Since then, of course, the administration has piled on more and more high-stakes consequences -- for students, teachers, and schools – by adding fifth and seventh grade retention, awarding principals, teachers and students monetary rewards for high scores, and threatening to close down schools if scores don’t improve fast enough. The scores themselves have been rendered entirely meaningless as a result, as excessive test prep, teaching to the test, cheating, and other strategies to “game” the system has totally overtaken our schools.

Here is what Koretz has to say about this:

"One might expect that with the huge increase in the amount of testing in recent years, we would know more…Ironically, the reverse is true. While we have far more data now than we did twenty of thirty years ago, we have fewer sources of data that we can trust. The reason is simple: the increasing in testing has been accompanied by a dramatic upsurge in the consequences attached to scores. This is turn has created incentives to take shortcuts --- various forms of inappropriate test preparation, including outright cheating – that can substantially inflate test scores, rending trends seriously misleading or even meaningless.”

To the administration, all this appears acceptable, because as long as test scores go up, this justifies their policies; in truth, they don’t seem to care if the increases are meaningful or not.

Their laissez-faire attitude is revealed by the total lack of interest evinced in following-up on even well-documented cases of cheating. (See for example this story in the NY Sun, which though it says the DOE is “investigating” this will likely lead nowhere, as such stories have in the past.)

This “anything goes” attitude is also reflected in Klein’s remarks in a recent interview in the NY Post:

Q: What about complaints about the report-card grades for schools?

A: The report cards were probably one of the noisy periods. But . . . I can't tell you how many principals said to me, 'You know, chancellor, I didn't get the right grade but I promise you I won't get the same one next year,' so I think that had a big impact.

Here, Klein implicitly acknowledged that even while principals do not accept the fairness of these grades, based primarily on one-year gains in scores, he is content as long as they guarantee that they will get these scores to rise in the future, by any means possible.

Chris Cerf, if you’re reading this, your press office is not doing their job!

See Elizabeth Green’s story in the NY Sun about how seven DOE PR officers monitor 24 key education blogs and list servs, and occasionally try to refute the critiques within them, including our NYC education news list serv, and this blog.

They call themselves the “Truth Squad” but we know that the members of our list serv are the real truth squad. I am glad, however, that the powers that be feel compelled to respond to some of our observations, even though it is so often done in a perfunctory and unconvincing fashion.

As I was quoted in the article, "It's good that the press operation actually hears our complaints, because Joel Klein doesn't seem to."

The article does not come as much news to me, since we all figured out more than a year ago that this was happening.

We had a fun time when the now-departed but not-forgotten Robert Gordon, author of the highly flawed “fair student funding” scheme was the first Tweedie to subscribe (Feb. 9, 2007). Gordon answered some of our questions, unsatisfactorily – and then quickly unsubscribed. (Mar 21, 2007)

David Cantor, the chief press officer, soon followed by subscribing in Feb 28, 2007. Adina Lopatin, of the Accountability office, subscribed one week later, around the time that I’d attended one of their screwy focus groups for their screwy parent survey.

Though the NY Sun article says that only one person from the press office is assigned to each blog or list serv, actually three of them, including Cantor, subscribe to our list serv: Melody Meyer (who joined up in Apr 2, 2007) and Lindsay Harr (Apr 11, 2007).

Cantor began to post himself occasionally, in a rather perfunctory manner, but not until December 11, 2007 -- nearly one year after he had joined, initially about the NY Mag article which quoted Klein as saying to parents that they could send their kids to private school if they didn’t like class sizes in the public schools. It later turned out that Klein said something else very similar – that District 2 parents had “choices,” but when I asked Cantor what that specifically meant, if not sending their kids to private schools, he never replied.

Since then he has interjected so rarely (only about ten times ) that the main effect of his desultory comments makes me suspect that nearly everything else that I and the other members of this list serv write, including some extremely inflammatory statements, must be true. I also don’t get the feeling that poor David enjoys the task that Chris Cerf has assigned him to.

None of this is particularly surprising, but what did surprise me is what I learned during a forum a few months ago, in April, on “Grading NY’s public schools.” During the question period, I asked Cerf a question. I began by introducing myself, but he quickly interrupted me to say, “I know who you are; I read your stuff every day.”

Every day? Not in my wildest dreams had I imagined that Cerf or anyone at that high a level at Tweed had the inclination or the time to do this. Sometimes I don’t even read myself every day – I’m too busy. I know my husband almost never does. I doubt most of the people on the list serv do.

But I was happy to hear this, if a bit surprised that Cerf had admitted this, for if I and others on our list can cause him one tenth the headaches that Tweed causes us every day, not to mention the other one million plus NYC public school parents -- that does give me a small sense of satisfaction.

After looking at the historical record, I now conclude that what probably started as a pure monitoring exercise, instigated by Cerf in Feb. of 2007 eventually turned into a rather lame attempt to beat the critics at their own game nearly a year later.

