Does DOE have a race problem? Preet Bharara says yes

Yesterday,  US Attorney Preet Bharara sued NYC DOE for taking no action against a principal, Minerva Zanca, who allegedly discriminated against three black  teachers at the Pan American International High School in Elmhurst - making outrageously racist comments and urging the Assistant Principal to find their performance unsatisfactory so they could be fired. The DOE's refusal to act continued even after protests at the school, the media ran stories about the case in July 2013, the teachers filed lawsuits, and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission found in their favor in May 2014.

See Norm Scott's blog today about a letter sent to the Superintendent and several DOE administrators from the teachers at the school in June 2013..  The staff complained about the principal creating an "abusive environment and culture of fear",  cuts to programs for students with interrupted formal education [SIFE],  and an  increase in class sizes, leading to the decision of many teachers to flee the school.

When the DOE took no action, this was followed by a petition that garnered more than 45,000 signatures, highlighting the racist behavior of the principal, press releases from the school's staff, and rallies at the school in July 2013 which were covered by the media, when these teachers filed complaints.   See below, a TV news segment from Channel 11 news and Channel 7 news, with interviews with two of the teachers and the assistant principal involved.

Norm also mentions that the other Assistant Principal at the school at the time, who didn't go public with any complaints was Monica Garg, now the controversial principal of Central Park East II.

According to the US Attorney's office, the DoE refused to act even when the EEOC tried to resolve the issue through conciliation. At that point the EEOC referred the case to their office.

The allegations in the legal papers are stunning.  Here is the press release and here is the legal complaint.

The Chancellor is ultimately responsible for inaction, but in my experience the DOE attorneys are also profoundly incompetent and irresponsible. Read the articles here:  Buzzfeed , NYPost,  Mo4ch News, and the  NYTimes.

The Perdido St blogger contends that these unfair attacks on teachers are rampant at NYC schools, compounded by the fact that they no longer have the right to grieve unsatisfactory ratings by administrators and enough U ratings can lead to loss of their jobs - though the blatant racism exhibited in this case makes it more offensive (and if true, clearly illegal).  CORRECTION: Arthur Goldstein points out that the lowest ratings are now called Ineffective, not U, that all teachers can appeal Ineffective ratings, though only 13% to a panel that includes a neutral arbitrator. The rest are appealed back to the DOE.

This case provides the most telling evidence yet that the DOE has a real blind spot when it comes to race, or worse.  Add to this the administration's slowness to take action to improve diversity and integration at public schools until recently, and their refusal to change the admissions policies of five of the specialized high schools and the evidence grows. More on this soon. 

Fred Smith on questions raised by the release of some test items from the 2016 3-8th grade state exams

I've looked at the information SED (Commissioner Elia) set forth last week on EngageNY.  It consists of a grade by grade release of 75% of the reading passages and multiple-choice items that appeared on the April ELA exams--by way of Pearson to Questar.  All of the material and questions that required constructed responses have been provided, as well. I did not look at the math test.

It is true that the amount of operational test material and the number of items disclosed is more than was given out in each of the prior three years of Pearson's core-aligned testing.  And since 2012, this is the earliest this has happened.  [Note: When CTB/McGraw-Hill was the test publisher during the NCLB years, the complete test was accessible to the public on SED's web site within weeks of its administration, along with answer keys. Item analysis data followed shortly thereafter.]

Upon review of the just-released spring 2016 testing output, however, certain useful data have not been made available. SED has been moved to offer us a translucent view of the exams, but it still is not being entirely transparent.

In order to make the SED information more accessible to reviewers, I re-cast it in the attached Excel workbook. It shows the name of the reading passages that were released, the type of item involved (M-C or CR), the sequence number of each item and the word count of each passage.

In addition, there are four separate measures of readability (also referred to by Pearson/SED as the "complexity metrics"). And beside these numerical indexes, there is a column called Qualitative Review, where the appropriateness of the material is judged.  The outcome of SED's review process was that all 55 ELA reading passages were deemed to be appropriate. The keyed correct answer to each M-C item is presented at the end.

