The Brooklyn Young Mothers' Collective

The Blog Has Moved!

2010-12-02T11:41:00.000-08:00

In order to improve the blog, we have moved it here:
https://youngmotherseducationpolicy.wordpress.com/

Be sure to subscribe to the new address!

Dropout Rates Dropping, but Don't Celebrate Yet

2010-12-01T12:00:00.000-08:00

While the U.S. high school graduation rate rose to 75% this year, the racial gap persists and some states lag behind.
Read more:
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2033524,00.html

The Public School Bargain

2010-11-30T08:15:00.000-08:00

Do you think Shael-Polansky will hold real power?
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/30/opinion/30tue3.html?ref=todayspaper

Report Finds Low Graduation Rates at For-Profit Colleges

2010-11-29T13:00:00.000-08:00

A report finds that for-profit colleges have lower 6 year graduation rates for bachelor degrees than public and private non-profit colleges. Additionally, students at for-profit colleges accumulate more debt.
To learn more, follow this link: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/24/education/24colleges.html?ref=education.

Shael Polakow-Suransky Named Second-in-Command to Black

2010-11-29T08:07:00.000-08:00

Shael Polakow-Suransky was named chief academic officer, second-in-command to Black.
Follow this link for more information: http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/26/mayor-and-state-reach-deal-on-schools-chief/?hp

Polakow-Suransky has a long history of experience in education.
Follow this link for his educational background: http://gothamschools.org/2010/11/27/meet-shael-polakow-suransky-does-new-second-in-command/#more-50581

Do you think Polakow-Suransky will fill the gaps in Black's education leadership experience?

Parents Express Opposition To Schools Chancellor Selection

2010-11-23T07:44:00.001-08:00

By: Lindsey Christ

As members of an advisory panel prepare to discuss Tuesday whether Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s pick for schools chancellor, Cathie Black, should be waived of the educational requirements and be allowed to take up the post, more protests are being held against her appointment.
A group of city parents gathered Monday at State Education Commissioner David Steiner's apartment to present a petition with more than 12,000 signatures opposing Black’s appointment.

The current law requires the commissioner to grant a waiver to any candidate for chancellor who does not have the traditional certification. The parents are asking Steiner to deny Black that waiver."The waiver should be denied. Clearly, there are people out there across America, who have actual experience running school systems," said Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters.
"It's an insult. She may be a great manager, but these are our schools, these are our kids and we need someone who can get in, who understands and who knows the difference between a kid and a widget," said District 3 Parent Council President Noah Gotbaum.
Meantime, the State Education Department has released Black's transcript from Trinity College as part of her process to become the next school's chancellor.
The transcript shows Black majored in English and took courses in Italian and theology, but what it doesn't show are grades. Because of federal privacy laws, no grades are provided and the city and state both say they won't disclose them.
The New York Times recently obtained current Schools Chancellor Joel Klein's college transcripts and wrote that he received high marks for the most part while attending Columbia and Harvard Law School.
From the beginning, there have been two major issues with Black's appointment. The first is whether she's qualified or not.
The mayor has stressed that the publishing executive is a great manager, but she has no experience and had shown no interest in public education before the appointment. The second issue is with the process. It seems Bloomberg made the choice without holding a single interview. And, if he consulted anyone, they're not speaking up.
Her selection has sparked a range of protests, petitions and proclamations. Now several legislators are now trying to rush through a law requiring Albany to vote on any candidate who does not have the educational qualifications.
"Now is not the time, after eight years of changes to the system, to appoint someone who admitted herself that she needs time to learn,” said Crespo. “We're not here for on-the-job training, we need someone with experience, we need someone, as the state law requires, with experience in education.”
“It falls into our lap to determine how to deal with a person who does not have the needed credentials to be the chancellor of the schools system,” said Adams. “And that is our responsibility, that's called legislative control."
The commissioner's office says the meeting between Steiner and the advisory panel will be closed to the public and press since it involves personnel issues.
It's not clear whether he'll make a decision before or after the Thanksgiving holiday.

At Chelsea High, Seniors Go Online to Make Up Classes They Failed

2010-11-22T08:56:00.000-08:00

By Beth Fertig

Right now, just six out of 10 public high school students in New York City are graduating on time. In our ongoing series, “The Big Fix,” WNYC and the Web site GothamSchools are reporting on three troubled high schools that are trying to improve their graduation rates. One of them is Chelsea Career and Technical Education High School, in Manhattan. The school is now trying to get more seniors to graduate in June by letting them make up classes they failed with new, online courses.

Seventeen-year old Anthony Ortiz says he knew he had the potential to be a good student.
"I’ve always been one of the smartest in the class and I have the ability to understand the work and do it," he says. "But then also I’m just, I guess naturally, I just wanted to clown around."
Anthony wound up at Chelsea two years ago after getting kicked out of his Bronx Catholic school. But his behavior didn’t exactly improve. He admits he was talking in class and didn’t do his homework. Then, last year, when he was a junior, he got disgusted when he saw his winter report card. "Horrible grades," he recalls. "Like speed limits. Fifty-fives straight down. But now this year will be definitely different, I’m reaching for honors."
Anthony’s grades went up tremendously last spring. But he still has three classes to make up in history and science. High schools typically let kids who fail their classes take them over again, or come to summer school. But the explosion in online learning offers a new approach.
At Chelsea, seniors who failed their classes can spend one or two periods each day making them up online. Two teachers are assigned to help as the students sit at computers and work independently. Some are taking science and English. Anthony is taking U.S. history. He’s just finished reading a section about colonialism and now he’s taking the test. He stares at the computer screen and reads one of the questions.
"Why did the colonists settle along the James River?"
Anthony's answer: "So they could defend by a foreign attack."
This test is all multiple choice though some exams have written sections. There are 33 questions and Anthony needs to get 70 percent of them right in order to pass and move on to the next section of the online history course. I ask Anthony if this feels easier than a regular class. He says it's not.
"Maybe even harder ‘cause during the quiz itself, you have to actually answer all the questions without looking at anything and make sure have everything memorized. Whereas for in another class you might have an open book quiz and you know you can look at it."

But in a regular history class, Anthony (photo right) would have a certified history teacher. The two teachers supervising these online classes normally teach biology and business. In this relatively small high school of about 550 students, they were the only teachers available. Biology teacher Stan Kwiatowski, who goes by Mr. K, is stumped when Anthony asks him about a history question.
"Who was sent to Jamestown to serve as governor?" Kwiatowski reads aloud, musing to himself. "Captain John Smith," Anthony interjects.
"I’m not sure," says the teacher. "No I would say John Cabot."
"You sure?" Anthony asks him.
"No I’m not sure!" Kwiatowski laughs.

Anthony is sure it’s John Smith. But that’s not one of the four choices on the test. So his teacher does the only logical thing: he Googles it. Kwiatowsi says he wouldn’t normally do this. But the teachers and students "found that there’s been some errors in the [software] programs." Sometimes the multiple choice options aren't correct.
This wasn’t one of those cases, however. While Captain John Smith established Jamestown, the question asked who was sent to govern Jamestown. (It was Lord De La Warr, in case you forgot.)
Anthony fails. But he can take the test over because he’s allowed up to five tries – with different questions drawn from the same material. Kwiatowski says these online classes can’t replace regular classes where kids interact with their teachers. But he thinks some students will benefit from working at their own pace.
"The fact that all of these students failed in the regular setting makes it, I think, a more positive way to approach the subject for them," he says.
There’s a term for helping students make up classes they’ve failed without taking them over completely: Credit recovery. It’s a controversial topic. Some schools have been criticized for making it too easy for kids to pass by assigning a few essays or cramming sessions. The online courses at Chelsea are designed by Aventa Learning, which also offers Advanced Placement and foreign languages. Walter Da Luz, a representative assigned to New York City, says the credit recovery ones are new, but like all other Aventa courses they’re aligned with state standards.
"I would say the biggest myth out there about online learning is that it’s easy, it’s different, you just go to the computer and it gets done," Da Luz says. "Our program’s not like that."
In other words, it’s just like any other class. Kids have to show up, pay attention, and take notes. But they don’t always do that. When Da Luz visits Chelsea High, he meets kids who are frustrated. One of them is 17 year-old Mickel John. He was taking a physical science course until the software program lost his quizzes. "It’s like I’m basically starting the course again for a second time," he says. "Everything was erased."
Mickel shows the empty folder on his computer screen to Da Luz. The representative listens and apologizes. "I’m sorry that that happened for you," he says, looking over at Mickel's screen. "I will look into what caused that. Let me just take a couple of notes if you don’t mind."
During his visit, Da Luz also hears about students who have trouble logging-in. But many are absent. Few students take any notes. And one boy is asleep at his desk. Seventeen year-old Justine Bishop wants to know why she has to take quizzes in every section of her biology course plus a final exam. "Why can’t we just do the tests instead of having a final at the end?"
"Because this is just like a regular class," Da Luz tells her. "So just like in your regular class you can’t just tell the teacher I just want to skip all this stuff. Because it’s all about reinforcing what you learned."
Justine is taking notes on the questions she missed. The teachers handed out notebooks recently when they realized the students weren't writing anything down, because they presumed they could just read off the screen and then move on to the quizzes and exams.
Academics who have studied online learning in high school say it can be very effective for students who are highly motivated, such as those taking Advanced Placement courses. But the jury’s still out when it comes to struggling students who are making up credits. Experts say it can be helpful to let these students work at their own pace (since they failed in regular classroom settings). But they also need qualified teachers who can help them when they’re stuck.
Chelsea is one of ten city high schools this year in a pilot study using online courses to help students make up credits. The schools are trying different software programs at a cost to the city of $2 million. This is entirely different from the federal grant Chelsea received to improve teacher training and to extend the school day. The school is trying to raise its four-year graduation rate of 50 percent.
Between 50-60 students at Chelsea were assigned to online credit recovery classes. Kwiatowski, the teacher, says attendance is about 60 percent. By early November, he said six students had already completed an online class by putting in extra time on their home computers. They can now advance to other courses they need to make up.
But what if they’re just taking tests and not reading all the history or science material? Walter Da Luz of Aventa says that can happen in any classroom. And these kids don’t have time on their side.
"This is credit recovery," he states. "We’re not looking for every student to get an A. We’re looking at them to develop, to display a mastery that proves they can move on."
And with more than 130 seniors at Chelsea, many of whom are still missing credits, it’s all about getting them to graduate in June.

Our Opinion
High school graduation is an important goal, but it becomes much less valuable when students graduate without adequate preparation for college. To ensure that these online programs are academically rigorous, schools should only use courses aligned with the Common Core standards. Additionally, schools should require students to not only pass the online courses, but also their the schools own tests based on the same material to acquire course credit. Finally, only teachers with backgrounds corresponding to the courses should proctor the online courses so that they can provide additional help to students.

What do you think of the upsurge in online courses? What is lost and gained by this type of instruction? Do you think they are a better credit recovery option than face-to-face classes?

Commissioner names panel of experts to screen new chancellor

2010-11-22T07:34:00.001-08:00

by Anna Phillips

State Education Commissioner David Steiner has named the panel of education experts that will help him decide whether to allow magazine executive Cathie Black to become the next schools chancellor.
Without a background in education, Black needs a waiver from the state that will let her bypass the prerequisites: that she have a degree in education and several years of teaching behind her. Though the final decision rests with Steiner, the panel will play a role in reviewing the city’s case for why Black is qualified and making a recommendation.
Reviewing the list of panel members, New York University Professor Pedro Noguera said the commissioner had covered his bases.
“Steiner’s aware that this is very controversial,” Noguera said. “So if you think about it, instead of just him making the decision he can say, ‘Look, I got a group of very reputable people in education who agreed with me.’”
“That doesn’t mean he’s going to agree with whatever they recommend but he’s got a good group to back him up,” Noguera said.
That group includes the superintendents of two of the big-five school districts in New York State: Rochester and Yonkers. These school leaders will have the job of deciding whether Black can do without the same set of credentials that they had coming in.
Rochester schools Superintendent Jean-Claude Brizard is also among three panel members who have worked for Chancellor Joel Klein. The other two are Andres Alonso, now superintendent of the Baltimore public schools, who served in the early years of Klein’s tenure as chief of staff for teaching and learning, and Carnegie Corporation vice-president Michele Cahill, who was Klein’s senior counselor for education policy.
Cahill is someone who knows what Black is going through. In 2004, Klein wanted to promote her to the position of deputy chancellor, but state education officials warned him that if he asked for a waiver, they wouldn’t give it to him. State officials said that only chief school officers were eligible for the waiver, but deputies would have to meet the requirements, which Cahill couldn’t.
The panel also includes two people coming from teachers colleges. Susan Fuhrman is the president of Teachers College at Columbia University and Ronald Ferguson is a Senior Lecturer in Education and Public Policy at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Harvard Kennedy School.
None of the panel members has a Masters in Business Administration or a background in business, though Alonso did work as a corporate lawyer in the 1980s.
State officials have not set a deadline for the panel to make its decision.
The full list is below:

Screening Panel
Andres Alonso
Dr. Alonso has served as the CEO of Baltimore’s schools since July 2007. He earned a B.A. Arts in history and English from Columbia University in 1979; a Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School in 1982; a Master of Education from Harvard in 1999; and a Doctor of Education from Harvard in 2006. Dr. Alonso worked as a corporate lawyer at Hughes, Hubbard & Reed in New York City from 1982 to 1984; a special education and English as a Second Language teacher in Newark, N.J. from 1986 to 1998; a superintendent’s intern in Springfield, Mass. from 1999 to 2000; chief of staff for teaching and learning at the New York City Department of Education from 2003 to 2006; and as Deputy Chancellor for Teaching and Learning in New York City from 2006 to 2007.

