Tweed's consultation with parents, or lack thereof

Mike Meenan of NY1 had an excellent story last night about the Chancellor’s failure to consult with any Community Education Councils before closing schools in their districts – contrary to the language and the spirit of state law, which says the following:

"The chancellor shall consult with the affected community district education council before... substantially expanding or reducing such an existing school or program within a community district.”

Yet Klein never bothered to do so in this case – nor in previous years. James Liebman said that these decisions were made because of long-term educational failure over many years -- yet several of the schools being closed are in good standing with both the state and federal government.

Liebman also claimed in his testimony to the City Council that he had conferred with many experts, union officials, and other “educational and community leaders” who provided “valuable feedback” during the development of the school grading system. Several of those cited in his testimony contradicted him later that same the day, including Ernest Logan, the President of the the principal’s union, Amanda Gentile, a VP of the UFT, and Ann Cook from the Consortium for Performance Standards.

His testimony also included the statement that his office had “directly reached over 20,000 parents in conversation about explanation of the Progress report and associated accountability tools.”

Yet according to an article in today's NY Sun, these sessions included visits to Laundromats and trips on the subway! It turns out that DOE employees had handed out flyers about the parent surveys at many of these places -- but there's no evidence that any real “consultations” or “conversations” about the school progress reports took place, and it’s not clear how many of the 20,000 people they supposedly contacted were actually parents.

Check out this list, provided by the DOE, which include not only visits to laundromats, but also a dentist office (each time supposedly involving 50 parents), and assorted trips on the #1,#2, #3, #4 trains – and just so the IND didn’t feel left out, also the E, F, G, V, and the R trains.

Many of these direct “conversations” appear to have occurred during trainings of parent coordinators – who after all, are not necessarily parents themselves.

In short, another incredible product of the unaccountable Accountability office at Tweed.

Voices in opposition to the school grading system grow louder

Diane Ravitch has an oped in today's NY Sun about the new school grades:

Is the grading system accurate and reliable? Did the grading system identify the worst schools? Is the closure of the lowest-performing schools likely to improve public education? Could the Department have taken other actions that might have been more effective than closing schools?

The answers to all of these questions, she suggests, is no. Diane also provides an important critique of the whole notion that simply closing schools is the best way to make significant progress:

Nor is it enough to turn out the lights. Schools are not a franchise operation. They are deeply embedded community institutions. They should be improved with additional resources, smaller classes, and additional training for educators. The starting point in reforming schools is to have a valid evaluation system that correctly identifies the schools that need extra help. It may not be easy to transform the schools that are in trouble, but if we want a good public education system, there really is no alternative.

Indeed, this is an essential element of the school reform process for which Tweed no longer feels accountable -- their responsibility to provide the support and resources schools need to improve.

See the show on PBS about the NYC school grading controversy, including parents and principals at some of the schools that got low marks, and one that got high marks, talking about the meaning and impact of these grades. The show also includes an interview with the Chancellor, in which he attempts to explains the "F" that PS 35, the Staten Island neighborhood school received, despite having 98% of students at grade level in math, by comparing it unfavorably to Anderson School – a highly selective gifted and talented school.

The interviewer, Rafael Pi Roman points out that William Sanders, the father of value-added accountability systems, told him that the sort of one year’s test score gains that the NYC grades are based upon are not meaningful. Klein responds that nevertheless, the school grade is a positive motivational factor in getting schools to work harder on improving test scores.

You can also listen to audio clips from the City Council hearings on the school grades from December 10, now posted on You Tube:

Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum , who says out that closing schools unilaterally, as the Chancellor has done, without first consulting Community Education Councils is potentially illegal.

City Council Education Chair Robert Jackson (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3), who aggressively questions James Liebman on many issues, including whether the DOE reached out to parents sufficiently.

Council Member Lew Fidler of Brooklyn, who flunks the school grades for their lack of transparency. (Part 1 and Part 2.)

And Council Member John Liu , who is masterful in showing that these grades are derived primarily from the results of only two tests -- though Liebman keeps trying to argue that these are really "multiple assessments" given out over "multiple days." (Part 1 and Part 2.)

Finally, watch the Channel 2 news segment featuring the hearings and showing Liebman fleeing from parents, now also posted on YouTube.

UPDATE: see also this article in City Limits: PARENTS, COUNCIL STILL ANGRY ABOUT SCHOOL GRADES

How true student progress can be measured by Debbie Meier

Debbie Meier, famed education reformer and founder of Central Park East, was quoted in the recent Daily News article about the current principal of CPE High School, who urged teachers to pass at least 65% of their students, whether they deserved it or not.

In the article, Debbie pointed out how the new school grading system devised by Jim Liebman encourages such practices, by giving higher grades to schools the more credits students gain each year.

Here she provides more illumination about how the original schools she founded, unconnected to CPS High School, defined student progress through projects and portfolios, and how this vision of education works against the sort of empty credit accumulation that the new grading system encourages:

Central Park East in question, and Principal Bennett, are unconnected to either the CPE elementary schools or the now defunct Central Park East Secondary School. It had a nice fifteen year history and then ended its life--on a downer.

Amusingly, the entire thrust of CPESS, based on Ted Sizer's book Horace's Compromise, is that modern high schools are about credit accumulation, not becoming well-educated, learning to use one's mind well. Thus CPESS did not count credits or courses past, and one could graduate having failed every single course.

Its "evidence" was based on putting together seven (originally 14!) portfolios of work and defending that work before a committee that consisted of faculty of CPESS, family, peers and outside experts! Over and over; demonstrating both the quality of one's work, and one's capacity to explain and defend it in a conversational setting. It sometimes also included a set on-site task as a kind of additional check on validity and on process.

It was designed to prevent the kind of cheating CPE H.S. engaged in, and which all schools and students subtly do by the very nature of the way they are organized.

For reasons best known to I don't know who, CPE High School, and something now called CPE Middle School, have insisted on using the CPE name! But they make no claim whatsoever to be following in the Coalition, Sizer, CPESS tradition. They are traditional to-the-core, and are so intentionally.

The nice thing is that a former student saw the News story and wrote me about his life. He was a special ed kid who now teaches special ed!

And he remembers us well enough to tell us all the things we'd most like to hear about what we did for and meant to him.