 I have four misgivings about SED's presentation:

1- Twenty-five percent (25%) of the passages and multiple-choice items that counted on the tests remain unreleased.  This amounts to six reading selections and a combined 40 items that appeared in Book 1 on the operational exams given on April 5^th.  Why should that be the case in light of the Commissioner's goal of providing more information?  Non-disclosure raises questions about the quality of the material being withheld. If you remember the contract, the 2016 operational material came from Pearson's item bank.  Since this is supposedly Pearson's last year and since NYS owns the material, why hold back?

As a consumer issue, how can SED justify that we, taxpayers, purchased a product we cannot see?  [And now that Pearson is on the way out, what about releasing the mounds of 2013-2015 test content that no one has been allowed to talk about?  Or did Pearson’s 5-year contract concede ownership of the still hidden material to the vendor?]

2- Item statistics have not been made available.  This kind of overarching data based on how the test population performed on each item is useful to researchers, analysts and anyone interested in seeing how the items functioned.  The items are the bricks that go into constructing the exams and on whose strength and quality decisions about children, teachers and schools have come to depend. 

Prior to Pearson, CTB/McGraw-Hill posted the item-level analytic data within months of test administration.  This included item difficulties (p-values = percentage of children choosing the correct answer) on multiple-choice items or the average score on constructed response questions.  CTB also showed how students responded to each distractor—i.e, the proportion of students choosing the wrong answers. Such data provide insights into possible weaknesses in the items (ambiguous choices, more than one best answer, distractors that are non-functional).  And a correlation was provided (known as the item discrimination index) showing the relation between performance by students on an item and their performance on the entire test. The expectation is that students who do well on an item also do well on the test.

This full set of statistics—referred to as classic item analysis data—ceased being presented after Pearson won the testing contract.  Since then, only some statistics have been provided—and more than a year after the operational tests have been given—ensuring that the exams could not undergo scrutiny until after Pearson’s next round of testing had taken place.

In the absence of empirical data, a vacuum that SED created, the department has been able to blunt criticisms of the exams—at first, dismissing them as anecdotal, and then, when the complaints became widespread, providing partial data (p-values and discrimination indexes) but well past the time SED had complete information readily on hand, yet didn’t make any available to those who might otherwise have had facts with which to challenge the exams. [Aside: I remember when a member of Governor Cuomo’s Task Force attempted to stifle Lisa Rudley’s critique that the Common Core Standards and core-aligned exams were being advanced without sound research data to prove their efficacy.  He pointedly asked where her evidence was to support complaints about flaws in the exams.  Given SED’s reluctance to dispense information, this was a preposterous question.]

The demand for complete timely data is not academic or trivial.  Let’s look at just-released Item# 37 from the Grade 6 ELA passage Weed Wars.  You may recall that Leonie Haimson came upon and brought to light information that one passage contained the confusing concept of “impossibly improbable”.  

Here now from SED’s rush to divulge 2016 information is the statement in question and the multiple-choice options 11-year olds had to choose from in answering.

Once in a while, changes to a weed’s DNA would allow that weed to survive the glyphosate.  The chances of changes like this were very, very small.  But when farmers used glyphosate years after year on millions of hectares¹ of crops, “what seems almost impossibly improbable becomes more probable,” Duke says.

37.   What is the meaning of the phrase “impossibly improbable” as it is used in lines 21 through 23?

         A   usually certain

         B   highly unlikely

         C   extremely slow

         D   rarely noteworthy

This item won’t reach the game-changing level of ridicule that Leonie’s exposure of the Pineapple and the Hare did in 2012.  But it underscores the value of having statistics available to evaluate items.  What percentage of kids chose the correct answer (B)?  How did the distractors work?  That is, what proportion of children chose each of the wrong answers?  Having analytic data would enable us to see how this dubious item played out. 