Jean-Claude Brizard
Mr. Brizard serves as the Superintendent of the Rochester City School District. He holds a Master’s Degree in School Administration & Supervision from the City College of New York and a Master’s Degree in Science Education from Queens College, as well as a Bachelor’s Degree in Chemistry from Queens College. Prior to coming to Rochester, he served as a Regional Superintendent, supervising more than 100 K-12 schools serving over 100,000 students in three New York City geographic districts. Previous positions in New York City included: Executive Director for Secondary Schools; Region 8 Instructional Superintendent; high school principal; high school physics teacher; and junior high school science teacher. Mr. Brizard is a graduate of the Superintendents’ Academy of the Broad Center for the Management of School Systems. He is also an Executive Committee member of the American Association of School Administrators.

Michele Cahill
Michele Cahill is vice-president for national programs and director of urban education at Carnegie Corporation of New York where she leads the Corporation’s strategy to meet the twin goals of contributing to societal efforts to create pathways to educational and economic opportunity by generating systemic change across a K-16 continuum, and to create pathways to citizenship, civil participation and civic integration in a pluralistic society. Prior to rejoining Carnegie Corporation in 2007, she held the position of senior counselor to the chancellor for education policy in the New York City Department of Education. Ms. Cahill was a member of the Children First senior leadership team that oversaw and implemented the full-scale reorganization and reform of the New York City public schools. She played a pivotal role in the development of Children First reforms in secondary education, district redesign and accountability, new school development, and student support services. Ms. Cahill has a B.A. in Urban Affairs from Saint Peter’s College, a Masters of Arts in Urban Affairs from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and she pursued doctoral studies in social policy and planning at Columbia University where she was a Revson Fellow.
Ronald F. Ferguson
Dr. Ferguson is a Senior Lecturer in Education and Public Policy at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Harvard Kennedy School. He is also an economist and Senior Research Associate at the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy. He has taught at Harvard since 1983, focusing on education and economic development. His research and writing for the past decade have focused on racial achievement gaps, appearing in a variety of publications. His most recent book is Toward Excellence with Equity: An Emerging Vision for Closing the Achievement Gap. He is the creator of the Tripod Project for School Improvement and also the faculty co-chair and director of the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard University. Ferguson earned an undergraduate degree from Cornell University and Ph.D. from MIT, both in economics.

Susan Fuhrman
Dr. Fuhrman currently serves as President of Teachers College, Columbia University. She earned a B.A. in History, with highest honors, from Northwestern University in 1965; an M.A. in History from Northwestern University in 1966; and a Ph.D. in Political Economy from Teachers College, Columbia University in 1977. Dr. Fuhrman’s research interests include state policy design, accountability, deregulation, and intergovernmental relationships. She has also conducted research on state education reform, state-local relationships, state differential treatment of districts, federalism in education, incentives and systemic reform, and legislatures and education policy. She is currently a co-principal investigator of a large project that studies high school response to accountability pressures and use of instructional assistance in six states.
Louise Mirrer
Dr. Mirrer has served as President and CEO of the New York Historical Society since 2004. She holds a Ph.D. in Spanish and Humanities from Stanford University and has over 20 years experience as an academic administrator, most recently as Executive Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs at CUNY. Dr. Mirrer has published widely on language, literature, medieval studies, and women’s studies, both books and articles, in Spanish and English.

Bernard Pierorazio
Mr. Pierorazio is Superintendent of the Yonkers Public Schools, the fourth largest district in New York State. Prior to becoming Superintendent, he served as the Deputy Superintendent, Assistant Superintendent, and Principal of Saunders Trades and Technical High School. Mr. Pierorazio is a graduate of the Yonkers Public Schools District, continued his studies at Central Connecticut State University, the College of New Rochelle, and Iona College, earning degrees in History, Special Education, and Administration and Supervision.
Kenneth Slentz
Mr. Slentz is the Associate Commissioner for the Office of District Services for the New York State Education Department. In that capacity, he oversees education design and technology, including the build out of the Board of Regents virtual school initiative; school district and Boards of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES) support and coordination, including the coordination of professional development; and school safety. In his 17 years in public education, Mr. Slentz has served as a teaching assistant, teacher, curriculum director, principal and school district superintendent. He holds an AAS in Liberal Arts from SUNY Cobleskill, a B.A. in Political Science from SUNY Geneseo, and an M.S. in Education from SUNY Oswego.

Do you think Black is qualified?

Gates Urges School Budget Overhauls

2010-11-19T10:26:00.000-08:00

Bill Gates, the founder and former chairman of Microsoft, has made education-related philanthropy a major focus since stepping down from his day-to-day role in the company in 2008.
His new area of interest: helping solve schools’ money problems. In a speech prepared for delivery Friday, Mr. Gates — who is gaining considerable clout in education circles — plans to urge the 50 state superintendents of education to take difficult steps to restructure the nation’s public education budgets, which have come under severe pressure in the economic downturn.
He suggests they end teacher pay increases based on seniority and on master’s degrees, which he says are unrelated to teachers’ ability to raise student achievement. He also urges an end to efforts to reduce class sizes. Instead, he suggests rewarding the most effective teachers with higher pay for taking on larger classes or teaching in needy schools.
“Of course, restructuring pay systems is like kicking a beehive” — but restructure them anyway, Mr. Gates plans to tell the superintendents in his talk to the Council of Chief State School Officers, which opens a convention in Louisville on Friday.
“Rebuild the budget based on excellence,” Mr. Gates says.
Teachers’ unions defend giving raises to teachers as they gain experience and higher education.
“We know that experience makes a difference in student achievement — teachers get better,” said Bill Raabe, director of collective bargaining at the National Education Association, the largest teachers’ union. “And additional training, too, whether its a master’s degree or some other way a teacher has improved her content knowledge, we think it ought to be compensated.”
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said of Mr. Gates’s speech: “He is proposing to change one of the things that parents count on — small class sizes to differentiate instruction. There’s a mountain of solid research and common sense showing smaller class sizes benefit students.”
States and local school districts are headed toward what may be painful budget decisions because two years of recession have battered state and local tax revenues, and the $100 billion in stimulus money that has been pumped into public education since spring 2009 is running out.
New Jersey, for example, faces a $10 billion deficit, and Gov. Chris Christie has clashed with superintendents over his efforts to cap their pay.
In several other states including Ohio, which faces an $8 billion deficit, newly elected governors are scrutinizing school spending as part of a broad review.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan delivered his own speech in Washington this week, titled “Bang for the Buck in Schooling,” in which he made arguments similar to those of Mr. Gates.
School officials should be using this crisis to “leverage transformational change in the education system” rather than seeking to balance budgets through shorter school years, reduced bus routes or other short-term fixes, Mr. Duncan said.
Mr. Gates accepted an invitation to speak to the council, he said in an interview, because many of the key decisions in America’s decentralized education system are made by state superintendents and local school boards.
“These are the leaders,” he said.
Steven Paine, the West Virginia superintendent who is the council’s president, said the group invited Mr. Gates because “he has a perspective that we need to consider.”
“He’s been fairly successful in the business arena,” he added.
After reading an advance copy of Mr. Gates’s speech, Mr. Paine said, “We all want to transform our education systems, but when you’re falling off that funding cliff it’s difficult to do.”
In the speech, Mr. Gates says that improving student achievement is a central challenge, and that budget crises are making change necessary.
“You can’t fund reforms without money,” he says. “And there is no more money.”
The only way out, he says, is by rethinking the way the nation’s $500 billion annual expenditures on public schools is allocated. About $50 billion pays for seniority-based annual salary increases for teachers, he says. The nation spends an additional $9 billion annually to pay salary increases to teachers with master’s degrees, he says.

Do you think class size matters?

Mayor’s early budget calls for 6,100 teacher layoffs next year

2010-11-19T07:50:00.001-08:00

by Anna Phillips

Mayor Bloomberg called for over 6,100 teaching jobs to be cut from the city’s public schools next year in a new austerity budget released today.
The preliminary budget, which tries to close a massive gap left by the end of federal stimulus funding, will leave the Department of Education with a total deficit of $435 million. The department was spared a more brutal cut by the mayor’s decision to shift funding from other areas into the school system, partially filling the hole left by the loss of $853 million in stimulus funds and $350 million in budget cuts.
Folded into the city’s calculations is the assumption that another 1,500 teachers will be lost through the attrition schools experience every year. It also assumes that schools will bear the full brunt of the $435 million cut, though a spokeswoman for the DOE said officials have not decided what, if any, cuts will be made to the central administration.
“Right now, the City is facing unprecedented budget conditions and we recognize that everyone will have to make some very tough choices in the coming months,” said Department of Education Chief Operating Officer Sharon Greenberger in an email.
“While this is a preliminary estimate of what next year’s budget will look like, we are already identifying ways to reduce the financial impact on our schools and students,” she said.
Last year when the mayor announced his preliminary budget, he described a doomsday scenario that included cutting 8,500 teaching positions. Two months later, that number shrank to 6,400 — 4,000 of which would have come from layoffs, and the rest from attrition. Finally, the mayor rescinded the threat of teacher layoffs entirely, saying that the city would cover the deficit by eliminating a two percent raise teachers were expected to get.
Teachers union president Michael Mulgrew said he was hopeful that with a new chancellor coming into Tweed and a new governor in Albany, he and elected officials would be able to lobby for more state funding.
Incoming governor Andrew Cuomo “keeps saying he’s going to cut things, but once he gets into office and sees the realities he may think differently,” Mulgrew said.
“In these tough times, the money has to go to the classroom,” he said. “I think we have some things we can cut out of the central Department of Education. Then you have to look at what’s going on in Albany and hopefully we’ll have a better session this year. It was craziness last year, but there are opportunities this year.”

Class Sizes Grew in City Despite Deal to Cut Them

2010-11-18T07:54:00.000-08:00

By SHARON OTTERMAN, Published: November 17, 2010

Three years after a landmark agreement to cut class sizes in New York City’s public schools, classrooms are swelling across the city, a result of budget cuts and spending decisions that have reduced the teaching force.
According to the city’s Department of Education, elementary schools this year had the largest increases, with average class sizes growing to 23.7 students per class from 22.9 last year. In middle schools, class sizes climbed to 27 from 26.1; high school class sizes held at about 27.
Small classes are increasingly rare. Excluding special education classes, 22.4 percent of elementary and middle school students were in classes of 20 or fewer children two years ago. Now, only 13.7 percent are. Meanwhile, the percentage packed into classrooms with 28 students or more has jumped to 31 percent from 23 percent, according to an analysis by The New York Times.
The increases come despite a city commitment since 2007 to reduce class sizes across all grades in exchange for state money earmarked for that purpose. In January, the teachers union, along with civic organizations and local officials, filed a lawsuit to get the city to account for how the money, totaling $740 million, was being used. The city has argued that questions about the funds belong before the state commissioner of education, David M. Steiner, not in a court.
But the class size reduction plan assumed there would be much more additional money than ever materialized, which is one reason its targets have faded from reach.
According to the agreement, by 2012, the city’s kindergartens, for example, were to average less than 20 students. They averaged 20.7 students per class in 2007; this year, they had 22.
Over all, aid to schools across the state has been dropping. In the past year alone, city schools have had to absorb cuts of 4 percent.
State spending reductions are one of the largest challenges awaiting Cathleen P. Black, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s choice to be the next chancellor, and given that the state faces another large deficit, it is possible that class sizes will continue to rise.
City officials said Wednesday that given the cuts, class sizes actually rose less than they could have.
In February, the city appealed to the state to excuse it from its class size reduction targets due to the economic downturn. Mr. Steiner agreed to allow the city to focus its class size reduction plans on just 75 of its 1,600 schools, chosen because they were both crowded and low performing.
Advocates fighting for smaller class sizes said Wednesday that it was disingenuous of the city to blame the economy alone for the swelling classes, because the city never mandated that principals use the extra funds to reduce class sizes. The lawsuit charges that the city has at times used the money to plug other holes in the budget.
In general, the city permits principals to use the class size reduction funds for other purposes, including to pay for specialized teachers and for team-teaching. But the city also officially ended a separate class size reduction program in the early grades, with principals receiving a memorandum in June telling them they could now spend those funds as they wished.
Michael Mulgrew, the president of the United Federation of Teachers, the teachers union, said that class sizes rose even when the economy was strong. “It’s clear that their intention was never to lower class size,” Mr. Mulgrew said. “They don’t believe in it.”
Overall student enrollment has remained relatively flat, at just over one million, but according to the union, there are 4,000 fewer teachers than there were two years ago, because many recent retirees have not been replaced.
At Public School 138 on Lafayette Avenue in the South Bronx, where class sizes now average 29 in fourth grade and 31 in third grade, Michelle Viera, a fourth-grade teacher, said that it was hard to even get the basics done. “Sometimes there’s just not enough materials,” she said. “We constantly have to copy things. There’s also a problem with discipline.”
Mildred Rivera, 39, said that her daughter Julianne, a second grader at P.S. 138, sometimes “doesn’t get attention from the teacher because she’s too busy with other kids.”
Other parents said they did not think the crowding was a problem, because their children’s teachers were good.
Perhaps the most influential study on class size, conducted in Tennessee in the 1980s, pointed to the benefits of small classes, particularly for poor and minority students. That study found that in kindergarten through third grade, students in small classes outperformed those in larger classes. But in the study, small classes were defined as those with 13 to 17 children — unthinkably small for most school districts.
Alan B. Krueger, a Princeton University professor who studies the economics of education, said he believed that there was evidence to support the benefits of small classes, even when those classes have more than 18 students. Plus, he said, class size reduction “is one of the few education reforms that I think we know what to do about.”
“The thing that’s in vogue now is to say, ‘We just need better teachers,’ yet no one knows how to screen to determine if someone’s a better teacher. No one knows how to train people to be better teachers.”
But Dan Goldhaber, director of the Center for Education Data and Research at the University of Washington, sees it differently, as do some other experts. “The effects of class size, if they exist, are small, and class size is really expensive,” he said.
When California embarked on a costly class size reduction effort in the mid-90s, Mr. Goldhaber pointed out, studies showed “marginal, if any, impact, and possibly some harm,” as many sub-par teachers were quickly hired to fulfill the mandate, and many well-qualified teachers left poorer urban schools for new slots elsewhere.
Part of the issue in New York is transparency in how the funds for class size reduction are being used, said Geri Palast, the executive director of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, the organization that brought the lawsuit that led to the landmark agreement three years ago. While her organization has repeatedly asked the city for information about how much was spent each year on class size reduction, so far, she said, the organization has only been told what the city plans to spend at the start of each school year.
“We are concerned that there was money allocated for that purpose that was not used for that purpose,” she said.