---Debbie Meier

Playing the Blame Game

Erin Einhorn reported yet another story in today’s NY Daily News about Principal Bennett Lieberman’s “dumb down your classes” staff memo at Central Park East. (For the original story, see the NY Daily News article or my previous posting on this site, "Campbell's Law: No, It's NOT Soup.") According to her story, at the same time Lieberman was getting dressed down by High School Superintendent Francesca Pena and Chancellor Joel Klein, he was busily chastising his own teaching staff for releasing his memo to the media. The Daily News reported that Lieberman accused the unknown whistleblower of “causing harm to the school and giving students the impression that [he] thinks they’re dumb.”

The reason for emphasizing students' pass rates, even at the expense of threatening teachers and suggesting that they lower their expectations, relates directly to the DOE's new Progress Reports. On high school reports, three major factors in a school's ratings are the percentage of students in each of the 9th, 10th, and 11th grades who accumulate ten or more credits in a given year, since this is seen by the DOE as highly predictive of graduation. Of course, pass rates and credit awards are not determined by a common standard or test and can be manipulated at the school level by "dumbing down" classes, thereby increasing the school's Progress Report score and its corresponding letter grade.

Rather than simply admit to an error in poor wording if not outright bad judgment, Leadership Academy graduate Lieberman goes after the individual who had enough courage in his or her convictions to take his outrageous memo public. It’s encouraging to know that many teachers in the system still believe in their kids and their vocation, who reject notions of merit pay based on high-stakes testing and are willing to help shine a light on such travesties as inflated pass rates by dumbing down classes. Maybe there still are reasons to hope, to know that there are many teachers who just want to be left alone to do what they do – inspire and teach.

On the other hand, the Leadership Academy appears to be teaching its principals-to-be the same invaluable leadership skills demonstrated by veteran practitioners like Chancellor Klein and James Liebman: create systems and metrics, relevant or otherwise, to hold everyone else maximally accountable while foreswearing any accountability of your own. As one pithy aphorism says, “To err is human. To blame it on someone else shows management potential.”

Mitchell Sets Sights on DOE

December 14, 2007 (GBN News): The ink is barely dry on former Senator George Mitchell’s report on steroid use in Major League Baseball, and already he is reportedly turning his attention to a new target: The NY City Department of Education. Sources at the DOE told GBN News that Chancellor Klein has been embarrassed by massive criticism surrounding the new school Progress Reports, and he has been hard pressed to explain the discrepancies that have resulted in some schools getting A’s on their progress reports despite having been put on the state list of failing schools.

Mr. Klein is said to have decided that the only way such struggling schools could have performed so well is if their principals had bulked up on steroids. “To go from ‘failing school’ to an A grade in such a short time is like a player going from 16 home runs to 41,” the Chancellor was said to have told Mr. Mitchell. “We know that kids’ test scores depend on how good the principal is,” he went on to say. “What else but steroid use could have led to such a rapid gain in principals’ performance?”

While the use of certain steroids is not explicitly banned by the DOE, the Chancellor is said to feel that any principal using them would have a competitive advantage in a system where schools can be closed and principals fired if their schools fail. “If anyone is going to have an unfair advantage,” Mr. Klein reportedly said, “It’s the charter schools and small schools we create, not some principal whose head has outgrown his hat size.”

Mr. Mitchell will work closely with the Chief Accountability Officer, Jim Liebman, who will analyze ARIS computer data to provide clues as to potential suspicious activity. It is unclear what if any penalties will be assessed if wrongdoing is found. However, one source at the DOE said, “It’s not out of the question that some of those A’s could end up with asterisks.”


Ed. Note: Of course, the preceding is parody. In all seriousness, the Mitchell report is a long overdue wake-up call to Major League baseball and the sporting world in general. If only there could be a “Mitchell Report” on the DOE and Mayoral control, not for steroid violations, of course, but for violations of parents’ trust.

Mark Weprin's City Council Testimony

The following is Assemblyman Mark Weprin's magnificent testimony before the City Council Education Committee on Dec. 10:

Good morning. I am Mark Weprin and I represent the 24th Assembly District in Eastern Queens. As a father of two public school students and a champion of New York City public schools, I submit the following testimony to the New York City Council on the subject of the New York City Department of Education (DOE)’s recently released school progress reports.

The progress reports are an attempt to inform the public about the
performance of New York City public schools. While I agree with DOE’s
focus on academic excellence, I take issue with its methodology and its
failure to fully explain the assessments to the public. The grades,
which were supposed to provide parents with valuable information, have
mostly generated confusion, and the media has exacerbated the situation
with fuzzy terminology: DOE’s Progress Reports have been regularly
referred to as report cards, which is a misnomer. The grades are meant
to show schools’ progress – which is not the same as school quality –
and they do not achieve even that much. While I support evaluating
public schools, I believe that DOE’s recent attempt falls far short of
its goals.

The first problem is that the category of “student progress” accounted
for fifty-five percent of a school’s grade, and the DOE equated student
progress with changes in test scores from one year to the next. So a
school in which the students scored the same for two years in a row is
considered to have shown no progress, even if most students did well
both years, while a school in which the students’ test scores increased,
even if they remained low, gets points for improvement. This method of
grading unfairly penalizes high-performing schools such as those in
Eastern Queens.

Even worse, DOE’s definition of academic progress is based on the idea
that high-stakes standardized tests accurately assess how much students
have learned, but there are several reasons to doubt that premise. As I
have often stated, the extreme emphasis on test preparation has taken
away from real learning in classrooms across the City. So if the
students in a school increased their test scores from one year to the
next, their “improvement” is just as likely to be a result of excessive
test preparation drills as a reflection of academic progress. And if
higher test scores stem from more time spent on test preparation, they
may in fact indicate that less learning has taken place.

On the other hand, a decrease in test scores could mean that a few
students were not feeling well on the day of the test, or that they
happened to choose the wrong answers on a couple of multiple choice
questions. If students’ scores went down from third grade to fourth
grade, maybe it’s because the third graders take each State test for two
days while the fourth graders spend three days per test. (New York’s bar
exam is only two days.) Test scores can decline for a number of reasons,
but the change does not mean that students and teachers in a school are
suddenly performing at a lower level than they did the previous year.

I also have serious reservations about the surveys of parents, students,
and teachers that the DOE used to evaluate the portion of a school’s
grade that reflects “school environment.” Every community has a few
naysayers who are always full of criticism. Unfortunately, they are the
most likely to submit surveys and to influence others to share in their
negativism. Such individuals can have a disproportionate impact on the
school’s grade.