According to the Learning Standards, #37 is coded RI. 6.4, which means it was classified as a Reading for Information item to see whether sixth graders can “determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including figurative, connotative and technical meanings.”

My guess is that most kids got the item right—making this an “easy” item—because the distractors seem implausible. I would mark it as a poor item for two reasons: It can be answered correctly without reading the passage from which it is drawn; and the distractors likely didn’t carry much weight. Of course, my hunch may be off.  Perhaps many children chose A in response to this convoluted question. We shouldn’t be left to speculate, however, in the absence of data that SED has in its possession.  Note: SED already has the statistics sought virtually as soon as the tests are scored or else it couldn’t issue the instructional reports it just distributed as referenced in Elia’s June 2016 letter to colleagues,

3- SED took away information it provided from 2013 – 2015 when it released questions with annotations.  The information was posted in August of those years in EngageNY. In this year’s zeal to reveal more items sooner, SED has not presented the statewide p-values for the items as it had over the last three years. Significantly, the annotations, which SED described as teaching tools, are also gone.  So, thus far this year SED has offered more items but has not included a rationale “to demonstrate why any of the released questions measures the intended standards; why the correct answer is correct; and why each wrong answer is plausible but incorrect.”  It is helpful to gain SED’s perspective about the material and its defense of the correct answer choice.  Unfortunately these explanations have not come out.  I think we should campaign to have SED’s annotations for the 2016 material released immediately,

4- SED failed to follow its own decision-making rules regarding which reading passages were appropriate to include on the operational exams.  Four ways to estimate the readability of potential passages were used in constructing the ELA tests: the Lexile Framework, Flesch-Kincaid, the Degrees of Reading Power and the Reading Maturity Metric (a Pearson measure). Each involves a scale that can be applied to reading material and sets forth a range that is appropriate for each grade.  For example, the Lexile Framework indicates that reading material ranging from 740L – 1010L is appropriate for 4^th and 5^th graders.  Ergo, material outside that band may not be right for children in these grades. 

SED and Pearson applied three of the four methods to each selection and said in releasing this year’s material that “to make the final determination as to whether a text is at grade-level and thus appropriate to be included on a grade 3-8 assessment, all prospective passages undergo quantitative text complexity analysis using three text complexity measures…. Only passages that are determined appropriate by at least two of three quantitative measures of complexity and are determined appropriate by the qualitative measure of complexity are deemed appropriate for use on the exam.

In reviewing SED’s latest data on the 2016 exams, I counted 11 of the 55 operational passages as failing to meet the criterion that they had to be found to be appropriate by at least two of the methods.  I don’t know how SED will resolve this contradiction.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Two final observations: The material just released by SED makes no mention of the Common Core Learning Standards—as had been the case in the Released Questions with Annotations of 2013-2015. Instead, SED has kept the boilerplate found in these releases and reverts to New York state p-12 Learning Standards as the framework it follows.  Nor could I find any reference to “college and career readiness. I guess they have been discarded due to the botched implementation of the Common Core.

Finally, I think we should press SED for the missing information outlined above and keep demonstrating how the department and commissioner continue to pose as being responsive, while taking business as usual actions.  Once we let up, they will fall back to disdaining that messy part of democracy—the will of the people.

- Fred Smith

DOE Contracts for Approval at June 22nd PEP Meeting

The DOE has posted information on the procurement contracts to be considered at the next Panel for Educational Policy meeting.  Here is the link to the descriptions and the shorter agenda of contract items.  The preview for July contracts is here.

Reading through the contracts, the most salient item is a proposal (Item 13, page 25) to create a new non-profit entity, "NYC School Support Services, Inc." that will provide custodial services to public schools.  Its board will be comprised of the chancellor, the head of the Office of Management and Budget and three appointees of the chancellor.   The proposal calls for funding of $1.8 billion over the next three years.