Sec. Duncan: Districts Need to Rethink Class Size, Salary Structure

2010-11-17T14:32:00.000-08:00

By Alyson Klein on November 17, 2010The dismal economic climate may well be represent "new normal" for schools, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said today at a forum sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute, a free market think tank.
That means schools are going to have to make hard choices, Duncan said. And he's hoping they'll use the opportunity fundamentally rethink long-held ideas, such as the need for students to have a certain amount of "seat time" in each particular class, class size, and teacher pay scales that reward educators for getting advanced degrees.
Duncan is hoping that school administrators won't cut areas that directly impact the classroom, such as trimming instructional time, and scrapping art and music classes. And he doesn't want districts laying off "talented young teachers."
"Unfortunately this pattern of cutbacks has too often prevailed in the past," he said.
Instead, districts might want to look at rethinking transportation routes, and closing down schools that are under-enrolled, Duncan suggested.
And he urged districts to consider "modest but smartly targeted increases in class size." As a parent, Duncan said, he'd much rather have his kids in a class of 26 with a really excellent teacher, than in a class with 22 kids, lead by a mediocre teacher. And he said that in Asian countries that tend to do well on international benchmarks (like South Korea and Japan) average classes in secondary schools are 30 or more, as opposed to the U.S. average of about 25.
During a question and answer period, one teacher questioned that rationale, saying that if she took on additional students, that's asking her to do more for the same amount of money. Duncan said he'd like districts to consider reworking contracts so that effective teachers (particularly those who choose to work with more kids) can make a lot more money, say $80,000, or even $125,000.
I think there are lots of folks out there who would probably agree that is a good conversation to have. But I'm wondering if the economic downturn will make those types of discussions easier (as in, we have to cut costs anyway, so let's rethink salary structure) or much harder (since districts may not have the spare cash for huge salary increases to compensate good teachers for taking on more kids.) What do you think?
And what's your take on Duncan's class size comments?

Class Sizes Jump Again

2010-11-17T07:40:00.001-08:00

Nov. 16, 2010
by Maisie McAdoo

The DOE put out its preliminary class size report for 2010-11 without so much as a whisper. OK, a PowerPoint, and data tables, that’s it. No press release, no discussion. Because the news is bad again.
Class sizes citywide rose a average 2 percent, or 0.6 student per class. The increases were especially large in elementary schools, up to 23.7 students per class from 22.9 last year, and middle schools, up to 27 kids per class from 26.1 last year. High schools had a small increase.
The 4.2% budget cut is to blame this year, but this marks the third consecutive year of increases. Through 2008, class sizes were decreasing — very slowly, but they were decreasing. But since then they’ve been up in every grade every year. Since 2008, the average third grade class has swelled by 13 percent. The average first grade class is 9 percent larger. This wasn’t what the Campaign for Fiscal Equity decision was supposed to bring about.
Class Size Increases, School Years 2008 to 2011

GRADE	2007-08	2010-11	Increase
K	20.6	22.0	+ 7%
1	21.1	22.9	+ 9%
2	21.1	23.2	+10%
3	21.0	23.8	+13%
4	23.5	25.0	+ 6%
5	24.1	25.4	+ 5%
6	25.5	26.3	+ 3%
7	26.2	27.1	+ 3%
8	26.6	27.4	+ 4%
High school	26.1	26.9	+ 3%

In her book, chancellor appointee says she’s no data “whiz”

2010-11-16T11:42:00.001-08:00

by Maura Walz

City officials’ argument to convince State Education Commissioner David Steiner that publishing executive Cathie Black is qualified to be schools chancellor is based on the idea that her managerial skills will be necessary during the coming years’ intense financial pressures.
But in her memoir-cum-business advice guide, “Basic Black,” the chancellor appointee describes her skills as far more attuned to sales and marketing than financial analysis. While she likes the operational side of business, she writes, “too much data and too many spreadsheets make my eyes glaze over.”
In a section of the book called “Power = knowing your strengths and weaknesses,” Black explains that knowing that she prefers broader strategy to rows of numbers has helped her decide which tasks to delegate:

Over the years I’ve taken care to work on that weakness — taking financial management courses, asking for help when I need it, and not being afraid to let the numbers folks do the thing they’re best at. It wouldn’t make sense for me to pretend to be a whiz where I’m not.

Black’s analysis of her own managerial strengths and weaknesses is one of many insights that her 2007 book gives into how she might approach her new job at Tweed Courthouse.
It also gives clues to why Black said yes to the job of schools chancellor. In a section on how to decide which job offers to take and which to pass over, she describes two separate instances where she was offered jobs outside of magazine publishing but turned them down. In one case, she declined an offer to become president of a well-known cosmetics company. She refused because, as she writes, they needed “someone who lives and breathes cosmetics,” and Black did not think she was that person.
Similarly, when she was offered a top position at a Silicon Valley start-up, she turned it down because she didn’t feel familiar enough with the field:

It would have been an exciting and potentially lucrative new field for me, but as I walked around the company’s offices, looking at the rows and rows of people silently tapping away at their computers, I just kept thinking, “I’m such a fish out of water here. What in the world do I bring to this party?”

But Black says there are times when it makes sense to take a job that’s far afield from your interests and expertise — when the new job may be a strategic stepping-stone to something else.
“Don’t be afraid to take steps in your career that are strictly for strategic purposes,” she writes. “Yes, you want to follow your dreams, but sometimes the path to your dreams involves a carefully thought-out detour.”
The book also gives clues about how Black may run the Department of Education’s central administration. Black has said that she intends to lean heavily on the team of deputy chancellors that Klein has put together — though one of those deputies quit almost immediately after Bloomberg’s announcement and it’s unclear whether others plan to stay.
She writes in the book that, unlike many executives arriving at a new company, she prefers keeping the old team in place rather than making drastic changes right away. When she was hired at Hearst, she writes, she began making changes so slowly that she attracted criticism from outside observers.
“We needed an infusion of new energy, and part of the reason I was hired was to provide it,” she writes. “Yet I didn’t storm in with bazookas blazing. The last thing I wanted to do was come in and shake things up just for the sake of shaking, which would have led to upheaval and mistrust on the part of Hearst management.”
In the book, Black describes how she approaches laying off staff, which she may be forced to do next year in the face of steep budget reductions. She explains how she made the decision to shutter a struggling magazine, experience that some have suggested might come in handy when the city tries to close as many as 60 schools this year.
Black also writes about her commitment to diversity in the workplace. The Department of Education and the Bloomberg administration have been criticized for their largely white, male ranks. Black writes that she has received criticism for hiring too many female executives; at Hearst, she dispensed with that idea by acknowledging it directly at an executive meeting, then asking all of the women in the room to stand. The women made up about one-third of the meeting’s attendees.
She writes that she prefers to hire employees of “different backgrounds, ages, temperaments, and experience” not just for ethical reasons but also because it makes good business sense.
“It’s best to mix it up, as hiring people like yourself simply brings you more of the same perspective and skills, rather than the diversity of skills that more often leads to success,” she writes.
Throughout the book, Black describes an approach to managing that is mostly personable but also direct and sometimes almost brusque. And she says she has a thick skin for hearing when people think she is wrong.
“You can take it or leave it, but don’t fear criticism,” she writes.

City news outlets join suit over teacher effectiveness scores

2010-11-16T11:34:00.001-08:00

by Anna PhillipsFive news organizations have joined the lawsuit over whether the city can release teachers’ effectiveness scores, arguing that they have a right to see the data.
Lawyers for the New York Times, Daily News, New York Post, the Wall Street Journal, and NY1 have decided to intervene in the case, according to a spokeswoman for the city’s law department. They will file their own papers, but are taking the same position as the city’s lawyers, arguing that the data is not protected under the Freedom of Information law.
Reporters at each of the news organizations submitted requests for the data and the city planned to release the reports until last month when the teachers union sued to stop them.
In its lawsuit, the union’s lawyers wrote that the Department of Education should have denied reporters’ FOIL requests because the teachers’ ratings are exempt from disclosure. The suit also said that making the scores public would amount to an invasion of teachers’ privacy.
The release would cover all 12,000 city teachers who have value-added reports, which measure a teacher’s effectiveness based on how good she is at improving her students’ test scores from the beginning of the year to the end.
The reports are a relatively new way of measuring teacher effectiveness and have been criticized by some researchers for their wide margins of error.
To give the news organizations more time to join the lawsuit, the city has asked for the hearing to be postponed from November 24. Oral arguments are now scheduled to take place on December 8, according to a spokesman for the teachers union.
“Media outlets that made the FOIL requests giving rise to this litigation have retained counsel, who is moving to intervene in the matter,” said Jesse Levine, a lawyer for the city, in an email. “The adjournment permits all parties to brief the legal issues involved fully.”

Bloomberg Defends Black

2010-11-15T09:23:00.000-08:00

By MICHAEL HOWARD SAUL

Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Friday that an open search for New York City's new schools chancellor would have been untenable, as some parent groups and politicians intensified their opposition to the appointment.
By late Friday afternoon, 13 of the 51 members of the City Council had signed onto a resolution calling on the state education commissioner to deny a waiver to Cathie Black, the media executive tapped this week by Mr. Bloomberg to replace Chancellor Joel Klein. A spokeswoman said Council Speaker Christine Quinn has not taken a position on the resolution.
Ms. Black, currently the chairwoman of Hearst Magazines, needs a waiver because state law requires the chancellor to have education credentials and experience in schools; Ms. Black has neither, though she began serving recently on the board of a charter school and the mayor said the nation's largest school system needs, above all characteristics, an expert manager.
"Our children's education is too important," said Council Member Jumaane Williams, chief sponsor of the resolution. "Just as we seriously consider the backgrounds of leaders in the NYPD, FDNY, and other city agencies, we should use the same consideration for the chancellor of NYC schools."
With the Legislature handing control of the schools to Mr. Bloomberg in 2002, his chief power is the ability to pick the chancellor and, then, be held accountable for that selection. Denying the waiver would be viewed as a strong rebuke of Mr. Bloomberg.
On his weekly radio show, the mayor dismissed critics who are calling for the waiver to be denied. "It just goes to show they have no understanding of what the job is," he said.
A spokesman for David Steiner, the state education commissioner—who ultimately decides on the waiver—declined Friday to say whether Mr. Bloomberg or Ms. Black have spoken with Mr. Steiner about the matter. A spokeswoman for Mr. Bloomberg did not return repeated inquiries. The commissioner has yet to receive the mayor's formal waiver request, the spokesman said.
Mr. Bloomberg's announcement on Tuesday that he had selected Ms. Black to succeed Mr. Klein, who will be stepping down after more than eight years, came as a surprise. The mayor did not publicly announce the opening—or advertise it—as he did when he appointed Mr. Klein in 2002. "Nobody does a search in the open like that," he said. "You can post certain jobs and people can apply. But at a certain level, that's not just how anybody would do it."

The mayor said he keeps a list of potential candidates in his head for high-level jobs in his administration.
"We spent a lot of time looking around the world for the best people and we have a list of people in my mind," he said. "Always trying to think if any of our commissioners or deputy mayors…got hit by a truck—just as a euphemism—I know pretty much who I would make my first call to to see if we could get somebody to fill in right away."
In response to criticism from elected officials, parents and teachers, who have complained that they had no input into one of the most high-profile and influential positions in city government, the mayor said he is confident his selection process yielded the best choice.
"To go through a lengthy search process in the middle of a school years is just not something that is in our kids' interest," he said. "We got to keep going here."

Trends: Non-educators Leading School Districts

2010-11-15T09:04:00.000-08:00

By Daniel MasseyThe Daily News' front cover last Wednesday summed up the general reaction to publishing executive Cathleen Black's selection as city schools chancellor: “Huh?” In fact, choosing nontraditional professionals to run school systems has become more commonplace nationwide in the eight years since Michael Bloomberg tapped Joel Klein, an education outsider, to lead the schools here.
Challenging the status quo, this new breed has pushed reform agendas that stress measurable results. Individuals from outside education now lead 5% of the country's largest 200 urban school districts, according to the Los Angeles-based Broad Center for the Management of School Systems. In 2009 alone, 43% of the 28 vacancies in large districts were filled by graduates of the center's Superintendents Academy, which specializes in training leaders with unconventional backgrounds.
“There's a difference between being a teacher and leading an organization that's focused on teaching,” says Becca Bracy Knight, executive director of the Broad Center. “You can have someone running a great symphony who isn't a concert violinist. It doesn't mean the violinist isn't important; it's just a different skill set.”
At Ms. Black's introductory press conference last week, Mr. Bloomberg called her a “world-class manager,” and said that her ability to handle a budget and a staff trumped her lack of education credentials. “Our problem is making sure an organization with a $23 billion budget, with 135,000 employees, that has to deal with every level of government, that has to deal with all sorts of social problems, is able to function.”
As chairman of Hearst Magazines, Ms. Black oversaw 2,000 employees who produced over 200 editions of 14 magazines in 100 countries. The company's U.S. revenue fell 19% last year, to $1.8 billion, but there's no estimate of its international revenue, according to Ad Age. Supporters say Ms. Black's skills will be critical with budget cuts looming. They also argue that the foundation of reform is in place, and what's needed is someone who can complete it.
“The key now is to pull all the stakeholders together to get it implemented,” says Kathryn Wylde, president of the Partnership for New York City. “That's a job that really requires the kind of management, communication and consensus-building skills that Cathie Black has.”