It was in October 2007, after all, that it emerged that Diane Ravitch had been taped by the DOE at various speaking events, and a file compiled of her remarks.

This news was also broken by Elizabeth Green in the NY Sun, following a vicious attack on Diane published in the NY Post the day before, in the form of an oped with the byline of Kathy Wylde, head of the NYC Partnership, but with information put together by the DOE press office. This was a terrific PR blunder on the part of Cerf and Co., as nearly everyone and their mother came to Diane’s defense – not that she needed their help; she offered her own eloquent response in the NY Post.

It was shortly thereafter, in Dec. of 2007 that David Cantor started commenting on our list serv, after the NY Magazine article was published that must have caused them much grief. It was only then that the vociferous rage of public school parents about school overcrowding, which had reached crisis proportions in certain neighborhoods, without the administration even so much as lifting a finger, began to break into the mainstream media.

In Elizabeth’s article, it says that “The squad's latest triumph should appear today on a Listserv operated by the parent organizer Leonie Haimson — in the form of an e-mail message arguing that Ms. Haimson's characterization of summer school programs as underfunded was incorrect.”

We’re still waiting for that email message, by the way. As well as answers to lots more questions we have posed to David Cantor over the last few days and weeks.

Chris Cerf, if you’re reading this, your press office is not doing their job!

Update: the article in the NY Sun has delighted the bloggers, of course, many who have blogged about it already -- for some links click here.

ELA and Math Test Scores -- Experts Question Increases

State test scores for 2008 can be found here (Math) and here (ELA)

An expert who serves as the State's top technical adviser on testing is concerned about grade inflation and has called for an independent study of this year's unusual and unprecedented rise in test scores across the state. Writing in the NY Sun, Elizabeth Green has the story here.

Elizabeth also has a disturbing story about cheating on the state tests here. An excerpt:

A sixth-grader at M.S. 201. said that a teacher once looked over his shoulder and said, "Ooh, is that right? Is that the right answer?" encouraging him to erase and try again.

Meanwhile, 11 of 12 P.S. 48 graduates interviewed last week said they were coached during the state tests.

They said that teachers would look over their shoulders and instruct them to try again and again until they got answers right.

"They'd be like, 'Is that the right answer?' — until they make sure it's right," a sixth-grader said.

"When I was at 48, I never went to class, and I still passed the test," a seventh-grader said. "If you go to graduation, you pass."

Higher test scores could pay off for M.S. 201's teachers this year. The school is one of about 200 participating in a trial project to give teachers bonuses if their students perform well on state tests.

The bonuses average $3,000 a teacher.

Under the Bloomberg administration, test results have been woven into a complex system of carrots and sticks where principal bonuses, teacher merit pay, school ratings, school budget bonuses, principal dismissals and school closings all hinge on test scores. It is not surprising that pressure to score high has lead to a culture of test prep, grade inflation and cheating.

Update: see the NY Sun for a properly skeptical oped about the sharp rise in NY State test scores.

Weprin Crashes Press Conference and Again Blasts DOE

In a stunning reminder that the State ultimately controls our public schools, State Assemblymember Mark Weprin invited himself to DOE press conference at PS 46 in his district and denounced DOE's mania for standardized testing. The press event was arranged by DOE to celebrate schools that received "A" grades on their standardized test-based Progress Reports. But to the assembled audience that included the grim-faced Chancellor Klein and Chief Accountability Officer Jim Liebman, Weprin bluntly asserted there was "too much focus on trying to get the right answers on a test and not enough on learning". Weprin again complained the DOE is turning our schools into Stanley Kaplan test prep centers, a charge he first leveled during recent City Council hearings.

See Mike Meenan's excellent NY1 footage here and great coverage by Elizabeth Green in the NY Sun here. The Sun offered these revealing remarks:

Visiting a fourth-grade classroom before the announcement, Mr. Klein asked children why their school received an A. "Because," one child answered, "when the New York State ELA test is coming up, they teach us what methods to use, how to write."

Another boy said, "They do everything to help us with our ELA and all our tests."

Oh boy! Tweed's battalion of PR spinners have been busy trying to convince us that the Progress Reports are about more than test prep but they may have a hard time explaining those truthful children away.

City Students Stalled on National Education Tests

In this morning's NY Sun, Elizabeth Green reports on results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). These tests compare achievement of 4th and 8th graders across the country. Here is an excerpt:

Compared to the rest of the country, New York City fourth-graders edge out large central cities slightly on average but fall behind the national numbers. Eighth-graders scored no better on a math test than students in large central cities. That pattern has been essentially unchanged since 2003, the year the Bloomberg administration began to initiate changes in the city's public schools.

The results contradict earlier Bloomberg administration claims of success especially in middle schools. Full article here.