Update 6/17: The DOE provided additional 48 pages of documentation of past issues with Community Based Organizations (CBOs) providing services to renewal schools.  Document can be found here.

If you have comments or concerns, you can post them below or email us at NYCschoolcontractwatch@gmail.com.

The PARCC censorship controversy, and what the NY Times left out

Update: For more on this controversy, see today's NY Times, which sadly omits mention of the Fair Use exception to the copyright law, and quotes  Michael Petrilli, who claims that "most states are not using test results for teacher evaluations or school quality judgements."  Really?  He also says that the PARCC exams are of "exceptionally high quality."  If this is true -- and there are many who disagree -- then PARCC should be obligated to release their entire exams and not attempt to evade scrutiny.   

The NYT article also omits mentioning how unusual it is to expect to keep the items on a national test secret that is given to millions of students over the course of a lengthy testing window, which for PARCC lasts more than three months --March 7 to June 10 .  In fact, according to an authoritative source, the College Board changes the questions on the SAT  when it's administered on the West coast from the East coast version --because they assume the questions will be shared within that three hour period.

Finally, the NYT links to my blog post, one of the few (?) that still remains up, complete with the PARCC questions.  So you should check it out if you haven't already --- because the post will likely be taken down by Blogger by tomorrow.

See also articles in Slate, USA Today, the Progressive, Washington Post Answer Sheet, and by bloggers Peter Greene, Mercedes Schneider, Daniel Katz and Diane Ravitch, who discovered that her own blog on the PARCC was deleted overnight without warning.

On May 7, Celia Oyler, a professor at Teachers College, posted a column by an anonymous teacher critiquing the 4^th grade PARCC exam, as featuring three reading prompts that were  grades higher than the recommended benchmark, and asking questions that were not even aligned to the Common Core standards in that grade.  

Professor Oyler subsequently received a warning letter on May 12 from the CEO of PARCC, Laura Slover, which threatened her with legal action unless she removed the post, claiming it violated their copyright, and demanded that she also disclose the name of the teacher who wrote the column.

She promptly deleted the excerpts from the exam, and renamed the post, The PARCC Test: Exposed [excerpts deleted under legal threat from Parcc]. 

Others who had tweeted links to Celia’s blog, including me, had their tweets deleted, following complaints by PARCC to Twitter that these tweets had also somehow violated their copyright.  I was annoyed but then when I heard about the PARCC letter to Celia, I reprinted the original post on my  blog on May 14, along with the excerpts of the 4^th grade exam, and urged other bloggers to do the same as “an act of collective disobedience to the reigning testocracy.”  

Critical to my outreach efforts was the Education Bloggers Network, a collection of more than 200 grassroots bloggers, managed by Jonathan Pelto , who communicate with each other in order to become better informed and expand their reach.  Few if any of these bloggers, mostly parents and teachers, get paid for their efforts but they see their role as critical in fighting back corporate reform, unmasking propaganda, and advocating for real improvements to strengthen our public schools. [Jonathan is reliant on individual contributions to keep his work going, please consider making a donation here.]

Then, one by one, many of these bloggers had their posts with PARCC excerpts deleted, sometimes without even receiving explanatory emails. You can see many of these deletions listed on the  Lumen website,  showing 27 takedown notices from Twitter and Google (owner of Blogger) between May 12 and May 16, 2016, all claiming copyright violations.  

PARCC put out a press release, arguing their position; yet many bloggers, including  Julian Vasquez Heilig  and  Anthony Cody, have pointed out that it is impossible  to critique an exam without featuring some of the questions, and thus should be allowed under the Fair Use exception to the copyright law.  

As Anthony wrote, “Just as we needed to read the question about the talking pineapple to understand how lousy it was, we must be able to discuss and criticize the content of the PARCC test. These are not sacred texts. They ARE, however, being used to make Godlike judgments about children and teachers, with potentially life-altering or career-ending consequences.” 

