How the school grading system is a fiasco

Check out my oped in today’s Daily News, calling the new school grading system a “fiasco” and pointing out the reasons why.

It ends this way:


The new grades are merely another simplistic, misleading attempt by this administration to look tough - and evade its duty to improve our schools.

(Click on the picture to the right to enlarge it.)

Not surprisingly, the NY Post ran an oped in support the new grades– written by a charter school operator. Interesting that DOE could apparently find no one involved with a traditional public school to back them up.

What’s especially ironic is that the Post also ran an article on p.2 revealing that charter schools have been exempted from receiving grades – supposedly because the DOE can’t require their parents and staff to fill out the surveys.

The Daily News ran an excellent article, entitled “How a good school fails.” It looked at PS 35 on Staten Island, in which 49% of the students live in poverty, yet 86% passed last year's state reading test, and 98% the state math test. Citiwide, this school was in the 91st percentile in reading, and 97th in math. But it got an “F”.

How can this be so? Because last year, only 35% of its students improved their scores over the year before in reading, and only 23% in math.

How absurd! As my oped points out, between 34-80% of the annual fluctuations in a school's test scores are random, or based on one-time events alone.

While many excellent schools like PS 35 received “F"s yesterday, a lot of struggling schools also received “A"s.

I went through the state's list of failing schools for nine districts: Districts 7, 8 and Districts 10-16. Of the 141 schools that received grades yesterday, 27 of them received As, 51 Bs, 44 Cs, 13 Ds, and 6 Fs.

So if a school was on the state failing list, it was far more likely to get an A than a D or F. The distribution of grades of schools on the failing list was remarkably similar to schools citywide: 19% As, 36% Bs, 31% Cs, 9% Ds, and 4% Fs. (According to the DOE press release, 23% of schools overall received As, 38% Bs, 25% Cs, 8% Ds, and 4% Fs.)

John Elfrank-Dana, a teacher at Bergtraum HS analyzed the grades in terms of the quality reviews that every school received last year – a more holistic approach:

Fully 80% of the schools that got F or D grades were rated as “proficient” or better in their quality reviews, while 37% of those that were rated unsatisfactory in their quality reviews got As and Bs on their report cards.

Here is a quote from the NY Times today from Emily Horowitz, a parent at Muscota school, which unfairly received an “F”:

“I find the methodology to be confusing, problematic and flawed” … Ms. Horowitz said that the grade “doesn’t mean anything” to her, and that parents were planning a rally this morning to “celebrate our school.”

Hurray for Emily and the parents at her school! See our previous posting of individuals who should be celebrated for standing up for reason during these difficult times,

Please nominate others for our Profiles in Courage series by leaving a comment here.

Update: see this NY1 story about the principal and parents at Muscota.

How "fair student funding" fails our failing schools

Here's an excerpt from a letter to Chancellor Klein from John Elfrank-Dana, teacher and chapter leader at the Murry Bergtraum High School in lower Manhattan:

I was in "shock and awe" at our last school budget meeting. We are held harmless for over $200,000.00 and are expecting increased austerity for the next two years - all of this in a post-CFE world? It's hard to believe that we are not feeling any of the trickle-down from the CFE money. We need smaller class sizes for our freshman and advisories as a fifth (not sixth) class. Mr. Klein, we want to succeed and demand a chance to do so. ....Can you explain where our share of the CFE money is going, and when we will feel it at the school level?

Murry Bergtraum is a severely overcrowded high school that has been on the state failing list for several years. In fact, it is in its second year of "restructuring"-- with the possibility of closing in the near future if results don't improve. Class sizes range from 28 to 30.4 students-- far higher than the rest of the state, where high schools average twenty students per class.

Yet according to the "fair student funding" reform that DOE claimed would drive more dollars to our neediest schools, Bergtraum's budget would have been cut by $282,365 next year if the proposal had been fully enacted. Because of the negotiated agreement to "hold harmless" all schools, it will receive a big fat zero through this formula for the next two years instead.

Compare this to Stuyvesant high school, with the highest graduation rate and the top performing students in the city, due to receive an increase of $68,929 next year through its FSF allocation.

In fact, 47% of all the failing schools in NYC would have received cuts averaging $322,000 if the proposal had been implemented as originally designed -- and will get no extra funding through the formula for the next two years. The other 53% failing schools will get an average of only $81,676, enough to pay for one extra teacher at most.

For example, in District 4 in East Harlem, only one of nine failing schools will receive any dollars through FSF. In District 5 in Central Harlem, only two of eight failing schools will. In District 7 in the Bronx, only six out of 20 failing schools will receive FSF, and in two of these, the amounts are too small to hire even one extra teacher. In Brooklyn, there is not a single failing school in District 13 with enough funds through FSF to hire a new teacher. District 21 in Brooklyn has only two out of 11 failing schools that will receive new FSF funds. In Queens, only two out of 10 failing schools in District 28 and only one school out of seven in District 29 will receive enough funds through FSF to hire any additional teachers. And the list goes on.

What makes this particularly disturbing is that so far, the FSF allocation is the only way in which DOE has announced it will distribute any of the extra funds resulting from the settlement of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit to schools, a case which was more than 13 years in the courts and was finally settled by the State Legislature this spring.

Councilmember Robert Jackson (see photo to the right) was the original plaintiff in this lawsuit -- in which the state's highest court concluded that class sizes were too large in NYC schools to provide our students with their constitutional right to an adequate education.

The so-called "fair student funding" allocation is also the only way in which so far Chancellor Klein has publicly revealed that he will attempt to comply with the new state law requiring class size reduction -- by simply aggregating the individual choices of principals who choose to use their FSF funds to hire extra teachers to reduce class size. The city is supposed to submit a five year class size reduction plan on July 1 -- with the first year focused on low-performing, overcrowded schools -- a description that fits Murry Bergtraum to a T.

From all the evidence so far, the administration's class size reduction plan -- as well as the FSF formula itself--is a fraud.

For more on how the city's FSF plan fails our failing schools, see this memo here.

For how it fails to be an actual class size reduction plan, see the Class Size Matters letter to the Regents and the State Education Department.