ARIS: a view from the field

About ARIS, the $80 million supercomputer that Jim Liebman, the DOE accountability czar, insists is a valuable tool to improve instruction, here is a report from a teacher who attended a recent training sponsored by the Accountability office:

“ The whole afternoon was devoted to the "connect" features. These include a profile page, blogging, group formation, discussion boards, wiki documents and file uploading that come with everyone's ARIS account. The package is less than meets the eye. All of the features I examined were inferior to similar tools that are readily available online.

A couple examples. If you write a blog or set up a discussion board there's (apparently) no way to get email notification if someone responds. You'll have to keep logging into ARIS and checking for activity. That's will be a big drawback for those teachers who are willing to participate. Many of the participants at the workshop said basically, the Big Brother factor would preclude them from sharing anything meaningful. There was a lot of disbelief this was seriously being offered. Another very weak feature is the wiki documents. No tool bar. I've never seen anything so bare bones.

Before the training started the instructor asked everyone to share their feelings about ARIS in one word. The most common word was "skeptical." She said she'd do that again at the end to see if workshop had changed anyone's mind but we never got to do that. A lot of questions came up. There seems to be an attempt to present ARIS as both data and "community." Well there's going to be data ..."

See this post in Gotham Schools about how New Visions sent out an email pointing out problems with ARIS, including widespread errors in the data, which was later withdrawn -- undoubtedly after pressure from DOE.

List of cuts to Tweed proposed by education advocates, UFT and Speaker Quinn

Elizabeth Green of Gotham Schools reports that the UFT has signed onto a letter, drafted by Time out from Testing and the Center for Immigrant Families, calling for a hiring freeze at Tweed, and cuts to the Leadership Academy and the Accountability office to save about $60 million a year -- before any of the millions in proposed mid-year cuts to school budgets should be contemplated.

This letter was also signed onto by Class Size Matters, the Working Families Party and others. As she notes,

On the chopping board would be the annual letter-grade progress reports for schools; the quality reviews that supplement the test-driven progress reports with observed details; all standardized tests for children between kindergarten and second grade; the Leadership Academy, the nonprofit organization that trains principals; the periodic assessments that are supposed to help teachers prepare students for state tests; and ARIS, the data warehousing program contracted to IBM that has so far been a flop.

That’s not the entire Joel Klein agenda. But it’s a lot.

In a speech to the Citizens Budget Commission, City Council Speaker Quinn proposed yet another list of non-classroom savings of $150 million, including $13 million from cutting the Data Inquiry Teams in every school:

"Thus far, we’ve identified at least $150 million in specific, non-classroom cuts to the Department of Education budget. These include a range of cuts from slowing the pace of school restructuring, to scaling back employee recruitment contracts.

There are scores of pilots, new initiatives, and program expansions in the Department that may be well intentioned -- but -- that in this climate, are luxuries that we just can’t afford.

Just one example is the $13 million “Data Inquiry Teams.” Let me read you the DOE’s official description of this program: “The Inquiry Team process is geared to assist schools in data-driven decision-making by integrating the components of the Accountability Initiative into the life of the school.” DOE gives every school eight to ten thousand dollars a year for this.

We think that this is asking principals and their teams to review and analyze student progress and class-work, isn’t that what a school and its staff is supposed to do anyway.

That’s $13 million annually that we could cut -- to keep $13 million in the classroom.

Add your suggestions for cuts in the comments section!

Margaret Spelling goes to Disneyworld

US Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings gave a keynote address at the Excellence in Action summit in Disneyworld, at which Bloomberg and Klein also appeared:

"Joel Klein told me that every Friday night, his wife, who works for Sony, gets an email telling her which movies led box office sales that week. Technology exists that provides data in real-time. Why are we not using it to personalize instruction for students in the classroom?

I was in San Diego on Monday, where I met with leaders in technology and innovation. We talked about how technology is beginning to personalize educational experiences."

Spellings seems to share the Tweed fantasy that using technology to analyze student standardized test score data somehow "personalizes instruction."

It is this same delusion that has led to the tumor-like growth of the Accountability initiative which continues to metastize through NYC public schools, each year adding more "Senior achievement Facilitators," "data coaches," and "data inquiry teams" .

Next year, despite all the budget cuts that will mean less tutoring, less afterschool programs, and larger classes, the Chancellor insists on creating even more "periodic assessments" and doubling the number of data inquiry teams in each school.

Spellings: "It makes me wonder, how can some people justify denying poor and minority families the same options they exercise themselves? "

Absolutely.

How can Joel Klein and Michael Bloomberg justify doubling the number of assessments and data inquiry teams that no private school in the country would countenance, while denying NYC children the chance at real personalized instruction through smaller classes that their own children received?

What grade would you give Joel Klein?

Yesterday, the DOE let the legal deadline for class size reporting lapse. Not entirely surprising, given the fact that they have refused to tell us a single school where class sizes have supposedly been reduced this year. Their official excuse is that they are still working on cleaning up the data.

Interesting that they felt they had enough accurate data to assign grades to every school; but they are still working on providing accurate class size information – as required by a law passed by the City Council nearly two years ago.

Tweed talks a lot about data-driven instruction, and is spending millions of dollars putting together data inquiry teams in every school to pump up test scores. But when it comes to the most basic, most critical data of all – how large are the classes our kids are sitting in – they remain officially at sea. Or else they are simply trying to hide the truth. Which is worse, I can’t say.

• The NAEP (national) test scores were released yesterday. These are the most reliable indicators we have for spotting long-term trends. NYC made no significant improvements in three out of the four categories since 2003, when the administration put into effect its Children First reforms.

No improvement in 4th or 8th grade reading, no improvement in 8th grade math. Only in 4th grade math have there been increases. Below is an article from today’s Times; and here is Diane Ravitch’s summary on our blog.

Also see the NY Post story, in which the Chancellor is quoted as saying that they are going to launch another “comprehensive study” to see what works in terms of raising achievement in middle schools. Parents and teachers could tell him plenty about how our middle school class sizes are not conducive to learning, in which 79% of students are in classes of 25 or more, and 40% in classes of 30 or more, far above the state, national and OECD averages, but I doubt he’d be interested in listening.

Clearly, the fact that this fall, NYC received the Broad award for most improved school district in the country was undeserved. As I said at the time, it was based largely on manipulated graduation data and inflated state test scores.

What grade would you give Joel Klein and this administration, not only for failing to improve student achievement in three of four categories, but in other areas? Say, transparency, communication, fairness? Or pick any category you like.

Our blog has a new poll (see right hand corner.) Please vote, and then put your comments on right here as to why you give the administration the grade you did.

Periodic assessments: a waste of precious time and dollars

Great piece by Jackie Bennett on the UFT blog Edwize about the so-called periodic assessments – which start next week. She says they will produce “junk data” while taking away valuable time for teaching and learning.

If you’ve ever looked at the stuff coming out of the Accountability office, you’d know there’s no one there that understands either teaching or the limits of testing.

She also says that as part of this program, “Multiple choice sheets will be picked up by courier and graded by the DoE’s vendor.”

Can you imagine the cost of this exercise in futility! Couriers picking up millions of bubbled in answer sheets in hundreds of NYC schools, and scanning them to get the results five days later – all happening five to six times per year?

Not to mention all the "Senior Achievement Facilitators" and "data inquiry teams" in each school, working overtime to analyze this junk data in order to squeeze better test scores out of our kids.

It's no wonder they're trying to steal millions of dollars from our kids’ CFE dividend to pay for this ridiculous distraction.