What's the next chapter in this saga?  Stay tuned, for possible legal challenges if PARCC continues its attempt to evade accountability for the flawed nature of these exams through censoring any critiques that contain excerpts from the exam.

Warning! Field Tests ahead!

For all of you parents who thought the testing season was over, here is an alert from Fred Smith, testing expert:

Memo To Parents and Guardians of 88,000 NYC Children Regarding Upcoming Field Tests:

Good morning. It’s late in this school year. I hope that you and your sons and daughters are well.  I know you have been busy with everyday matters.  Therefore, the field tests your children are expected to take are not high on the list of things you want to hear about.

Evidently, NYC Chancellor Farina respects that too and has chosen not to disturb you with information about them.  But, we know that you are capable of multi-tasking.  Here are a few points you should be aware of:

Over the next three weeks, field tests will be administered to students in grades 3-8.  The tests may be given any day through June 10.   

Field tests let vendors like Pearson try out questions on children in order to develop future exams. 

Since 2012, Pearson has given separate field tests in June (aka stand-alone field tests) to a large sample of students throughout New York State.  Results don’t count for the students.

The way students respond to the try-out material is used to select the reading passages and items that will go on the English Language Arts and Math tests to be given next April to New York State’s 1.2 million test population—which encompasses 440,000 children in New York City.

The cost of the field tests is borne entirely by taxpayers, free of charge to their producer.  They take less than an hour to administer but disrupt the school day.  

New York City’s Department of Education does not call attention to the field tests.  It fails to mention that 774 of our schools have been assigned to give them or that 87,330 children have been targeted to try out items in the service of a commercial test publisher.

The bulk of the stand-alone field testing won’t begin until May 31.  That’s when 85% of the ELA and Math tests are due to start.  These are the “Paper-Based” Tests.  The PBTs are aimed at 517 of our schools and 61,000 students.

We have also been asked to do “Computer-Based” field testing for the first time.  This experiment will kick off on Monday, May 23 and involve 11,000 city children.  Enlisting their participation is intended to help transition us from PBTs to computerized exams.

Introducing CBTs will accelerate the profit-making encroachment of technology in the classroom. This objective must be important. Just this week the State Education Department posted a cheerful online letter anticipating “technology issues” but assuring us that the benefits outweigh the bugs.

Over the last four years, the stand-alone approach has proven to be ineffective.  Teachers have roundly criticized the poor quality of the resulting operational exams given each April. They complain that the test material is inappropriate and the items are flawed. Yet, the bad exams were built via the same kind of field testing process that will be repeated here over the next few weeks

A large majority of parents (and many teachers, too) have not been informed about the upcoming tests or their purpose.  The DOE has made little effort to notify parents in a forthright way.

Chancellor Farina, who speaks about the importance of “parent engagement,” apparently wants the field tests to go forward without parents knowing much about them or learning that taking them is voluntary.  Some parents might even say they don’t want their children to participate.

In fact, since 2012, more and more moms and dads have become aware of these extra tests and have refused to let their children sit for them.  Here is a letter parents can submit when they choose not to not let their children take the field tests.

Please find out if your children are in a school that has been assigned to give the field tests by checking the list of schools posted here.

Even if your child is not in one of the grades that is scheduled to be tested, please alert other parents in targeted schools about the field tests and share information with them. 

At least you will have a chance to engage in what’s happening and decide whether you want to exercise your right to say Yes or No.  Knowledge is power.  Thank you. -- Fred Smith

Capital plan comments; $14.9 billion Capital Plan and Contracts amounting to millions approved by PEP without discussion or debate

The below comments expressing our concerns with the five year capital plan were sent to the members of the Panel for Educational Policy on May 17.  A good article about some of the flaws in the Plan and the entire school planning process was published by DNA Info here.

Sabina Omerhodzic of CEC 30 also attended the hearing at the May 18 PEP meeting at Long Island City HS, and made an eloquent speech about the inadequacy of the capital plan.  Nevertheless, the $14.9 billion five-year plan was unanimously approved by the Panel members, without a single question or comment.