Finding support in the ranks

Mr. Bloomberg also pointed out that the chancellor has support from a team of eight deputies—most of them with extensive education experience. One, Photeine Anagnostopoulos, resigned within hours of Ms. Black's hiring becoming public, however, and keeping the others could prove a challenge. For example, Eric Nadelstern, Mr. Klein's top deputy, was passed over. That surprised insiders, who felt his four decades of experience in the system positioned Mr. Nadelstern to be the next chancellor.
Other outsiders who have taken over school systems say Ms. Black faces the challenge of a lifetime. Their advice? That she listen.
Jonathan Raymond managed a nonprofit with a $9 million budget before transitioning into education administration in 2006. In 2009, he was appointed superintendent of the Sacramento City Unified School District, which has 47,000 students and a $370 million budget.
Mr. Raymond said he visited all of the system's 82 schools in his first 110 days on the job. “As nontraditional leaders, we come in with a lot of the right skills on the business side, but what we often neglect in an effort to make change is the importance of building consensus,” he says. “I had to take time to really listen and learn from the community.”

Expectations not always aligned

Paula Dawning, a former vice president of sales at AT&T, led the Benton Harbor Area Schools System, one of Michigan's poorest and most chronically underperforming districts, for five years before retiring in 2007. In her first two years, fourth-grade reading scores doubled, and the overall dropout rate fell 20%.
Ms. Dawning warns that Ms. Black's job will be her toughest, with parents, teachers, the business community and government maneuvering for influence. “One of the big differences going from the private to the public sector was you had so many constituencies you had to respond to,” she says. “And their expectations are not necessarily aligned.”
Both Mr. Raymond and Ms. Dawning attended the Broad Center's academy, while Ms. Black is taking charge of 1.1 million students without any training. (Ms. Knight says the center will offer the new chancellor a “crash course.”)
While Messrs. Raymond and Klein and Ms. Dawning experienced success, outsider failures include Julius Becton, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant general who resigned after two years of struggling as head of the D.C. system.
Jeffrey Henig, professor of political science and education at Teachers College-Columbia University, says, “Lots of folks believe if you bring in a tough organizer and manager and array the right staff you can make up for lack of substantive knowledge, but the case for that hasn't been made.” Though it can be done, he adds, “it's just a harder row to hoe, and it's not clear to me why that would be your first choice.”
Ms. Black is expected to bring a less confrontational style to the job than her predecessor, but some experts doubt that, given her dearth of experience, Ms. Black will challenge Mr. Klein's policies.
“I will be very surprised if she turns out to be independent or concludes that some of the things Klein did were not so great,” says Sol Stern, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

Do you think non-educators, like Black, are qualified to lead school systems?

NYC School Closings: What You Need to Know

2010-11-12T10:39:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, BYMC staff attended a training on the NYC school closing process. Below is a summary of important information:

-New York City has accepted federal School Improvement Grants for high schools. These grants stipulate that the lowest performing schools can be improved in the following ways:
1. Convert to charter school
2. Close and open new school(s) in its place
3. Fire principal and at least half of teachers (this option cannot be done in NYC because of UFT regulations)
4. Fire principal and transform school (this option cannot be chosen for more than half of schools).

- Bloomberg has pledged to close 10 percent of the NYC's lowest performing schools. There is no formula to select these schools; they may be chosen on the basis of low test scores, low graduation rates, and lack of community involvement in making improvements.

-Both the NYS and NYC Department of Education puts schools on the closing list.

-If the school is to be closed, it will remain open until all current students have graduated.

-When a school is closed, new schools are started in the same building.

-Process of school closure:
1. DOE posts School Improvement Scenarios of each school that it may close.
2. 4 community meetings are held at each school to get community imput.
3. DOE posts Educational Impact Statement, which includes alternative options for students, proposed new schools for the building, and a summary of what the DOE has done to improve the school before closing it.
4. DOE holds joint hearing with community representatives.
5. Panel for Educational Policy votes on the proposal.

-List of school closings:
The 16 schools that the city has placed on a potential closure list for the first time are:
BRONX
P.S. 50 Clara Barton, an elementary school
P.S. 102, Joseph O. Loretan, an elementary school
P.S. 107, an elementary school
P.S. 189, the Cornerstone Academy for Social Action, an elementary school.
M.S. 142, John Philip Sousa, a middle school
BROOKLYN
P.S. 260, Breuckelen, an elementary school.
P.S. 114, Ryder, an elementary school
P.S./I.S 137 Rachel Jean Mitchell, a K-8 school
M.S. 596, KAPPA VII, a middle school
J.H.S. 302, Rafael Cordero, a middle school
M.S. 571, a middle school
MANHATTAN
I.S. 195, Roberto Clemente, a middle school.
QUEENS
P.S. 40, Samuel Huntington, an elementary school
P.S. 30, an elementary school
P.S./M.S. 147, Ronald McNair, a K-8 school
I.S. 231, Magnetech 2000, a middle school

The additional 20 schools on the state’s persistently lowest achieving list that may be phased out and replaced with new schools are:
August Martin High School
Beach Channel High School
Christopher Columbus High School
Fordham Leadership Academy for Business and Technology
Grace Dodge Career and Technical Education High School
Grover Cleveland High School
High School of Graphic Communication Arts
Jamaica High School
Jane Addams High School for Academics and Careers
John Adams High School
John Dewey High School
John F. Kennedy High School
Metropolitan Corporate Academy
Monroe Academy for Business/Law
Newtown High School
Norman Thomas High School
Paul Robeson High School
Richmond Hill High School
Sheepshead Bay High School
W.H. Maxwell CTE High School

The rest of the 19 schools that got a reprieve last year and will most likely face phase-out are:
Frederick Douglass Academy III (middle school)
Global Enterprise High School
Monroe Academy for Business and Law
School for Community Research and Learning
New Day Academy
Academy of Collaborative Education
Kappa II
Academy of Environmental Science High School
Middle School for Academic and Social Excellence
Public School 332
Business, Computer Applications and Entrepreneurship High School
Choir Academy of Harlem High School

How Does the U.S. Compare?

2010-11-12T09:57:00.000-08:00

By Amanda Ripley

Imagine for a moment that a rich, innovative company is looking to draft the best and brightest high-school grads from across the globe without regard to geography. Let’s say this company’s recruiter has a round-the-world plane ticket and just a few weeks to scout for talent. Where should he go?
Our hypothetical recruiter knows there’s little sense in judging a nation like the United States by comparing it to, say, Finland. This is a big country, after all, and school quality varies dramatically from state to state. What he really wants to know is, should he visit Finland or Florida? Korea or Connecticut? Uruguay or Utah?
Stanford economist Eric Hanushek and two colleagues recently conducted an experiment to answer just such questions, ranking American states and foreign countries side by side. Like our recruiter, they looked specifically at the best and brightest in each place—the kids most likely to get good jobs in the future—using scores on standardized math tests as a proxy for educational achievement.
We’ve known for some time how this story ends nationwide: only 6 percent of U.S. students perform at the advanced-proficiency level in math, a share that lags behind kids in some 30 other countries, from the United Kingdom to Taiwan. But what happens when we break down the results? Do any individual U.S. states wind up near the top?
Incredibly, no. Even if we treat each state as its own country, not a single one makes it into the top dozen contenders on the list. The best performer is Massachusetts, ringing in at No. 17. Minnesota also makes it into the upper-middle tier, followed by Vermont, New Jersey, and Washington. And down it goes from there, all the way to Mississippi, whose students—by this measure at least—might as well be attending school in Thailand or Serbia.
Hanushek, who grew up outside Cleveland and graduated from the Air Force Academy in 1965, has the gentle voice and manner of Mr. Rogers, but he has spent the past 40 years calmly butchering conventional wisdom on education. In study after study, he has demonstrated that our assumptions about what works are almost always wrong. More money does not tend to lead to better results; smaller class sizes do not tend to improve learning. “Historically,” he says, “reporters call me [when] the editor asks, ‘What is the other side of this story?’”
Over the years, as Hanushek has focused more on international comparisons, he has heard a variety of theories as to why U.S. students underperform so egregiously. When he started, the prevailing excuse was that the testing wasn’t fair. Other countries were testing a more select group of students, while we were testing everyone. That is no longer true: due to better sampling techniques and other countries’ decisions to educate more of their citizens, we’re now generally comparing apples to apples.
These days, the theory Hanushek hears most often is what we might call the diversity excuse. When he runs into his neighbors at Palo Alto coffee shops, they lament the condition of public schools overall, but are quick to exempt the schools their own kids attend. “In the litany of excuses, one explanation is always, ‘We’re a very heterogeneous society—all these immigrants are dragging us down. But our kids are doing fine,’” Hanushek says. This latest study was designed, in part, to test the diversity excuse.
To do this, Hanushek, along with Paul Peterson at Harvard and Ludger Woessmann at the University of Munich, looked at the American kids performing at the top of the charts on an international math test. (Math tests are easier to normalize across countries, regardless of language barriers; and math skills tend to better predict future earnings than other skills taught in high school.) Then, to get state-by-state data, they correlated the results of that international test with the results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress exam, which is given to a much larger sample in the U.S. and can be used to draw statewide conclusions.
The international test Hanushek used for this study—the Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA—is administered every three years to 15-year-olds in about 60 countries. Some experts love this test; others, like Tom Loveless at the Brookings Institution, criticize it as a poor judge of what schools are teaching. But despite his concerns about PISA, Loveless, who has read an advance version of Hanushek’s study, agrees with its primary conclusion. “The United States does not do a good job of educating kids at the top,” he says. “There’s a long-standing attitude that, ‘Well, smart kids can make it on their own. And after all, they’re doing well. So why worry about them?’”
Of course, the fact that no U.S. state does very well compared with other rich nations does not necessarily disprove the diversity excuse: parents in Palo Alto could reasonably infer that California’s poor ranking (in the bottom third, just above Portugal and below Italy) is a function of the state’s large population of poor and/or immigrant children, and does not reflect their own kids’ relatively well-off circumstances.
So Hanushek and his co-authors sliced the data more thinly still. They couldn’t control for income, since students don’t report their parents’ salaries when they take these tests; but they could use reliable proxies. How would our states do if we looked just at the white kids performing at high levels—kids who are not, generally speaking, subject to language barriers or racial discrimination? Or if we looked just at kids with at least one college-educated parent?
As it turned out, even these relatively privileged students do not compete favorably with average students in other well-off countries. On a percentage basis, New York state has fewer high performers among white kids than Poland has among kids overall. In Illinois, the percentage of kids with a college-educated parent who are highly skilled at math is lower than the percentage of such kids among all students in Iceland, France, Estonia, and Sweden.
Parents in Palo Alto will always insist that their kids are the exception, of course. And researchers cannot compare small cities and towns around the globe—not yet, anyway. But Hanushek thinks the study significantly undercuts the diversity excuse. “People will find it quite shocking,” he says, “that even our most-advantaged students are not all that competitive.”
Reading the list, one cannot help but thank God for Massachusetts, which offers the United States some shred of national dignity—a result echoed in other international tests. “If all American fourth- and eighth-grade kids did as well in math and science as they do in Massachusetts,” writes the veteran education author Karin Chenoweth in her 2009 book, How It’s Being Done, “we still wouldn’t be in Singapore’s league but we’d be giving Japan and Chinese Taipei a run for their money.”
Is it because Massachusetts is so white? Or so immigrant-free? Or so rich? Not quite. Massachusetts is indeed slightly whiter and slightly better-off than the U.S. average. But in the late 1990s, it nonetheless lagged behind similar states—such as Connecticut and Maine—in nationwide tests of fourth- and eighth-graders. It was only after a decade of educational reforms that Massachusetts began to rank first in the nation.
What did Massachusetts do? Well, nothing that many countries (and industries) didn’t do a long time ago. For example, Massachusetts made it harder to become a teacher, requiring newcomers to pass a basic literacy test before entering the classroom. (In the first year, more than a third of the new teachers failed the test.) The state also required students to pass a test before graduating from high school—a notion so heretical that it led to protests in which students burned state superintendent David Driscoll in effigy. To help tutor the kids who failed, the state moved money around to the places where it was needed most. “We had a system of standards and held people to it—adults and students,” Driscoll says.
Massachusetts, in other words, began demanding meaningful outcomes from everyone in the school building. Obvious though it may seem, it’s an idea that remains sacrilegious in many U.S. schools, despite the clumsy advances of No Child Left Behind. Instead, we still fixate on inputs—such as how much money we are pouring into the system or how small our class sizes are—and wind up with little to show for it. Since the early 1970s, we’ve doubled the amount of money we spend per pupil nationwide, but our high-schoolers’ reading and math scores have barely budged.
Per student, we now spend more than all but three other countries—Luxembourg, Switzerland, and Norway—on elementary and secondary education. And the list of countries that spend the most, notably, has little in common with the outcomes that Hanushek and his colleagues put into rank order. (The same holds true on the state level, where New York, one of the highest-spending states—it topped the list at $17,000 per pupil in 2008—still comes in behind 15 other states and 30 countries on Hanushek’s list.)
However haltingly, more states are finally beginning to follow the lead of Massachusetts. At least 35 states and the District of Columbia agreed this year to adopt common standards for what kids should know in math and language arts—standards informed in part by what kids in top-performing countries are learning. Still, all of the states, Massachusetts included, have a long way to go. Last year, a study comparing standardized math tests given to third-graders in Massachusetts and Hong Kong found embarrassing disparities. Even at that early age, kids in Hong Kong were being asked more-demanding questions that required more-complex responses.
Meanwhile, a 2010 study of teacher-prep programs in 16 countries found a striking correlation between how well students did on international exams and how their future teachers performed on a math test. In the U.S., researchers tested nearly 3,300 teachers-to-be in 39 states. The results? Our future middle-school math teachers knew about as much math as their peers in Thailand and Oman—and nowhere near what future teachers in Taiwan and Singapore knew. Moreover, the results showed dramatic variation depending on the teacher-training program. Perhaps this should not be surprising: teachers cannot teach what they do not know, and to date, most have not been required to know very much math.
Early last year, President Obama reminded Congress, “The countries that out-teach us today will out-compete us tomorrow.” This September, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty, visiting a local school on the first day of classes, mentioned Obama’s warning and smugly took note of the scoreboard: “Well,” he said, “we are out-teaching them today.”
Arne Duncan, Obama’s education secretary, responded to the premier’s trash-talking a few days later. “When I played professional basketball in Australia, that’s the type of quote the coach would post on the bulletin board in the locker room,” he declared during a speech in Toronto. And then his rejoinder came to a crashing halt. “In all seriousness,” Duncan confessed, “Premier McGuinty spoke the truth.”