The blatant inconsistencies in the grades reveal how ridiculous they
really are. Some schools that did well on their Quality Reviews did
poorly on the Progress Reports; some schools that were listed as among
the most persistently dangerous in New York received A’s and B’s from
DOE. What are parents to think when they receive such contradictory
information?

I have no qualms about the concept of issuing progress reports for New
York City schools. Any institution that uses taxpayer dollars must be
accountable to the public. But a single letter grade cannot possibly
represent everything the public needs to know about a school and its
progress. Fair evaluations would take into account student safety,
parent involvement, teacher qualifications, art and music offerings, and
the school’s learning environment. Feedback from parents and teachers
should come from large groups of survey responders who filled out clear,
intuitive questionnaires. Most of all, we should not rely on scores from
high-stakes standardized tests. Changes in test results from one year to
the next do not reveal what we really need to know about our schools:
how hard teachers and principals have worked and how much students have
learned. The Progress Reports are not report cards, and the DOE grades
simply are not accurate assessments of our schools.

Assemblymember Mark S. Weprin

56-21 Marathon Parkway

Little Neck, New York 11362



Telephone (718) 428-7900

Facsimile (718) 428-8575



weprinm@assembly.state.ny.us

Campbell's Law: No, It's NOT Soup

Thirty years ago, sociologist Donald Campbell made a seemingly obvious observation that became known as Campbell’s Law. As Campbell phrase it, “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.” To put it more simply, the more you base decisions like promotions, firings, or bonuses on a particular number or set of numbers, the more likely it is people will either cheat or otherwise try to game the system.

Cheating is, of course, nothing new in education, nor is it just students who do it. In fact, there’s a long and sad history around the U.S. of teachers and administrators manipulating standardized test results to inflate scores or protect their jobs or their schools’ reputations. Now the NY Daily News reports today that the Principal at Central Park East High School issued a memo to his staff last month suggesting that they scale down their expectations of students in order to raise pass rates and credit accumulation. Coincidently, yearly credit accumulation by 9th, 10th, and 11th graders just happen to be among those treasured metrics on the DOE’s new Progress Reports that assess every NYC public school with a letter grade of A, B, C, D, or F.

Central Park East rated a low “B” on its Progress Report and a “Proficient” on its Quality Review. Principal James Lieberman is quoted in the Daily News that, “Really good things are happening here.” Of course, students like senior Richard Palacios tell you the real truth, noting that 65% of his classmates don’t even show up for school and that only three or four of the 15 kids in his math class routinely appear. Perhaps Lieberman’s recourse for such low attendance is correspondingly lower expectations. Teachers were reportedly outraged over their Principal’s memo.

Perhaps most disappointing in all of this is that the offending school, Central Park East HS, is the City’s icon of alternative schools since its founding in 1985 by Deborah Meier. This news brings a particular sting, the kind of chagrin one might feel upon hearing that the clergy at St. Patrick’s Cathedral were skimming 10% of the collections for use at OTB.

Sadly, we are all getting inured to these types of stories under the DOE’s perverted notion of accountability based on single, high stakes tests. Teaching to the tests and excessive prepping for the tests to the detriment of other subjects and activities, variable scaling of test results to manipulate pass rates, dumbing down the standardized tests by lowering p-scores, steering students to correct answers during test administration, post-test erasures and corrections made by teachers and principals, and so on. As long as 85% of a school’s Progress Report rating derives from test scores, you can be sure schools will focus on those tests to a fault, even to the detriment of other subject areas, and that the resulting pressures will lead to broken rules and broken trust. We’re going to be seeing a lot more of these stories between now and the end of the Klein era.

Head-Banging Over Progress Reports – At Least It Feels Good When You Stop

Common sense would suggest that in the ideal world, the DOE’s new Progress Reports would serve two major constituencies: parents and school administrators. Testimony at the City Council Education Committee hearing on Monday, December 10 made it clear that these report cards receive an “F” of their own with regard to parents who simultaneously find them too simplistic and yet due not understand how the grades were derived.

The very next day, I observed first hand at an SLT meeting my son’s school’s efforts to figure out how to interpret and respond to their grade. On that score, I can only conclude that the Progress Reports deserve an “F” for school administrators’ inability to convert the products of a $3 million DOE investment into something actionable.

Since my son's high school received a letter grade of “A,” albeit just barely, the meeting agenda item was stated as, “Discuss ‘A’ rating and its implication: How do we keep it?” Our Principal, an AP, five or six teachers (two of them in math!), the UFT chapter leader, four parents, two students, a DC 37 representative, and a CBO representative sat in a classroom for nearly an hour striving to answer that question. The result? Not only did we discover we really had no idea, we also realized we had far more questions than answers, such as:

-- Our school received over 10 points in “additional credit,” but that came from the nature of how the school works. It was unclear how to get more credit in this category, whether this was academically meritorious, or even how many more points we could actually get.

-- We realized that we do not understand what 4- and 6-year weighted diploma rates are, why ours are 170.7% and 195.6%, respectively (how do you graduate 195.6% of your kids?), or what the maximum percentages could be.

-- We did not understand what "Average Completion Rate for Remaining Regents" or where the percentage associated with it came from.

-- We did not understand the peculiar score system associated with our school's "Weighted Regents Pass Rate," numbers like 0.98, 1.28, 1.48, 0.94, and 1.0. What do these numbers mean, and how do they get improved? Do they reflect students passing Regents at different levels, such as below or above 85%? We don't know.

-- SLT members persistently confused our bold-faced "score" in these categories with actual Regents pass rates, thinking that the Progress Report data must be incorrect.

-- No one in the room understood how the peer groups were actually formed, and only one or two of us knew who some of the schools in our peer group were.

-- No one in the room knew about the 2/3 vs. 1/3 weighting split between peer group horizon and Citywide horizon until I (a parent, not a DOE employee or Principal) explained it to them. And I only knew because I heard it in Jim Liebman’s testimony at the Education Committee hearing the day before.

We spent so much time asking questions and realizing how little we knew about this system, we did nothing to answer the original question about how to maintain our grade. A group of intelligent, committed, and genuinely caring teachers, administrators, and parents beat their collective heads against the Progress Report wall for over an hour and came up with nothing about how to make the report actionable. Frustration edged into cynicism as opinions were expressed that "this too shall pass," that as soon as Bloomberg is gone, Klein will be gone and this report card system with it, so why worry about it.

The DOE has produced a system that grades schools while giving them (and us as parents on the SLT) little or no guidance in how to interpret it and absolutely no idea how to respond. This is a management failure of the first order, particularly given the ultra-high visibility and stigmatizing potential of a single letter grade.