The same was true of the proposed contracts, about which Patrick Sullivan and I submitted many questions and serious concerns  on behalf of the Citizens Contract Oversight Committee, well before the hearing.  Every contract on the list, totaling millions of dollars,  was unanimously approved without any discussion or debate.

Comments on March 2016 Capital Plan by Leonie Haimson

Mayoral control hearings and my testimony about why it's an undemocratic and frankly racist governance system

See this Gotham Gazette piece with quotes from Shino Tanikawa and me about the lack of parent voice at the hearings.

At today's Senate hearings on Mayoral control, most of those who invited to speak said they supported Mayoral control without  reservations or much analysis, only that things are less chaotic now.  Here were the witnesses:

Chancellor Carmen Farina

Chancellor Farina and Ursalina Ramirez

Mark Cannizzaro, VP of CSA
Tenicka Boyd, StudentsFirstNY
Teresa Arboleda, ECC
Ellen McHugh, CCSE
Mona Davids, NYC Parents Union
3 Charter school principals
Kathy Wylde, NYC Partnership
Marcus Winters, Manhattan Institute
Leonie Haimson, CSM
Laura Altschuler, League of Woman Voters
Richard Kahan, Urban Assembly
Dennis Walcott (he was originally scheduled 2nd, but had to leave and then returned)

The fact that the Mayor did not show up seemed to have pissed off both the Republican and Democratic senators,  who grilled Farina about this repeatedly and asked her if Bill de Blasio planned to go to Albany to negotiate the issue in the next 12 days before the Legislative session has ended.

Senator Felder asked if the Mayor had met with Flanagan.  Chancellor Farina said she didn't know. Senator Peralta asked if it was true that the Panel on Educational Policy was a rubber stamp and had never turned down a contract. Ursalina Ramirez, the DOE COO, said five times - four revisions and once rejected, but I think she was referring to co-locations, not contracts.  I've asked past and current PEP members and they've said they know of no contract that the Panel has ever turned down.

Standing room only at the hearings today (see Walcott standing?)

The Chancellor said that she spends lots of time listening to parents, though she doesn't always agree with them.  She said that Mayoral control works as shown by the fact that de Blasio appointed her.

She said she told CECs to deal with diversity (!!) and David Goldsmith of CEC 13 has done a great job.   Senator Golden asked about school overcrowding, and the Chancellor said that there are siting problems and that there should be some sort of committee formed.

Senators asked the Chancellor if she had any proposals for improvements to the governance system, which she didn't.  Instead she spoke about changes to teacher certification. A few witnesses suggested tweaks to the PEP and the authority of the CECs,  including the CSA (Principals Union) and the ECC (Consortium of CECs).

In response to Senator Perkins' insistent questions about charters, Farina said they are working with charters to spread their best practices to public schools, including Uncommon Charters which uses Relay to train their principals and teachers with good results (like the highest suspension rates in the city?)

The charter school principals then complained bitterly about how they had been unfairly denied space and resources, including the principal of Girls Prep who bewailed the fact that she had not been provided space for a band (!!).  Another charter principal, either from Success or Coney Island Prep, said though he believes in Mayoral control, de Blasio doesn't deserve it.

Me giving my spellbinding testimony

The fact that the UFT was invited and didn't show up was mentioned twice by Senator Marcellino, who seemed very disappointed and added that he was a former NYC high school teacher and UFT delegate. Marcellino also seemed concerned when Mona David testified that the DOE has closed SLT and PTA meetings to the public.  Hopefully soon the video will be posted online and then I will share.

My testimony is below. I added a comment about how more parents should have been allowed to testify. The high point of the hearings for me was when Sen. Felder said the KidsPAC report card we released yesterday looked good.  Take a look!  - Leonie Haimson

Class Size Matters Testimony on Mayoral Control 5.19.16 Final by Leonie Haimson