More Departures Likely At DOE, Insiders Say

2010-11-12T07:32:00.001-08:00

By: Lindsey Christ

The mood among many at Tweed Courthouse is said to be confused, even demoralized after this week's announcement that Schools Chancellor Joel Klein is stepping down.
And now, a new problem may be brewing if key members of Klein's team decide they don't want to work for incoming Chancellor Cathie Black.
Klein shocked his deputies with his resignation Tuesday and the mayor surprised them again by announcing a businesswoman will take over the system. She agreed with the mayor that the strong team would make up for her lack of public policy and educational experience.
"Well I think with the help of the eight deputies in the office, we will spend a good amount of time prepping me and making sure I understand the issues thoroughly," Black said.
But within a day, one of those eight had already left. Deputy Chancellor for Finance and Technology Photeine Anagnostopoulos, known as Photo, was in charge of the $23 billion budget. She resigned, effective immediately. And multiple sources within the department say they don't expect she'll be the last to leave.
They describe the atmosphere in department headquarters as traumatic, confusing and uncomfortable. Many were loyal to Klein, but feel the way the Mayor's office handled the announcements on Tuesday left insiders completely out.
"I did have a public search and I picked the best person, I considered as many different people, I talked to people for suggestions," Bloomberg said.
It's still unclear who else was considered and who was talked to, but several senior officials are apparently unhappy. It turns out Anagnostopoulos and Black have been neighbors in the same Park Avenue building. Anagnostopoulos hasn't commented on her abrupt resignation but a DOE spokesperson said, "Given the transition we are about to undertake, she felt it was the right time to move on. We wish her well..."
Experts say retaining other deputies will be key for Ms. Black.
"There are superb people in the leadership now I certainly hope she's able to keep. I am a little concerned because there are so many other districts who have caught onto the need for continuous improvement and are looking to New York for principals or for superintendents," said Paul Hill of the University of Washington.
The tenor of the transition may depend on whether the team at Tweed stays on or not.

Mayor Takes Idea of Education Outsider to New Level

2010-11-11T08:11:00.000-08:00

By ELISSA GOOTMAN and JENNIFER MEDINA

Published: November 10, 2010

The notion of who can run a large public school system has shifted radically in the past decade, as lawyers, bankers and budget experts with little classroom experience — beyond sitting in one — have been tapped as superintendents and chancellors throughout the country.
The departing New York City schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, of course, is a prime example. But in the eight years since he was appointed, the education world has changed, and become fertile ground for a crop of would-be school executives with one foot in the world of business management and one foot in the world of school reform.
In choosing Cathleen P. Black as Mr. Klein’s successor, the mayor made a pointed choice to go outside that growing circle and appears to have taken the idea of the outsider-chancellor to a new level.
While Mr. Klein had previously served as deputy White House counsel and the nation’s top antitrust official, and even briefly taught in a public school, Ms. Black, the chairwoman of Hearst Magazines, has spent her career steeped in business.
Ms. Black has freely acknowledged her “limited exposure” to unions. She and her children are products of private schools, while Mr. Klein attended New York public schools. She sits on a charter school advisory board, but joined only a few months ago and so has yet to attend a meeting.
According to the city Education Department, Ms. Black’s other experience with public schools includes participating in a mentor day with Michelle Obama at a Detroit public school and, several years ago, serving as “principal for a day” in a school in the South Bronx.
“I don’t know how far is too far, but it’s certainly pushing the envelope,” Joseph P. Viteritti, a public policy professor at Hunter College, said of the mayor’s choice. “What lies ahead for her is as much political as it is managerial or education related.”
The issue of whether Ms. Black is qualified is likely to arise as the state decides whether to grant her permission to take the job. State law requires that all school chiefs have at least a master’s degree and a professional certificate in educational leadership, as well as three years’ experience in schools. Because Ms. Black has no such certification, she needs a waiver from the state Education Department, as Mr. Klein received.
The city will have to submit a statement explaining Ms. Black’s “exceptional qualifications,” along with a formal résumé and her academic transcripts. A committee will make a nonbinding recommendation to Education Commissioner David Steiner, who will make the final decision.
A refusal to grant the waiver would be a stunning rebuke to Mr. Bloomberg. Tony Avella, a former city councilman from Queens who was elected to the State Senate, sent a letter to Mr. Steiner asking that he deny the waiver. A similar petition that circulated on the Internet had garnered more than 900 signatures by 7 p.m. Wednesday.
“I believe the chancellor should be an educator, who understands what the students go through,” Mr. Avella said.
In 2002, Mr. Avella said, political leaders were more willing to give Mr. Bloomberg leeway.
“I think we’ve learned since then,” he said. “With hindsight we saw that lack of experience hurt his administration, which was much more bureaucratic than I had anticipated and run too much like a business.”
The state has granted several waivers and denied several since the law went into effect in 1970. In 1983, the education commissioner rejected Deputy Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr., whom the city’s Board of Education had chosen to be chancellor. In 2004, state education officials made clear that they would not grant a waiver to Mr. Klein’s choice for the deputy chancellor in charge of instruction, a job that also required certification, forcing him to appoint an educator.
Mr. Steiner declined to comment, but it is believed that the state will give much deference to the mayor, whom it has already given control of the city’s schools.
Stu Loeser, the mayor’s spokesman, said, “Over the last eight years we’ve assembled the best pedagogical team, and we picked someone who we believe can manage very well.”
Merryl H. Tisch, chancellor of the State Board of Regents, said that when the waiver discussions begin, “I am sure that one of the reasonable questions that people will ask is, as you bring in someone who is a manager without, frankly, much knowledge about the instructional core, how they plan to put that team in place.”
Ms. Tisch added: “This is a very smart woman. She knows what she knows, she knows what she doesn’t know, and I’m sure she will assemble a team that will make her comfortable in the role.” Asked if she approved of the mayor’s choice, Ms. Tisch said: “Obviously Ms. Black has extraordinary credentials as a manager. Obviously the New York City public school system is an extraordinary management challenge.”
Mr. Klein and others like him have inspired a new group of leaders in education, many equipped with business and law degrees rather than education school diplomas. Eli Broad, an influential philanthropist and strong supporter of Mr. Klein, has in recent years cultivated dozens of potential urban school leaders through his foundation’s fellowship and training programs. Mr. Bloomberg was apparently willing to pass over those new leaders.
“They are saying in black and white that it’s not important to have any connection to the education field to be chancellor of the New York City school system,” said Jennifer Freeman, a parent leader. “And I think that can’t be right.”
But Kathryn S. Wylde, president of the Partnership for New York City, a business group, said Ms. Black’s outsider status, coupled with her communication and marketing prowess, could make her an excellent fit for a job that is very much a hot seat: she will most likely have to battle with the teachers’ union over its expired contract and navigate the minefields of closing the city’s low-performing schools.
“What everyone in the education community has been complaining about is that they wanted a good listener and somebody that could build consensus,” Ms. Wylde said. “And I think on those two criteria, Cathie Black is an ideal choice.”
Deborah Kenny, founder and chief executive of the Harlem Village Academies charter school network, said Ms. Black had joined the schools’ national leadership advisory board in July. Rupert Murdoch, Mr. Klein’s new employer, is a co-chairman of the advisory board.
Ms. Kenny said that she first met Ms. Black several years ago, but that they got to know each other better after Ms. Black attended a panel on which Ms. Kenny appeared at a Sun Valley, Idaho, conference in 2008. Since then, Ms. Black has visited at least one of the schools “a number of times,” Ms. Kenny said.
“It seems to me that she has world-class leadership experience, and she engages people and she inspires people,” Ms. Kenny said. “Isn’t that what’s needed?”

Top DOE finance official resigns in wake of Klein’s departure

2010-11-11T08:02:00.000-08:00

by Maura WalzThe city’s top finance and budget official is following Chancellor Joel Klein out of the Department of Education, officials confirmed Wednesday evening.
Photeine “Photo” Anagnostopoulos, Deputy Chancellor for Finance and Technology, submitted her resignation Wednesday, effective immediately.
“Given the transition we are about to undertake, she felt it was the right time to move on,” said DOE spokeswoman Natalie Ravitz. “We wish her well in her future endeavors, and are already beginning the process of identifying qualified candidates for her position.”
Anagnostopoulos’ departure signals that Klein’s resignation and the arrival of Hearst Magazines executive Cathie Black as chancellor will also bring a shift in power in the top circle of the DOE.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s announcement on Tuesday afternoon that he was replacing Klein with Black came as a surprise to many DOE officials, including some of Klein’s senior aides.
And while Black has indicated that she plans to rely heavily on the team of top officials that Klein brought together — especially Klein’s team of eight deputy chancellors — the willingness of some of those officials to stay on without Klein is far from certain.

Anagnostopoulos began at the DOE as the Chief Knowledge Officer and was promoted to Chief Operating Officer in the Office of Accountability in December of 2007. She held that job until last April, when the chancellor announced that School Construction Authority President Sharon Greenberger would take over the job of COO. Anagnostopoulos was named the Deputy Chancellor for Finance and Technology.

The New York Times reported earlier this week that some city officials believe Greenberger was placed in the job at Bloomberg’s behest and over the protests of Klein. The outgoing chancellor has denied those reports, but several officials told GothamSchools that Greenberger’s appointment was a sign of greater mayoral influence in the department.

Anagnostopoulos, who earned a business degree from Harvard, shares some of the same qualities that Bloomberg has praised in Black. But Anagnostopoulos has far more experience than Black in the education sector. Before joining the department, she had been the President of McGraw-Hill Digital Learning and a Senior Vice President of The College Board.

While working at McGraw-Hill, she oversaw the development of the company’s online learning programs, and at The College Board, she was part of the largest overhaul of the SAT, the college entrance exam. Before that, she was vice president of business development for Classroom Connect, which sells online professional development programs for teachers.

Anagnostopoulos’ move to a top position in the administration from McGraw-Hill, a company with an $80 million contract with the DOE, raised conflict of interest questions for some critics. She also has sparked anger from parents by defending the city’s decision to raise the class size goals.

For nearly three years, she has overseen the department’s finances in the midst of a financial downturn that has forced painful budget cuts to schools. While she has been credited with avoiding even deeper cuts, her DOE budget has also been routinely criticized for spending too much money on central administrative costs and misdirecting money intended for needy schools and students.

A year ago, before the mayor and chancellor began discussing the threat of teacher layoffs, Anagnostopolous was already making public statements about the need to cut back. “The stimulus is wonderful and it is great and it has saved jobs and programs, but we can’t kid ourselves,” she told the New York Times. “It didn’t cover everything.”

Chancellor Klein’s exit: the best kept secret in the DOE

2010-11-10T08:10:00.001-08:00

by Anna Phillips

News that Chancellor Joel Klein will step down has caught his staff — even his most senior advisors — by surprise and sparked debate over whether he was pushed to resign.
Department of Education employees, some of them eight-year veterans with strong personal ties to the chancellor, learned of Klein’s resignation at a press conference this afternoon. And they didn’t meet his replacement, Hearst Magazines chairwoman Cathleen Black, until after the mayor and chancellor addressed reporters.
“I was literally scheduled for a 4 o’clock meeting, walked in, and watched a bunch of people going ‘Oh my God,’” said a DOE official.
Said another: “It’s the best kept secret in the history of the DOE.”
Even Black’s meeting with teachers union president Michael Mulgrew, which Mayor Bloomberg mentioned at the news conference, was an accidental encounter.
Mulgrew said that he ran into Black two weeks ago just as he was arriving for a breakfast meeting with the mayor and she was leaving.
“He just introduced her as the woman who runs the Hearst Magazine chain,” Mulgrew said. “That was cute,” he said with sarcasm.
Though Mayor Bloomberg said that he had known that Klein “was ready to move on,” and had publicly searched for a replacement, it seems that most of Klein’s staff did not. A DOE official said that in meetings where the chancellor and his aides discussed the mayor’s third term, whether Klein would still be leading the department was never in doubt.
“As we looked into the third term, this was the trajectory we were on and Joel was going to be able to see it through,” the official said. “So it’s definitely a surprise.”
For those who have become Klein’s acolytes and grown personally attached to him, the change may be especially jarring.
“Joel is incredibly inspiring and has inspired a ton of people to make lots of sacrifices in lots of different ways to follow his mission, follow his lead,” said a DOE official. “When that goes, it’s obviously a blow.”
A former official forecasted a small wave of retirements as the chancellor’s more senior staff consider whether they want to spend three years working for a boss they met this afternoon.
And as the news spread around Tweed Courthouse and City Hall, officials began to debate whether Klein was leaving of his own volition. Though some declared the chancellor’s move to be well-timed, given the city’s financial troubles and his already-established legacy, other suspected he’d been asked to resign.
One reason for the suspicion is that Klein’s resignation has caught everyone by surprise. After the news conference today, the chancellor told a New York Times reporter that he’d talked with the mayor about his decision to leave “three or four months ago,” and Bloomberg had asked him to stay.
Some said that the secrecy was necessary.
“I don’t know what else one would do,” said a current DOE employee. “Once you tell one person everybody knows, and once you start a public process you lose a year.”
Yet the shock of the announcement has fueled disbelief that it had been planned by Klein.
Looking back, several DOE insiders wondered whether the restructuring that followed an intensive internal report on the department’s day-to-day operations, done by Chief Operating Officer Sharon Greenberger, led to Klein’s departure.
“She was the mayor’s political appointee and a trusted comrade of the mayor, and was really there to help the mayor’s office,” said a source with knowledge of the situation.
Some said they saw signs that the mayor had lost faith in the chancellor, with whom he sometimes differed when it came to relations with the teachers union. The possible tension between the two men became pronounced last summer when the mayor held a press conference to triumphantly announce a deal with the union that would end the city’s infamous rubber rooms. The agreement did nothing to make it easier for principals to fire poorly performing teachers and Klein appeared visibly unenthusiastic.
“It is clear there was a lot more distance between the mayor and the chancellor than there used to be,” said a former DOE official.
Officials also questioned Klein’s next move. At the end of this year, he will move to News Corporation, where he will be an executive vice president. Though the chancellor is close with News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch (when New York Magazine asked Murdoch to name the most important New Yorker, he named Klein), current and former employees see the job as an odd choice and far from the national education platform Klein has now.
“I think the fact that he’s going to Rupert has got the fingerprints of Bloomberg making a soft landing,” said a former DOE official.