Despite everything, my son’s high school is happy to have an “A” and be able to wave it around like a gold ribbon in front of 8th grade parents at open houses, as well they should. If anyone has taught us about PR, it's this Chancellor. Still, in my heart of hearts, I know the grade is virtually meaningless and is giving our school's well-intentioned administration absolutely no help in guiding itself toward doing better. I am convinced that we as an SLT will collectively develop our own much better sense of what we need to do than this inane Progress Report system is telling us.

James Liebman on the run

On Monday, at the City Council hearings on the school grades, James Liebman, the chief accountability czar and former law professor, faced fierce criticism from Council Members. No wonder; his testimony was evasive, full of misleading statements and outright errors.

Liebman went on to make many questionable statements, among them, that a school at which "hundreds of children on average lost 10 percent of a proficient level in a year almost certainly has a significant problem."

Instead, experts say that one year's gain or losses in test scores at the school level is 34-80% random, and unrelated to the amount of learning taking place.

Liebman also claimed that factors related to overcrowding and class size were taken into account when devising the grades, when they clearly weren't.

In his testimony and power point, he claimed that he had consulted with many groups and experts, including the United Federation of Teachers, the Council of Supervisors and Administrators (the Principal's Union), CPAC, Community Education Councils and the NY Performance Standards Consortium in devising these grades.

Ann Cook, the co-chair of the Consortium, later testified to the fact that this was untrue. Her group had asked for and gotten a meeting about the interim assessments, but the topic of the school grades never even came up.

Ernest Logan, President of the CSA also denied that he had ever been consulted, and laughed when Jackson asked him this question. (See this letter from Logan to the Chancellor, about the many flaws in the school grades.) The UFT VP, Aminda Gentile, said they had “conversations” with DOE about the school grades, but there was no consultation.

Betsy Gotbaum, the Public Advocate, also criticized the unreliability of the school grades, and said that the Chancellor's decision to close schools without consulting first with Community Education Councils is against the law. She cited the state law, (2590-h) , which says that the Chancellor has the authority to:

Establish, control and operate new schools or programs…or…discontinue any such schools and programs as he or she may determine; provided however, that the chancellor shall consult with the affected Community District Education Council before substantially expanding or reducing such an existing school or program within a community district. (The law is posted here.)

Yet, she added, this has not happened in this case. "And the truth is, I can't think of an example where it has happened."

When asked by the chair of the Education committee, Robert Jackson, Liebman admitted that CECs had not been consulted before the announcement to close schools. Instead, they had been consulted afterwards, "entirely consistent with the process that has applied for the last several years."

Did he believe that parents should be consulted? Liebman said that the process that was used "was sufficient and adequate and very comprehensive."

Jackson said this response was "totally unacceptable", and if this was the direction the chancellor is going, he is in "big trouble." Liebman also claimed that the method he used was very "transparent" with very "clear rules" and that the results of the Quinnipiac polls showed that parents understood the methods used. (!!)

Liebman kept returning to the results of this poll in his defense, though it turns out that only 143 public school parents were polled.

City Council Member Lou Fidler was concerned that stigmatizing schools with failing grades will likely accelerate the decline of these schools, rather than helping them improve. Melinda Katz said it best: In her 14 years as an elected official, she’s never seen an agency so sure they’re right, when all the parents she has spoken to believe they’re wrong.

John Liu was very effective, asking Liebman repeatedly if the 85% of each school's grade was not just based upon a single measure, the results of a test taken once a year. Liebman kept on evading the issue, saying these grades were not based on one measure but actually "many measures" from a "series of assessments" that take place over a "series of daysm" and that each assessment "cuts across many hundreds of different items, and many skill areas." Liu pointed out the fact that its still only one test!

Finally, Liebman blurted out, "Life is one test" and everyone booed. Liu concluded that not only was Liebman trying to obfuscate, but that that his entire testimony was an obfuscation.

At the end of Liebman's three-hour testimony, the Chair, Robert Jackson, politely requested that he step outside the hearing room to receive petitions from Time Out from Testing and Class Size Matters, signed by nearly 7,000 parents, calling for a halt to the school grades. (Thanks so much to those of you who signed.)

In preparation, we filed out in an orderly fashion, (see above photo from the NY Times) but rather than have to confront us directly, Liebman slipped out a side door, out the back exit of City Hall, and ran away from us like a thief in the night, as we tried to catch up. He then entered the private gates to Tweed, but refused to let us in.

Liebman’s flight from parents was captured on video on many of the nightly news shows. As Lisa Donlan was quoted as saying in the Daily News, all this is symbolic of DOE’s arrogant and dismissive attitude. "He wouldn't even stay to hear our questions ... after we sat for three hours and listened to his testimony."

Here is an excerpt from today’s Times story, “Defending School Report Cards, Over a Chorus of Boos”:

“Mr. Liebman, whose title is chief accountability officer of the Education Department, ducked out a side door, leaving parents to chase him out the back of City Hall to behind the Education Department’s headquarters at Tweed Courthouse.

There, several education officials ran in circles for several minutes to avoid Jane Hirschmann, the director of Time Out From Testing, an advocacy group, as well as parents and reporters.”

Later in a phone interview, Liebman claimed to Times reporter that “he had not deliberately avoided the parents.” This claim is about as trustworthy as the school grades themselves.

See also article in Daily News, Escape from NY parents, the CBS newsclip here and NY1 here.

The CBS story repeats the erroneous statement that Liebman has met with Time out from Testing “many times”; in fact, according to Jane Hirschmann, head of the group, he has refused to ever meet with them.

I also gave testimony posted here about how unfair, inaccurate and destructive these school grades are, and entered into the record the comments criticizing the school grades from many of you, including parents, teachers, and at least one retired principal, that were posted online at our petition.

Update: Erin Einhorn of the NY Daily News pointed out today in Only in NY schools can get an 'A' & 'F' that of the 26 SURR schools on the state failing list, nine got As or Bs.

"The city can do whatever they want to do, but at the end of the day, I think the public deserves better," said Merryl Tisch, the vice chancellor of the state Board of Regents and a longtime supporter of Mayor Bloomberg.