Why do you think Klein stepped down?

NYC Chancellor Joel Klein Steps Down!

2010-11-10T08:08:00.000-08:00

By SHARON OTTERMAN and JENNIFER MEDINA

Published: November 9, 2010

Joel I. Klein, who presided over a radical reorganization of the New York City school system and drew praise and criticism for efforts to raise test scores and hold teachers accountable for them, resigned on Tuesday as chancellor after eight years in the job.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg appointed Cathleen P. Black, the chairwoman of Hearst Magazines, as Mr. Klein’s successor. Ms. Black will be the first woman to head the nation’s largest school system, with a $23 billion budget, 135,000 employees and one million students.
The decision was also noteworthy for the fact that Ms. Black, 66, has no educational background, in keeping with Mr. Bloomberg’s preference for executives from the business world. Because of that, she will need a waiver from the State Education Department; Mr. Klein, who had also been a media executive, was granted one when he took over, in 2002.
Mr. Klein, who had long planned to serve only through two mayoral terms, mulled the decision for the last few months and in the past week landed a job as an executive vice president at News Corporation.
“The decision was whether to stay to the end or to give somebody else a chance,” he said in an interview. “I’m 64 years old now and want to have the opportunity to do something new.”
Mr. Klein can make many claims about the successes of his tenure, including rising test scores and graduation rates, and the initial makings of an objective system to evaluate teachers and schools.
The truth of those claims, and their chances of having a lasting impact, will be debated in the months and years to come. His detractors argue that the test scores were inflated, that parents went unheeded and that teachers were derided and marginalized.
But the very robustness of the debate is testament to the fact that Mr. Klein did deliver on a central promise: to challenge orthodoxies, shake up the status quo and risk dislike in the name of progress.
“Did he stir things up?” Mr. Bloomberg said Tuesday. “You betcha. That was the job, and the great beneficiaries of that stirring were our children.”
Mr. Klein benefited from two historic conditions. He was the first chancellor appointed by the mayor and, as such, was answerable only to him, which gave him power and security. And he was part of — and widely considered a leader in — a national effort for greater accountability in public education shared across partisan lines.
Mr. Klein said he made a final decision to join News Corporation in the last week, a hire that puts a respected official with Democratic credentials — he was a top antitrust lawyer in President Bill Clinton’s Justice Department — in the executive suite at Rupert Murdoch’s conservative-leaning news media giant. A person familiar with the negotiations at News Corporation said Mr. Klein would be charged with pursuing “entrepreneurial ventures” that cater to the educational marketplace.
Despite the mayor’s praise and an apparent deep admiration for Mr. Klein, one former senior Bloomberg administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he did not want to jeopardize his relationship with City Hall, said that many people in the mayor's bullpen were dissatisfied with Mr. Klein because “he’s been a political load for a while.”
One of the first concrete signs that Mr. Klein was not long for the job was the appointment of Sharon L. Greenberger as the Education Department’s chief operating officer in April — something that, according to the official, “was imposed over Joel’s objection.”
Mr. Klein will remain with the city until the end of the year to help with Ms. Black’s transition. In an interview Tuesday, Mr. Klein was clear about his accomplishments as chancellor. When he accepted the job, he was part of a rising educational reform movement that drew lessons from the corporate world, like increasing parent choice through innovations like charter schools, weakening traditional union protections like tenure and bringing numbers-based accountability to schools to evaluate and rank them and to improve teaching.
“It’s a much more performance-driven system, and a much more professional system, and less politicized than when I started,” Mr. Klein said.
With the mayor, he dismantled the unwieldy system of local control that created 32 school districts. Power was centralized in the central Department of Education office, relocated from Brooklyn next to City Hall to emphasize its importance. The city’s 1,000-plus principals were given unprecedented authority over large sections of their school budgets.
From nearly the day he started, Mr. Klein attacked the union’s core principles — seniority, tenure and a set pay scale. During the 2005 contract negotiations, he was able to end the long-standing practice of giving teachers with seniority the ability to select which schools to work in. But that decision created a pool of floating veteran teachers who received full salaries without a permanent position, costing the city tens of millions of dollars annually.
Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers and former head of the city’s teachers’ union, said that while she believed Mr. Klein was sincere in his efforts to improve student achievement, he had difficulty garnering support for his changes, both from educators as well as political leaders.
“Joel has a great intellect and did not suffer fools,” Ms. Weingarten said. “Sometimes what was lost was the ability to lead a great system in a way that you win the hearts and minds of the people who work in it and parents who send their kids there.”
In 2006, he introduced a system of A-to-F report cards, which rank most schools nearly exclusively on their progress on test scores. He chipped away at teacher pay based only on seniority, getting the union to agree to bonuses for schools that showed strong progress.
Some advocates and policy analysts said that Mr. Klein was a transformative force, turning the city’s public education system into something that people who had given up on it could believe in again. They said he welcomed talented educators to the back office and schools alike.
Joe Williams, executive director of Democrats for Education Reform, an advocacy group that supports charter schools and that has been often aligned with Mr. Klein, put it this way: “Joel Klein made public education sexy again.”
But Mr. Klein stumbled along the way, as when he adopted a reading curriculum of questionable efficacy early in his tenure only to reverse course after it did not produce good results.
Merryl Tisch, the chancellor of the State Board of Regents, frequently sparred with Mr. Klein — though largely privately — about his style of forcing change in the city. But Ms. Tisch said Mr. Klein successfully took a “dysfunctional system and gave it some management credibility.”
The city also benefited from Mr. Klein’s role as a national symbol of school reform, Ms. Tisch said, with private donors giving millions of dollars to help create new projects and experiments, like teacher performance bonuses and cash rewards for students who did well on exams.
“Joel will go down as one of the great urban educational reformers of this century,” Ms. Tisch said. “Not just because he fought hard fights, but he did it in New York City, which people had really written off.”
Yet, at every turn there was controversy. Schools were put under tremendous pressure to raise graduation rates or face closings. There was widespread concern that principals were inflating their numbers by granting credits to undeserving students.
“He is leaving us with a legacy of classroom overcrowding, communities fighting over co-located schools, kindergarten waiting lists, unreliable school grades based on bad data, substandard credit recovery programs and our children starved of art, music and science — all replaced with test prep,” said Leonie Haimson, the head of Class Size Matters, an advocacy group and a critic of Mr. Klein’s.
The opposition was further emboldened when the state announced this summer that the test scores on which Mr. Klein’s accountability system hinged were inflated because the exams had grown too easy to pass.
A correction brought test scores nearly back to the starting levels of the mayor’s tenure, replacing a narrative of historic gains with one of slow progress.
While Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Klein said their achievements — opening 470 new schools, and raising graduation rates by 20 percent, for example — were beyond question, they acknowledged that there was much more to be done.
Asked whether he will be remembered as a divisive leader, Mr. Klein said, “I didn’t think you could make big changes to a $22 billion system — close down schools, hold people accountable, reward excellence — without pushback and controversy.”
“People will remember me differently,” he added. “They will remember me as a man who was committed to changing an educational system that was failing vast numbers of people. This was the most comprehensive school reform that has happened in this country.”

Do you approve of this new appointment?

DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION RELEASES FIRST DIRECTORY OF HIGH SCHOOL DIPLOMA AND GED PROGRAMS

2010-11-08T11:51:00.000-08:00

Directory Details Paths to Graduation for Students Aged 15-21 Years Old Who Have Fallen Behind

The New York City Department of Education today announced publication of Additional Ways to Graduate: High School Diploma and GED Programs, the first ever comprehensive directory of programs for students aged 15 – 21 years old who have fallen behind on credits and are looking for alternate paths to graduation. The directory covers schools and programs in all five boroughs, including Transfer Schools, Young Adult Borough Learning Centers, and Full- and Part-Time GED programs to help over-age and under-credited students get back on track to graduate. It is designed to help students and their families make informed choices and guide them towards viable ways to earn a high school diploma or GED.

The Additional Ways to Graduate directory walks through the differences between traditional high schools and additional pathways to graduation, how to access these schools and programs, tips on postsecondary planning, and the rights of students in New York City. The directory also includes individual profiles of every school and program in the City, including an overview, contact and admissions information, Progress Report grades and other information. Printed copies will be available in the coming weeks, and will be sent to networks, high school principals, and other community-based constituents. The directory is available now online at http://schools.nyc.gov/ChoicesEnrollment/AlternativesHS.

Transfer schools are full-time high schools that give students who are behind or have dropped out a small and rigorous learning environment. They focus on connections to college and helping student achieve high school diplomas. Young Adult Borough Centers (YABCs) run evening programs for students who are close to dropping out of high school or cannot attend during the day due to other responsibilities. After earning all of their credits and passing the required exams while attending YABCs, students graduate with a diploma from their home school. Full-day and part-time GED preparation programs prepare students to pass the General Educational Development (GED) Exam.

Many of the schools and programs are supported by the Learning to Work (LTW) Initiative. Students enrolling in one of these schools or programs may choose to enroll in Learning to Work, which can lead students toward rewarding employment and educational experiences after graduation. In partnership with community based organizations, Learning to Work offers individual and group counseling, academic support, subsidized internship placement, in-depth job readiness programs, and career and college exploration activities. The directory includes specific information on what schools and programs have LTW options available.

Students seeking more information should ask their parents/guardians and guidance counselors to go through the directory with them and help make an informed decision about the best school or program. They can also contact a school or program directly, or visit a Referral Center for High School Alternatives or Borough Enrollment Office where staff members are prepared to help students re-enroll in school. Location and contact information for Referral Centers and Enrollment Offices are available at http://schools.nyc.gov/ChoicesEnrollment/AlternativesHS or by calling 311.

Regina Schaefer Director, Education Unit New York City Administration for Children's Services 150 William Street, Room 8L1 New York, New York 10038 Tel.: 212-442-3030 Fax: 212-227-1267 regina.schaefer@dfa.state.ny.us

More High School Students Acquire Online Credits

2010-11-08T08:07:00.000-08:00

By BRIAN THEVENOT and SARAH BUTRYMOWICZ, Published: November 4, 2010

Brett Rusnock can follow his students’ every move on his laptop: how much time they spend on computers each day at Waltrip High School in Houston, their scores on quizzes and when they stop working. He even gets e-mail alerts when they toil at home into the wee hours. “I can play Big Brother a little bit with this,” Mr. Rusnock said.
Mr. Rusnock is not a teacher. He is a grad coach, one of 27 in Houston monitoring thousands of students who take so called credit-recovery courses online. Like many other districts across the state, particularly those with high dropout rates, the Houston Independent School District offers these self-paced make-ups to any student who fails a class. In the spring and summer terms, 6,127 Houston I.S.D. students earned 9,774 credits in such courses, which are generally taken in conjunction with a full load of regular classes. About 2,500 more students are enrolled this fall.
The program reflects a trend in Texas and nationally as school districts seek cost-effective ways to bolster graduation rates. But questions remain over whether the digital curriculum — which school districts buy from Apex Learning and other providers — offers the same quality of education as traditional courses. Little research exists on how much, or how little, students learn.
The Texas Education Agency does not regulate credit-recovery courses or even track their proliferation, though the courses have expanded rapidly over the last decade. The Austin I.S.D. and the Dallas I.S.D. each reported educating about 4,000 students in credit-recovery courses last year. Pearson Education, makers of the popular credit-recovery software NovaNet, reported its use in 400 Texas schools.
Robert Scott, the state’s commissioner of education, said he was concerned that some districts might be offering an easy way out of a rigorous curriculum, rather than an avenue back to regular classes.
“Any tool that helps get kids credit toward graduation is certainly worth having,” Mr. Scott said. “But any time you’re accelerating education that quickly, there’s a concern that the quality of the content standards you’re going over will be lessened.”
Apex Learning, Houston’s provider, supplies written tests in addition to the standard computer-based multiple-choice assessments, and school districts determine whether to use them. NovaNet does not provide such tests. The Austin I.S.D. uses its own written tests in combination with the company’s online curriculum; without this safeguard, students would be able to earn an English credit without writing a single sentence.
Credit recovery is just part of a larger devolution in the traditional 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., lecture-and-textbook high school model, which educators increasingly acknowledge fails many children. Other trends include raising the maximum age for Texas high school students to 25. There has also been a rapid growth of “dropout recovery” charter schools that exclusively serve troubled teenagers. For accelerated students, the number of dual-credit classes taught in partnership with local colleges has increased.
T. Jack Blackmon, who heads up the Dallas I.S.D. credit-recovery program, said the old model would continue to crumble.
“It’s the vision for the future as far as I’m concerned: kids going at their own pace,” Mr. Blackmon said. “The traditional school is only good for about a third of the kids, the ones who want football or choir or social activities — kids who have the school bug. For the rest of them, it’s just standing in line, waiting for the factory model to give them an education. A lot of kids don’t want to wait in line.”
Terry Grier, superintendent of the Houston I.S.D., expanded Houston’s credit-recovery offerings in January. He had successfully started similar classes in San Diego and in Guilford County, N.C. In those cases, the dropout rate was cut in half during his tenure, though credit-recovery was just one of the programs at play.
One of Mr. Grier’s goals upon arriving in Houston last year was to make similar improvements. District officials put Houston’s dropout rate at 15.8 percent — higher than the self-reported rate in New York (13.5 percent), but lower than Indianapolis (29.8 percent) and Los Angeles (34.9 percent).
The district prides itself on academic rigor and student support, provided mostly by grad coaches who make daily decisions about when students have mastered the material and how much time they should spend on a particular skill. Students in Houston take an average of 61 days to complete credit-recovery courses — about 26 days less than a typical semester-long course — and they are required to take written tests.
Mr. Rusnock supervises statistical progress, but he also looks beyond the numbers and tries to divine learning. Students retake quizzes until they pass them, but if a student fails one three times in a row, it is up to Mr. Rusnock to decide how to proceed. Frequently, he will make a student stay on that lesson, but he assesses case by case. “We’re not producing cars here,” he said.
In Houston, students can work from home or in a grad lab at their school. In Austin, every high school has a Delta credit-recovery lab. During a recent day at Austin High School, students got a heavy dose of one-on-one help. In a long, skinny classroom, about 40 computers lined cinder-block walls adorned with motivational sayings and posters, including one that showed a frog hanging halfway out of the mouth of a pelican, reaching its arms out to strangle the bird. The message was, never give up.
Martha Louis, a 37-year teaching veteran, runs the Delta lab with the help of another teacher and two assistants. Twenty to 40 students drop by throughout the school day. Ms. Louis said that the classes were a great alternative for students who might struggle for a variety of reasons, but that they were not a replacement for traditional learning.
Ms. Louis insists that students, even those working rapidly, must work methodically through the content. “They can’t just click-click-click-click-click and go straight to the quiz,” she said. “They have to take notes.”
But students are permitted to use those notes on quizzes, which is a tremendous help to Monique Romero, a freshman.
“I have trouble remembering,” Monique said, while she scribbled in her notebook about the Russian geography unit on her screen. Several students describe the courses as “easier,” a reference more to the method than to the material.
Students end up in the Delta lab for various reasons. Krendon Reynolds, a junior, takes mostly advanced-placement classes. But he failed one of his classes, Krendon said, because he did not do the homework. “I’ve just got a lot of other things to do at home,” including a job, he said.
In one extreme case, a 19-year-old who was a freshman last year earned enough recovery credits to become a senior this year. The student raced through economics in just four weeks, Ms. Louis said. Most take longer, but the main reason that all of them can move faster is because they have seen the material before; even though they got an F, they learned something.
Quilson Norales, a senior at Yates High School in Houston, snoozed through Spanish — his native language — and failed. The Apex Learning version of the class took him only three hours to earn back the credit he had squandered during a semester’s worth of naps.
Some grad coaches worry that such extreme examples might give other students the wrong impression. Mr. Rusnock said he tried to get across the message that passing the first time beat staring at the same material on a screen.
Quilson seems to be getting it. As he slouched in a plastic chair and worked his way through his final English test, he vowed never to take another class twice. “I ain’t going through this again,” he said.

In New York City, Multiple Pathways to Graduation is also experimenting with online credit recovery. Do you think this approach is part of the solution to New York City's poor graduation rate and college preparation or does it promote the procurement of more "empty credits"?

The Big Fix

2010-11-05T14:28:00.000-07:00

GothamSchools, WNYC, and Big Apple Ed follow three struggling high schools' efforts to transform their school throughout the year. Follow the progress here: http://gothamschools.org/category/the-big-fix/.

Are you a New York City Parent?

2010-11-05T13:53:00.000-07:00

Check out this blog! http://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com/.

New site gives voice to mothers of color, launches with free giveaways

2010-11-05T07:58:00.001-07:00

After a decade of involvement in online networking, writing, and marketing, Kristina Brooke Daniele and Renee J Ross began to realize that there was an underrepresentation of people of color in mainstream social media campaigns. Though their own involvement at social media conferences and participation in panels aimed at obtaining feedback from African American mothers, they began to understand that people of color were a powerful market that was being overlooked.
This realization, combined with an absence of social media/marketing companies owned and operated by women of color caused them to pool their years of experience and create the We of Hue Network. Described as a means of connecting businesses and social organizations with a database of intelligent and insightful women of color, We of Hue will also provide a forum for showcasing issues that are important to this demographic group.
Daniele and Ross have recruited a panel of writers from various segments of the parenting community - married, single, stay-at-home and working - to provide unique perspectives about politics, education, images in the media, parenting, and other topics affecting mothers of color. Together, they comprise Moms of Hue, a site dedicated to providing insightful commentary and open dialogue for all mothers.
The site will officially launch on Monday December 7th through a 'Twitter party" that will introduce readers to "We of Hue: Unique Perspectives of Women of Color" and will provide participants with a chance to win a host of giveaways including DVDs, beauty kits, jewelry, books, and much more.
For details about this exciting opportunity visit the Moms of Hue site. Be sure to follow @momsofhue and #momsofhue on Twitter for updates.
You can also listen to Kristina and Renee discuss the project on blogtalkradio at 10:00 a.m. tomorrow: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/show.aspx?userurl=chatterboxradio&year=2009&month=12&day=07&url=the-importance-of-the-voice-of-moms-of-hue

Ups and Downs in New Report Cards for New York City High Schools

2010-11-04T07:35:00.000-07:00

Wednesday, November 03, 2010

By Beth Fertig

Almost 70 percent of the city's high schools that were graded this year got A's and B's, a slight drop from last year when the top marks went to 75 percent. The city says it raised the bar for high schools to earn the higher grades this year.

The Progress Reports are based on student attendance, graduation rates, credit accumulation and surveys by parents, teachers and students. They're different for high schools than for elementary and middle schools, grades for which are based largely on the state's annual math and reading tests and which fluctuate a lot more as a result.
The city says the high school reports, overall, showed students improving across these various performance measures. But there were also more schools this year earning low marks. Nine got F's compared to just one in 2009 and there were 23 D's this year.
Schools that get three C's in a row or a D or an F run the risk of being shut down by the city. There are already 47 struggling schools that the Department of Education is considering phasing-out or turning around with new, federally-funded interventions.
Some of the high schools on that list made improvements. John Adams High School in Ozone Park, Queens earned a B this year. The large high school had earned a D in 2007-08 and a C in 2008-09.
Principal Grace Zwillenberg credits that gain to hard work by her 200 teachers and her more than 3,200 students. "You can't improve overnight," she said. "But we have made steady improvements in every single category. And you know it's getting better and I know that next year I'm going to get an A."
The four-year graduation rate climbed 10 percentage points to 61 percent. Zwillenberg said the creation of five small learning communities helped students get more individual attention at a school that needs an annex and classroom trailers because it's over-capacity. It's also got two new programs for struggling seniors to make up their credits and one for newcomers who don't speak English.
Zwillenberg hopes the B grade will help save John Adams High School. As one of the state's "persistently low achieving" schools, it can qualify for federal school improvement grants. Those can be used to phase-out failing schools or turn them around with various interventions. Eleven city high schools are currently getting federal improvement grants, worth up to $2 million annually, for the least dramatic intervention called "transformation." This involves replacing or assisting a principal and bringing in experts to help teachers plan their lessons and improve instruction for all different types of learners (see our series with GothamSchools called The Big Fix).
The teachers union noted that two out of the 47 schools on the city's watch list got B's this year (Grover Cleveland High School in Queens as well as John Adams). It called on the administration to help the schools instead of closing them. The union, the NAACP and some parents brought a lawsuit against the city this year when it tried to phase-out 19 failing schools (all of the high schools on that list are on that larger list of 47). Two courts ruled that the city violated state law by not providing enough community notification. The city is now holding hearings with parents, teachers and community leaders at all 47 of the schools as it decides whether they'll be phased-out and replaced with smaller schools or given more time and resources to improve.
Schools Chancellor Joel Klein said the new report cards will definitely be considered before final decisions are made later this year.
"We'll continue to look at the individual school based on the most contemporary data," he said. "I'm not making decisions here today. But I am going to assure everyone that I'll take that information as well as the engagement with the communities."
Klein also said many of those struggling schools continued to get C's and D's. Four of the 19 he wanted to shut got F's including Beach Channel High in Queens, the New Day Academy in the Bronx and Norman Thomas High School and the Academy of Environmental Sciences in Manhattan. The other F's went to Herbert Lehman High School in the Bronx, where the principal is being investigated for allegedly changing students' grades (see report by our friends at GothamSchools); Urban Assembly Academy for History and Citizenship for Young Men in the Bronx; Performance Conservatory High School in the Bronx; and Cypress Hills Collegiate and Preparatory School in Brooklyn.
Klein and Deputy Chancellor Shael Suransky continued to point to their success in replacing large, failing schools with smaller schools that now have higher graduation rates. They made their announcement about the new progress reports at the Manhattan Bridges school in Midtown, which is one of several small schools in the building that once housed Park West High School. Klein noted that Park West's graduation rate was less than 50 percent. But he said the new schools in the building have a graduation rate above 75 percent. "They consistently overperform the schools that preceded them," added Suransky.
But among the F schools and the 23 schools receiving D's, there were a few small new schools such as the Urban Assembly Academy for History and Citizenship for Young men and the Dreamyard Preparatory School, both on at the old William Howard Taft High School campus in the Bronx, and Williamsburg Charter High School in Brooklyn.

Class Struggle The rise and fall--and rise?--of Baltimore's community schools movement

2010-11-03T07:27:00.000-07:00

By Andrea Appleton

Published: November 3, 2010

If a child has to squint to see the blackboard, she may have trouble learning the multiplication tables. If she is often absent to stay home and babysit her brother, her understanding of history will be patchy. If her mother is a drug addict, diagramming sentences isn’t going to be a priority. This is the sort of logic that has led to a nationwide push for what are often called community schools. Schools that serve as full-service community centers engineered to address a wide range of so-called “barriers to education”—from family unemployment to parent illiteracy to medical complications—do a better job of educating children, advocates say.
It’s not a new idea: John Dewey talked of “school as a social center” a century ago, and New York City’s Children’s Aid Society opened the first of its much-lauded community schools in 1992. But the idea has lately been on the lips of powerful people. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has said, “Every school should be a community school.” In a 2009 interview on Charlie Rose, Duncan said schools should be open “12, 13, 14 hours a day” six or seven days a week with a “wide variety of after-school activities: drama, arts, sports, chess, debate, academic enrichment, programs for parents, GED, ESL, family literacy nights, pot luck dinners.” Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and Randi Weingarten, the influential head of the American Federation of Teachers, were both featured speakers at this year’s National Community Schools Forum, attended by more than 1,000 people. And federal education grants, such as the new Promise Neighborhoods initiative and the Full Service Community Schools Program, increasingly fund efforts that mirror those of community schools.
One wouldn’t know it now, but Baltimore embraced the community schools strategy years ago. (If you want to raise the hackles of an advocate, refer to community schools as a “project” or a “program.” Proponents like to emphasize that community schools are a whole new way of looking at the function of school, not simply a new component tacked on to an existing structure.) In 2000, a group of volunteers formed the Baltimore Coalition for Community Schools and took to lobbying city administrators, nonprofits, and other local power brokers. Interest gradually built, and in 2003, advocates created Baltimore Community School Connections (BCSC), an organization that provided technical assistance to developing community schools. By 2005, Baltimore was sending a delegation of 40 people—including then-City Council President Sheila Dixon—to the national community schools conference in Chicago. That same year, then-Mayor Martin O’Malley created the first official community schools in Baltimore. There were 46 of them, at least on paper.
In most other cities, community schools had emerged slowly, school by school. But Baltimore decided to go for broke and create many community schools at once, primarily by transforming existing schools that already had some outside partnerships. Partly as a result, the city was briefly in the national spotlight. “Everybody came to Baltimore because we were like trailblazers,” says Jessica Strauss, one of the chief catalysts behind the coalition and the community schools movement in Baltimore. “We were considered national leaders in this work,” agrees Lisa Bleich, who worked for BCSC for three years, starting in 2005. “We were asked to give Community Schools 101.”
Now, 10 years after the formation of the coalition, Baltimore’s pioneering community schools initiative is, by many estimates, nearly deflated. The BCSC is defunct and city funding for the initiative has dropped substantially since the early years. Only 20 schools in the city are officially community schools, and early champions of the effort say that few of these truly fit the model. Many community school coordinators—the on-site air-traffic controllers who make sure the services in a community school mesh and address student needs—agree that the initiative has not lived up to the dream. Even as the term is becoming a buzzword in education circles, some supporters fear that the community schools movement in Baltimore may have outlived its glory days.