Assembly Member Jim Brennan on the DOE Progress Reports

As reported here earlier, two members of the State Assembly testified at City Council hearings on the Progress Reports Tuesday. As the Assembly must decide whether to renew mayoral control or replace it with something else, their thoughts are always relevant. News accounts of the hearings did not mention their testimony, most likely because the press was covering the escape of Chief Accountability Officer Jim Liebman from the Council chambers that occurred simultaneously with the testimony. Here is the first part of Brennan's testimony:

Councilmember Jackson and members of the committee, it's a pleasure to share some thoughts with you about the Department of Education's progress reports. I'm Assemblymember Jim Brennan, representing the 44th Assembly district in Brooklyn. Currently, I chair the Assembly Standing Committee on Cities and I have served on the Assembly Education Committee for 23 years.

In a November 20th e-mail that Chancellor Joel Klein sent out to Department of Education faculty members, he stated, "After almost five and a half years as chancellor, I know you can't point to a single number, be it a test score or graduation rate, to prove success or failure. The whole picture is important." Yet, in his November 14, 2007 letter to the editor of the New York Times, he defended the school progress reports by stating, "Everyone knows what A and F mean. Summing up all relevant measure with a single, simple grade draws sharp attention to the great work at many schools and the stagnation that might otherwise escape notice elsewhere."

His first statement seems more applicable to the New York City school system. The DOE has reduced teacher, student and parent surveys, attendance, test scores, one-year changes in test scores, and weights these variables differently, to come up with one letter grade. This "reductionism" has produced results that, for many individual schools, seem on their surface to be utterly irrational and have caused bewilderment, confusion, and rejection.

The State and City of New York already have an assessment and accountability system. The State Education Department calls it the "status" model, and parents, educators and the general public all understand it simply as scores on tests, broken down into levels of proficiency or lack thereof. Whatever its shortcomings, it's generally understood. On top of this, we have the Federal and State "No Child Left Behind" standards, which already hold schools accountable for making adequate yearly progress for the whole school as well as Black and Hispanic children, Asian children, Native American children, English language learners, special education and economically disadvantaged students. The State has a system called School Under Registration Review and we also have School Report Cards, which provide lots of information for parents and educators. The Department of Education has a history of closing poorly performing schools, and principals currently already have evaluation standards in their contract that allow for their removal. The core standards in all of these accountability systems are, of course, test scores. The validity of this system has been under debate for many years.

Along come the DOE's progress report cards. Only 30% of the grade is based on the old performance test score, the remainder is based on criteria completely new to the City and State, 55% on one-year changes in test scores and 15% on surveys and attendance. The main component of the new model, the one-year test score change - the "growth model" - did not get vetted by any other public body other than the DOE. There was no public hearing on the inputs and assumptions into this statistical model, there was no vote by the Panel on Educational Policy, there was no review or approval by the State Education Department and its own division of Assessment and Accountability. I believe concerns had been expressed informally that New York City's new system would produce results inconsistent with the existing system that might cause confusion and consternation. It is my understanding that the SED has never seen the guts of the new statistical system - the growth model, its inputs, its assumptions, its complex weighting. We have no knowledge of whether the new system controls for the probability that measuring test results within one year would fluctuate within a certain range up or down and that therefore no conclusions school quality could be drawn from such results. Last week I sent a letter to the State Education Department asking they review the validity of the statistical models used for DOE's progress evaluations.

...

For full text click here and letter to State Education Commissioner Mills here

Jets Sign Liebman to 3 Year Contract

December 11, 2007 (GBN Sports): The New York Jets announced today the signing of running back James Liebman to a three year contract worth an estimated $15 million. Liebman, who most recently starred as the “Chief Accountability Officer” for the NY City Department of Education, reportedly wowed team officials yesterday after his testimony at a City Council hearing on school Progress Reports.

Jets Head Coach Eric Mangini happened to catch the 6 PM news reports about the hearing and saw Liebman demonstrate his rushing prowess. In what Mangini called, “The most impressive display of broken field running I’ve ever seen”, Liebman showed he could shake off not only a hoard of parent advocates attempting to give him petitions opposing the progress reports, but a number of print and television journalists as well. The team immediately called him in to offer him a contract.

At a morning press conference, Mangini was optimistic about the team’s chances next year with Liebman on board. “Jim assured us that next year we don’t even need a winning record to win the division,” the coach said. “He told us that if he can do what he did this year with the DOE, all we need is to improve more than the other teams do. With our record this year, that will be a snap.”

The Jets’ new running back showed that he is as adept at “trash talk” as he is at his running game. At the press conference, he taunted this week’s opponent, the Patriots, by saying, “They think they’re hot stuff with their perfect record. Let's see them try to improve on that next year. No matter what they do they'll just be a ‘failing team’.” Liebman is expected to be in uniform for Sunday’s game.

State Assembly Members Appear at Council Hearings to Blast DOE While Accountability Czar Liebman Flees from Parents

There was high drama today at the City Council hearings on the DOE's new Progress Reports. In an unusual occurrence, two members of the State Assembly appeared in person to testify against the "A-F" letter grading system. Assembly Member Mark Weprin of Queens was scathing, saying parents needed to know the system was "irrelevant nonsense". He complained the DOE's testing regime was "turning schools into Stanley Kaplan centers" and "sucking all the arts, fun and interest out of schools".

Assembly Member Jim Brennan of Brooklyn said the State Education Department should have reviewed the Progress Report grading methodology but still has not been given access to the underlying statistical methodology used to assign the grades. He pointed out how the results are often inconsistent with existing state and even city evaluations. He said "my core concern is that the system may have no validity whatsoever".

The Assembly members testified after the Council finished questioning DOE Chief Accountability Officer Jim Liebman. Parent supporters of Time Out from Testing were waiting to provide Liebman with petitions containing 6,700 signatures of parents opposed to the Progress Reports. Liebman slipped out a side door but was chased by parents lugging the boxes of signatures, followed by the press.

UPDATE:

More details have emerged on today's events. Council Education Chair Robert Jackson asked parents to present their peition to Liebman outside the Council chambers. Instead of accepting the petition, the crafty Liebman fled through a side door normally reserved for Council use. Undeterred, parent volunteers led by Time Out From Testing director Jane Hirschmann fought a running battle with Liebman's security detail as they tried to present the petitions to him. Check out this account of the fracas at InsideSchools and video footage captured by NY1.

A good day for headline writers: NY Times: "Defending School Report Cards, Over a Chorus of Boos" , Daily News: "Escape from NY Parents" and Post: "Advocates Cut to the Chase".

The NY City Department of Education: Is It Real or Is It Parody?

Note: It seems that more and more, I hear about readers who mistake certain GBN News parodies for reality. The last thing I want to do is to create confusion among NY City parents; the DOE does that well enough on their own. The following, I hope, will serve as a clarification of my parodies and of their purpose and meaning. Hint for blog readers: If it says “GBN News” at the top of the article, it’s parody. If it doesn’t, all responsibility for inaccurate, misleading or confusing information rests solely with the DOE.


It is both an occupational hazard and an intended purpose of parody that it may be mistaken for reality. I write education news parodies for the NY City Public School Parents Blog as “GBN News”. But when I look at what comes out of the NY City Department of Education these days, I realize that their reality is often more outlandish than my parodies.

The school Progress Reports (“report cards”) that were recently issued are a case in point. In my wildest imagination, I could never have come up with a “grading” system in which schools with positive quality reviews get D’s and F’s and are consequently closed, schools that are on the state failing list get A’s, and a school that received national recognition under NCLB gets a D. The idea is so far fetched that it is not even credible as parody.

Some time ago I wrote a piece based on last year’s fiasco in which high priced DOE consultants Alvarez and Marsal, to save money, had eliminated numerous bus routes in the dead of winter. With little notice, they had stranded countless children in the cold, and told children as young as five that they should use Metro Cards instead of school buses. I reported that in another move by Alvarez and Marsal, “The traditional ‘lunch period’ will be eliminated from all New York City schools, to be replaced by an as yet undisclosed academic activity period.” I had Chancellor Klein praising the plan as eliminating a cost-ineffective program and improving test scores, and Mayor Bloomberg responding to criticism by saying, “Schools are for learning, not for eating”. Some blog readers reported that they actually believed this at first, and one said, “I also think Klein and Bloomberg would do these things”.

In a somewhat darker vein, I recently wrote a parody in which Blackwater, USA was hired to take over school security from the NYPD. The idea, I wrote, came out of a meeting between Chancellor Klein and President Bush, in which “The President was said to have told Mr. Klein that if Blackwater could take over the Iraq war so successfully from the US military, it could do the same for the NY City Police Department in the war against cell phones.” One reader was so disturbed that he actually asked a Deputy Chancellor and a City Council member if the story was true.

In writing parody, I strive to straddle the line between reality and fiction, to demonstrate how porous that line can sometimes be. But while in one sense I feel gratified that these parodies were effective enough to be believable, it is more than a bit unsettling that people have gotten used to a reality so bizarre that they can accept the parody as truth.

For us public school parents, the world of the DOE can only be described as “Kafkaesque”; rational rules no longer seem to apply. Three times in six years, the entire school system was reorganized. Districts were folded into regions, then regions broken back up into districts. Control was centralized, then decentralized again. Parents and educators were consulted - after the changes had already been made.

The DOE treats cell phones like weapons, banning their possession and enforcing the ban with metal detectors. The Mayor rejects the City Council’s authority to overturn the ban because his control of the system comes from the state; yet, when convenient, he rejects state authority because the DOE is a “city agency”.

School evaluations are based on questionable data, which are wrapped up into a single letter grade by an $80 million supercomputer (ARIS); then those grades fuel a punitive system that can cost a principal his or her job, close a school, or inexplicably deny resources to the failing schools that need it the most. Meanwhile additional millions are spent on no-bid consultant contracts, yet funded state mandates to reduce class size, which could truly boost student performance, are flagrantly ignored.

Given all this, it’s really no surprise that my parodies sometimes get taken seriously. But the real parody is what Bloomberg and Klein have done with Mayoral control of the schools. Whether or not absolute power corrupts absolutely, it certainly can divorce those who hold that power from reality. Accountable to nobody, the Mayor and Chancellor take their advice, not from stakeholders like educators and parents, or from experts in the field, but from people in the business world like Jack Welch and Eli Broad.

While some of these educational dilettantes may be well meaning, none of them, including the Mayor or Chancellor, have any background in education. They listen to no one with the educational knowledge or common sense to tell them that their “reforms” are only a parody of sound educational practices. Meanwhile, our children must try to get their education in what has sadly become a parody of a school system.

Panel for Educational Policy Agenda for December: Q&A with DOE

The next PEP meeting is Monday, December 17th at 6:30

It's in the Bronx at MS/HS 368 Information Network & Technology Academy , 2975 Tibbett Ave.

For the agenda, PEP members are being asked to pose questions in advance and the leadership team of the DOE will be present to answer them.

If you have a question related to schools policy or budgeting that you feel should be asked, send it to me at the blog address or my official address (click on my profile on the right).

Unannounced Closing Stuns Bronx School

December 6, 2007 (GBN News): In a policy that the NY City Department of Education terms “Unannounced Closing”, Schools Chancellor Joel Klein has decided not to wait until the end of the year to close some “failing schools”. One such targeted school, PS 422 in the Bronx, was shuttered this morning in dramatic fashion when Blackwater school security officers swooped down on the school, giving teachers and children 30 minutes to clear out their belongings and vacate the building.

The school had recently received an “F” rating on its Progress Report, despite having been considered “Proficient” on its latest Quality Review. One teacher, who spoke to GBN News on condition of anonymity, said, “We figured they’d probably close the school, but nobody expected it to come so fast. They didn’t even let the kids finish their lunch.”

It was a grim scene outside the school. Someone, presumably the Principal, was observed being led away with his face covered. Stunned parents milled about, waiting for their children to emerge. When the children did come out, they did so in an orderly fashion, many of them carrying books and artwork. Blackwater guards kept order, only occasionally prodding a teacher or child to move more quickly.

When reached for comment, Mayor Bloomberg defended the abrupt closure. “If the schools don’t educate our kids, they’re not going to stay open,” said the Mayor. “We don’t see any reason to keep a school open a minute longer than necessary,” he continued. "And by not announcing [the closings] beforehand, we'll keep the principals and teachers on their toes while we hold their feet to the fire."

Chancellor Klein was later asked by GBN News what plans are being made to accommodate the children from the closed school. The Chancellor briefly looked up from his Blackberry and muttered, “They can always go to private school.”

Teacher strike in Israel over class size: What would Maimonides say?

The teachers in Israel have been on strike for nearly two months, and one of the key issues is class size. Apparently there are many classes that are over thirty students, and the teachers insist that is nearly impossible to succeed in these conditions. The courts are apparently going to order the teachers back to work after Hanukah is over.

It is a little known fact that one the first people to discuss the importance of class size was the great Jewish rabbi and philosopher Maimonides in the 12^th century, who wrote:

“Twenty-five children may be put in charge of one teacher. If the number in the class exceeds twenty- five but is not more than forty, he should have an assistant to help with the instruction. If there are more than forty, two teachers must be appointed.’’

(Chapter II of ‘‘Laws Concerning the Study of Torah’’ in the Mishneh Torah.)

According to an article in Haaretz, religious state-supported schools in Israel have smaller classes than the secular schools. Not surprisingly, schools with primarily Arab students are more crowded than those in the Jewish neighborhoods.

The strategy of the Israeli government in responding to the teachers’ demand to reduce class size appears similar to that of the Bloomberg/Klein administration – talk about various options while actually doing as little as possible, especially as it might create the need to build new schools.

Some in the Finance ministry are calling for more parental “choice” and control over principal and teacher tenure instead:

. … in talks with various treasury officials and their colleagues at the Education Ministry, there emerges a vision: using personal contracts to hire principals, term limits for principals, choosing all the teachers in the school, simplifying teacher dismissal and, the perennial favorite, substantially broadening the option a parent has in choosing their children's schools.

As far as senior Education Ministry officials are concerned, as well as education researchers in academia, the plan is disturbing.

"Even countries that did major reforms were very careful about the use of personal contracts," explains one official. "Doing so means inserting unacceptable, harmful tensions into the school. In order to ostensibly justify the use of personal contracts, there will be widespread use of assessments and evaluations of principals, teachers and also students. Everything will then be measured, but it is very hard, and apparently impossible, to quantify all components of education with a simple formula."

"The managerial approach says in effect that it is possible to affect the microprocesses inside the classrooms by changing the macro on the structural level. The problem is that this has never been proven," adds Dr. Dan Gvaton, of Tel Aviv University. As for the expansion of parental choice, a Ministry of Education official said that it would mean "widening privatization. The demand for good schools will prompt them to accept only outstanding students or those whose parents are able to pay thousands of shekels per month."

Sound familiar? Too bad we don't have such wise men at Tweed. Where is Maimonides now that we need him?

The First Step by Seth Pearce

Seth has a simply breathtaking piece at the NYC Student blog:

What we need in New York City, is an education system that makes education possible. When educators are so overburdened that they don't have time to care about the needs of individual students, this is not the case. When the classroom is completely unmanageable and knowledge can not pass through the barrier between teacher and student because of population overload, this is not the case. And when students feel as though they are just another "problem" for the all-to-busy adults in the building, this is not the case.

It is time to cut class sizes and trim teacher loads. If we really want to save our schools, that is the first step.

Do yourself a favor and read it all. I wish all DOE officials who blithely say that class size doesn’t matter, or who pretend they care without doing anything about it, year after year, would do just that.

Sign our petition against the new school grades and for smaller classes today!

Class Size Matters has a new online petition, asking that the school grading system be terminated, and all the hundreds of millions of dollars being spent on the DOE’s ill-conceived overemphasis on standardized testing and test scores be redirected towards reducing class size and expanding the capital plan.

Our online petition is posted here. Please go sign it now! We’d like as many signatures as possible by the City Council hearings on the new school grades, scheduled for Dec. 10.

(If you’d like more info on why the grading system is unfair, arbitrary and will hurt rather than help our schools, check out my Daily news oped, Why Parents and teachers should reject the new school grading system, posted here (as a word doc) or on the News website here. Also: Ten reasons to distrust the new accountability system and "Negative learning" and statistical malpractice at the Panel on Educational Policy for more.)

North Carolina, a state that over ten years ago pioneered the move towards more testing, is about to reverse course. See N. Carolina begins to turn away from testing.

“We're testing more but we're not seeing the results," said Sam Houston, the commission's chairman. "We're not seeing graduation rates increasing. We're not seeing remediation rates decreasing. Somewhere along the way testing isn't aligning with excellence."

Here in NYC, rather than be satisfied with all the existing state tests, and the new interim assessments now being given five to six times each year, the administration want to start adding new standardized tests in science and perhaps other subjects next year, as well as yet additional tests for grades K-2.

Rather than go down that same road that North Carolina is now rejecting, Tweed needs to be woken up from its delusion that more testing means more learning, as quickly as possible, before things get even worse.

Please sign our petition today! The full text is below.

We are vehemently opposed to the new DOE school grading system. These grades are unfair, simplistic and arbitrary, are based on statistically unreliable measures, and will hurt rather than help our schools.

By awarding each school a grade from A to F, the progress report trivializes the complexity of teaching, and will drive schools towards even more test prep and less learning, as well as further deprive our children of art, music, and physical education.

We demand that the energy, focus, personnel and millions of dollars that have been spent on devising this system, as well as the entire data collection system known as ARIS, interim assessments, financial incentives for high test scores, and “data inquiry teams” in the name of “differentiated instruction” be instead invested in reducing class size and expanding the capital plan, so that all NYC children can be provided with smaller classes and an equitable and adequate chance to learn.

"Negative learning" and statistical malpractice at the Panel on Educational Policy

At last week’s meeting of the Panel on Education Policy at Tweed, Jim Liebman’s performance in attempting to defend the indefensible – the school grading system that he designed -- was breathtaking in its ignorance.

Liebman, the current DOE accountability “czar,” is a former criminal attorney, currently on leave from the Columbia law school, with no training or experience in education policy, statistics or testing, and yet the entire educational focus of the DOE is now based upon his faulty theories and expensive initiatives, including the $80 million supercomputer called ARIS, assigning letter grades to all schools primarily on the basis of one year’s worth of test scores, devoting millions of more dollars and hours of precious classroom time to interim standardized assessments, and the creation of “data inquiry teams” in all schools – all in the effort to “differentiate instruction” which in the end will be impossible without smaller classes.

At the PEP meeting, in order to justify the school grading system, he fastened on the “F” that PS 35 in Staten Island received, a school in which 98% of its students are on grade level in math, and 86% in ELA. Why did this exemplary school receive an “F”? Because last year, only 35% of its students improved their scores over the year before in reading, and only 23% in math – though research shows that a large part of annual variations in test scores are based on chance alone and are statistically unreliable. (For more on this, see my Daily News oped and a previous posting, Ten reasons to distrust the new accountability system.)

During the discussion, Liebman compared PS 35 to one of its “peer” schools – the Anderson school, a citywide Gifted and Talented school that accepts students on the basis of their high IQ and high test scores. When Patrick Sullivan pointed out the unfairness of comparing PS 35 to a selective school like Anderson, Liebman said it didn’t matter how the kids got there, they should all make the same annual gains. He failed to mention, however, that elementary schools are grouped with other schools according to only the roughest measures of demography –and that no statistician would compare the performance of a school that selects its students on the basis of test scores with a neighborhood school, like PS 35, that has to admit every child in its zone.

There was an abundance of statistical malpractice on display that night -- between Liebman’s presentation and the talk given by the DOE testing “expert”, Jennifer Bell-Elwanger, who tried to convince the panel that the city’s lack of significant progress on the NAEPs since 2003 was indeed real progress. Both of these individuals would have flunked an elementary course in statistics if they had tried to make these arguments in a college exam.

When asked wouldn’t it better to have separate grades for achievement and progress, rather than collapse all these categories into one grade, even if he were convinced that the lack of one year’s progress in test scores was significant (which it isn’t) Liebman replied that the good thing about giving a single grade is that it gets people’s attention (or something like that.) One could say the same about threatening to cut off the hands of someone accused of theft, or even capital punishment, which doesn’t mean it’s a remotely fair practice or even useful.

More recently, in response to questions about class size from parents in Manhattan and Queens, Liebman has insisted that the reason the DOE refuses to reduce class size is that classes would have to shrink to below 15 students to improve instruction and/or student achievement. In other words, lowering class size from 30 to 20 would make absolutely no difference.

Not only is such a statement absurd to anyone who has actually spent any time teaching in the public schools or observing classrooms, it is completely unsupported by research. Instead, it is simply another lame excuse that opponents of reducing class size like to throw up as a smokescreen in order to discourage such efforts.

Here is a comment sent to me from Chuck Achilles, a principal investigator of the famed STAR experiment in Tennessee and a professor of at Eastern Michigan University and at Seton Hall University. Chuck is also one of the premier class size researchers in the world:

“Hi Leonie:

I thought that the “below 15” idea (archaic) had faded. Anyone who says that is uninformed and ought to be asked (challenged) publicly to defend the assertion. It came once from one meta-analysis (Glass & Smith, 1988) that was very limited in its n of observations (77, of which some were for physical skills like hitting a tennis ball against a wall.) Just in STAR, we had more than 1300 observations in the range of 12-28 students. We typically analyzed reading outcomes, but sometimes we did math (giving us 2600 comparisons) and could have used other academic (test) outcomes… I’ve faxed some pages to show the linear effect: About a correlation of -.35 for each student added to a class. Because STAR used the class average as the unit of analysis, this means (approximately) the addition of each student to a class in the n=12-28 range reduces the class average score (about .1 of a month per year.) Later analyses show that it is cumulative.

Chuck A.”

Here is a fact sheet with numerous citations, showing there is no threshold in terms of reducing class size; and that the increase in achievement in relation to the decrease in class size is roughly linear.

Liebman reminds me of a phenomenon called “negative learning” ---in layman’s terms, a little learning is a dangerous thing. One would think that someone who got his reputation by writing about the high error rate in capital punishment would have a little humility and understand the possibility of human fallibility in making absolute judgments, but no such luck.

Late Breaking TV Listing

Concerns have been swirling around a rumored increase in the number of surveillance cameras in some NY City schools; concerns that are heightened by the following GBN TV Guide listing:

Monday, December 3
8 AM***CH 74***6 hours ********PG-13
“Big Brother Knows Best” (Premiere) Daily reality show featuring footage from surveillance cameras in NY City public schools. Starring Joel Klein as “Big Brother”. Today’s episode: A camera turns the tables on Joel as it zooms in on his Blackberry screen.

Mike May Bend on Term Limits

November 29, 2007 (GBN News): Amid speculation that the City Council may be planning another referendum on modifying term limits for the Council and other city officials, Mayor Bloomberg’s opposition to such a move may be softening. The Mayor said today that he would be amenable to a change in the law, and weighed in with a plan of his own as an alternative to the current situation.

Under the Mayor’s proposed plan, Council members would each be rated by a letter grade. 85% of these grades will be based on the progress and performance of their districts, using measurable standards such as income levels, home prices, traffic safety statistics, crime rate, and test scores of the district’s schools. The remaining 15% of the grade will be based on a public opinion poll rating voters’ satisfaction with each member. Mr. Bloomberg is reportedly arranging with the Department of Education to use their ARIS computer system to crunch the numbers and come up with the grades.

Mr. Bloomberg’s plan calls for the letter grade to determine whether a Council member is allowed to run for additional terms. A member who receives an “A” will be allowed to serve indefinitely as long as the “A” is maintained. A “B” grade earns a member one additional term. “C” will leave the member subject to the current two term limit. A grade of “D” could result in recall of the member if the grade does not improve by the next marking period, while an “F” would subject the member to immediate recall and would put the district at risk of being eliminated. "We have to hold the Council members' feet to the fire," the Mayor said. "They have to be held accountable, and if they don't perform, there are consequences."

While the Mayor would not comment on a possible third term for himself, City Hall sources told GBN News that the Mayor’s plan will also include a provision for an end to Mayoral term limits. According to these sources, since the Mayor believes in accountability, his plan gives a Mayor scoring over 60% in public opinion polls an “A” grade and the right to serve additional terms.

In a related story, Schools Chancellor Joel Klein was asked today whether he would remain as Chancellor should the Mayor end up being given a third term. Mr. Klein had no comment, largely because he was so immersed in his Blackberry that he did not hear the question.

Update on School Report Cards and Testing

The DOE's school report cards, called "Progress Reports" continue to be the focus of sharp criticism.

Writing in the Gotham Gazette, David Bloomfield, of the Citywide Council on High Schools points out how the administration has not convinced us they have a credible system for rating schools. His article is titled Report Cards Flunk the Clarity Test. Here's an excerpt:

Klein and Bloomberg have arrived at a highly individual definition of a "good school," without any social consensus on that definition. No matter parents are confused. None of them would have mixed the ingredients in just that way were they to evaluate the school. So none of them should rely on the mayor or chancellor to determine where they send their children or how they behave toward poorly (or, for that matter, highly) graded teachers and administrators.

Also in the Gotham Gazette, Richard Kessler of the Center for Arts Education, explains how the Bloomberg administration's mania for testing harms arts education. Click here for his article.

Time out from Testing continues to gather signatures against the Progress Reports and the increased testing required to compile them. They are looking to complete their petition this week. Add your name here.