This decline is disheartening, proponents say, because the model works. Community school advocates tend to speak a particularly deadly dialect of jargon. What with all the “stakeholders” “coming to the table” to “facilitate discussion” on “standard deliverables,” one might conclude that the concept is just so much bureaucratic gibberish. But several of the city’s remaining community schools show the model’s promise. In his first gubernatorial debate with former governor Robert Ehrlich, Gov. O’Malley singled out a Baltimore community school—Patterson Park Public Charter—as a place “where kids are making progress.” And though little research has been conducted on the effectiveness of Baltimore’s community schools, district surveys show more parental involvement when compared with other city schools.
Wolfe Street Academy, a Fells Point elementary school that became a community school in 2006, is a case in point. Daily morning meetings in the school cafeteria are packed with parents, most chatting in Spanish. (The student body is about 67 percent Hispanic.) “At any given meeting or assembly, we’ll easily show 50 to 60 families, which is about half our population,” Principal Mark Gaither says. “I think a lot of that comes from the sense that we’re trying to meet them halfway.”
Edith, a shy young parent who did not want to give her last name, concurs. “I like this school because there are a lot of programs, like English classes for adults,” she says in Spanish.
Like other community schools, Wolfe Street offers numerous services outside the usual academic sphere, ranging from a food pantry to free dental care to string-instrument instruction. Gaither says most of these services exist because the school is a community school, and more to the point, because it has a community school coordinator. “This fall we will pass the $1 million mark in terms of how many resources—actual items, in-kind services, volunteer hours—have come to Wolfe Street over the past four years that are a direct result of the community school coordinator,” he says. (The costs associated with having a coordinator over that same time period come to about $300,000.)
Every community school in Baltimore—or community resource school, as the city puts it—has a full-time coordinator. A school’s “coordinating partner,” generally a nonprofit organization or university, hires for the position with funds funneled through the Family League of Baltimore City, the quasi-public nonprofit that manages city contracts associated with community schools and after-school programs, among other affairs. (In Wolfe Street’s case, that coordinating partner is the Y of Central Maryland.) The coordinator is to identify needs in the school that have not been met, seek partnerships with outside entities to help meet these needs, organize all the services coming into the school, ensure that the school’s physical space is efficiently used for programming, and eliminate duplication of services. For the 2008-’09 school year, for the first time, community school principals were asked to provide $20,000 of their coordinator’s salary from their own school budgets, or lose their coordinator. Of the 26 community schools then in existence, 25 ponied up the money. (Community school principals were required to do the same this year.) “That was a significant statement on the part of principals and school communities that there’s something here that really matters,” says Michael Sarbanes, executive director of the city school system’s Office of Partnerships, Communication, and Community Engagement.
Indeed, those involved in local community schools tend to be fierce advocates. “Some people think that it’s kind of a huggy-feely type of thing and we don’t really do a whole lot,” Eric Ford, community school coordinator at Patterson High School since 2006, says. “But principals see us as resources.” Ford has brought a variety of programs to Patterson, including a truancy court program that brings in volunteer judges to work with students who are often absent, and a “mini med school,” in which graduate students from the University of Maryland School of Medicine give guest lectures. On a recent school day, Ford was looking for hospital bed donations for the Certified Nursing Assistant program, which was short a few, and talking with a volunteer from the Maryland Institute College of Art about a possible dance class incorporating the visual arts. And he was still glowing from a recent event with the soccer team, which is comprised mostly of resettled refugees. Ford obtained copies of Outcasts United, a book about the struggles of a refugee soccer team in Georgia, and brought the author to speak to Patterson’s team. “Those are the kinds of things that keep me going,” he says.
Some community school principals have come around to the idea as well. Mark Gaither of Wolfe Street has the passion of a convert. “When I first was approached about the idea, I was skeptical,” he says. “I now see it as such a central part of what we do here.”
The model is also appealing for nonprofits, says Kate Scherr, community schools initiative coordinator at the Family League. Prior to accepting her current position, Scherr worked for a nonprofit that links corporate employees with volunteer opportunities. “I always picked the community schools because there was [a coordinator] there,” she says. “Other schools, what I found was that I couldn’t always get in because the principal is so busy, the teachers are busy. Who do you go to?”
Liz Obara, community schools coordinator at Patterson Park Public Charter since 2006, was previously a teacher. “As a teacher I was frustrated by the things I couldn’t control in the classroom,” she says. “Family issues, health issues. . . Sometimes parents had so much else going on that they weren’t able to prioritize helping their kids.” As coordinator, Obara says she can help address those problems, allowing the teachers to focus on teaching.
Related frustrations have surfaced during the ongoing fracas over a proposed new teacher’s contract, which would link teacher pay to student performance. Tom Proveaux, an English teacher of 33 years, told The Baltimore Sun, “Our kids come to school hungry, they come to school broken in many ways, and when we’re dealing with that it is not reflected in a test score.”
Data from numerous other cities indicates that community schools can help students—and teachers—surmount obstacles like hunger, and thus improve outcomes ranging from attendance to test scores. In Chicago, for example, the 150 community schools delivered standardized test results from 2001 to 2007 that showed a steady closing of the achievement gap with other local public schools. Disciplinary incidents are also lower in these schools. Studies have found that Communities in Schools, a long-time national initiative, produces students who excel in math and reading when compared to other schools, and have higher rates of attendance and reduced drop-out rates. Parental participation is also often higher in community schools, which tends to have a positive effect on education outcomes.
In Baltimore, however, the movement has encountered a number of obstacles, including school and city leadership in flux, a resistance to collaboration on the part of various city entities, and a reluctance to fully commit to the community school model, financially and otherwise. The current school administration has expressed renewed support for the community schools concept, and even taken a few concrete steps toward making it a reality. But if Baltimore is ever to have a viable, sustainable network of community schools, advocates and administrators alike will need to understand what went wrong the first time.

In the beginning, the local community schools movement was characterized by fits and starts. Nonprofit organizations and public agencies had been providing piecemeal social services in Baltimore schools for decades. In 1998, the Greater Homewood Community Corporation, a civic group in North Baltimore, began introducing a greater range of services into local schools with the aid of AmeriCorps VISTA members. (The organization continues to work with eight schools, three of which are currently part of the city initiative.) But attempts to bring about change on a systemic level hadn’t worked out so well. For years Communities in Schools “tried desperately to implement the . . . model in Baltimore City,” Sheila Drummond, who worked for the organization on and off for 30 years, says. These efforts were unsuccessful, she says, largely because city government failed to commit, and the city schools’ CEO kept changing. Then, in 2003, Drummond and Jessica Strauss co-founded BCSC. After years of lobbying, advocates had finally gained meaningful support. In 2005, Baltimore suddenly had 46 community schools.
But that first year was by all accounts a flop. In lieu of hiring community school coordinators, the mayor’s office decided to saddle after-school program coordinators with an extra set of duties. The city allocated a pittance to the effort and gave the coordinators little to no training. “It was kind of a test year for community schools,” says Charmayne Turner, who oversees the city’s community schools. “We figured out that that model does not work.”
But for the 2006-’07 school year, the initiative had a new start. The city—with a new schools CEO, Charlene Cooper Boston—invested $2.3 million in community schools, from the then-flush budget surplus. Coordinating partners were given the money to hire full-time community school coordinators for 26 schools—including 11 that were failing—and the BCSC was paid to train them. Energy was high.
“We did extensive training with [the coordinators],” Drummond says. “And we took them to visit community schools in other places.” These included Children’s Aid Society schools in New York City.
“It was very new, and the momentum was definitely different at the beginning,” says Raegena Lawrence, community school coordinator at the now-defunct Chinquapin Middle School from 2006 to 2009. “There was a lot of excitement. Everybody was learning at the same time.”
Mid-school year, O’Malley was elected governor. But community school advocates had no reason to fear his departure from City Hall because incoming Mayor Sheila Dixon was a strong supporter of community schools. In a December 2006 interview, she told the Sun community schools would be “a major priority” of her administration.
A key element of the Baltimore model was tested that year. Early on, it had been decided that, along with nonprofits providing services in community schools, Baltimore’s city agencies—from the Housing Department to the Department of Social Services to the Health Department—would “co-locate” employees within schools. Families would have a one-stop shop for all of their social service needs, and with enough collaboration on the part of city agencies, the cost for creating a community school would only be about $100,000, covering the coordinator’s salary plus a small stipend for a parent in each school to conduct outreach.
“From a fiscal planning point of view, the bulk of the dollars that serve people are public dollars that go to city agencies,” Strauss says. “The biggest problem with service delivery is that they’re disjointed, not integrated. The full-service community school approach . . . provides that coordination and integration.”
That year several city agencies relocated workers to community schools. But according to current and former community school coordinators, the tactic was almost immediately a failure due to poor planning. “There were a lot of issues in terms of sharing space,” says Leigh Dalton, community school coordinator at Barclay Elementary/Middle School from August 2006 through June 2008. “Who pays for the phone line if Housing uses it one day and Social Services the next? It was ridiculous, petty stuff, and it was a barrier to progress.”
“The Housing Department was there every day and then when tax season came, they left the building and never came back,” Lawrence says. “That’s when the partnerships with city agencies died, going into 2007.”
“Nobody was sending resources,” Strauss says. “You funded a coordinator with nothing to coordinate.” She blames this early failure on the “turf-oriented” nature of Baltimore. “It takes a tremendous amount of collaboration, and Baltimore isn’t famous for that,” she says.
The next school year, 2007-’08, brought yet another schools CEO, Andrés Alonso, and the beginning of the recession. By fall 2008, city funding to community schools had dropped to $1.6 million, and school principals were asked to pitch in. In 2008, the dwindling funding for BCSC was pinched off for good and it closed its doors, drastically reducing training and support for coordinators.
“That was a huge loss for us,” coordinator Liz Obara says. “[BCSC] helped formulate the initiative. Having a good impartial outside force was really important.”
Last year only 17 schools had community school status, and city funding remained static this year. This year and last, the city put $750,000 into the initiative. (The slight uptick in the number of schools this year is due to money from a state School Improvement Grant.) Some coordinators say they fear the initiative might blink out altogether.

Everyone has a theory about why the community schools initiative failed to take off. “At the time it was introduced, it was sort of, well, here’s a good idea that’s out there that we’re going to sort of introduce,” says Michael Sarbanes, who joined the school district mid-initiative, in 2008. “It wasn’t integral to the definition of what schools were and how they operate and evolve.”
Others say the constant changes in leadership have made it difficult to create a sustainable community schools system. “It got off the ground quickly [in Baltimore],” says Martin Blank, director of the national Coalition for Community Schools. “There were mayoral and school system transitions, so it did not get as fully embedded as we would have hoped.”
Strauss pins some of the blame on what had seemed an innovation: the use of a separate funding stream to pay for the community school coordinators. Such a plan only works, she says, if city agencies do their part. Plus, she says, that funding stream is currently precarious. Every year the Family League submits a budget proposal to the city suggesting what portion of a given pot of money should go to after-school programs and what portion to community schools. Strauss says this pits after-school programs against community schools, when community schools are (remember?) a strategy, not a separate program. “This was a crucial mistake. No other initiative in the country considers the coordinator as a separate thing,” she says. “A real site coordinator manages all of the partnership programs in the building.”
Kate Scherr, the community schools initiative coordinator at the Family League, says after-school programs and community schools are not in competition. “The idea was that they should go hand in hand and one complements the other,” she says. “The feeling is that there’s good value in both of those.”
The initiative has departed from certain components of the original vision. For instance, Sarbanes says city schools are dedicated to expanding the community schools model, but putting representatives from city agencies in schools will not be central to the plan. “We haven’t fundamentally set out to say, ‘Community schools are about establishing a one-stop shop for government services,’” he says. “We’re focusing on what are the partnerships that are really going to support student achievement.”
Coordinators also complain that their job descriptions have subtly changed. Now, in addition to their regular duties, every year each must meet with 20 students with truancy problems and another 20 with behavioral problems and try to find resources to help them. Sarbanes says these new duties are part of an effort to improve school climate and attendance outcomes, but some coordinators aren’t convinced this is the way to do it.
“When we first came on board, it was stressed to us that you should not be providing direct service to anybody,” Patterson High coordinator Eric Ford says. “You’re big picture people, bringing in partnerships. To hold us accountable for that stuff is to me a bit of a stretch.” But Sarbanes says having coordinators work with individual kids as an “additional layer of intervention” is “a direction I’d like to see us go in a lot more.”
Coordinators are also now responsible for increasing the number of Free and Reduced Meal (FARM) applications that are turned in. The school district gets a nearly $5,000 reimbursement from the federal government for each qualified student. Sarbanes says the rate at which these forms are returned can also serve as a measure of family engagement.
Liz Obara disagrees, as do other coordinators. “I think some of the things that the city asks us to do are a little tangential,” she says. “I don’t think FARM forms are a fair indicator of family involvement. Parents who don’t get involved all year might be the first to fill out the form, because it’s needed.”
In general, those who spearheaded the movement tend to express disappointment when asked about the initiative. “Nothing saddens me more than when I go other places and speak about the principles of community schools and people ask me what’s happened in Baltimore,” Lisa Bleich says.
“There is always a certain amount of sadness, disappointment, and a little bit of anger around trying to create Baltimore Community School Connections and having it go away,” Sheila Drummond agrees. But Drummond says she is also hopeful, and there are indeed signs of renewed interest on the part of the city. In 2009, a community schools city-wide coordinating council—made up of advocates, principals, nonprofit representatives, and others—was formed, with a directive to report to the mayor and city schools CEO Andrés Alonso. For the last three years, Sarbanes’ office has injected $14,000 per year in extra funding into community schools, partly using Title I money. And last spring, the Family League created a position dedicated solely to community schools, now filled by Kate Scherr.
In Jessica Strauss’ opinion, the current school administration is more committed to community schools than any in the last 20 years. “I think there’s hope now with the federal government putting tons of money into it,” she says. “And our new CEO [Alonso] really understands community engagement.”
Sarbanes says there’s good reason for optimism. “My sense is that there’s a really, really important movement that’s in the process of happening,” he says, “from community schools being a boutique program that existed because there was some money for it coming from the city during flush budget times to actually being kind of an integral part of what school means.” He says the district’s goal is for all city schools to lie somewhere along a “resource continuum,” where some have full-time community school coordinators, others just receive money devoted to improving family engagement, and still others are encouraged to leverage partnerships with parents or staff, without any accompanying resources.
Drummond, now co-chair of the coordinating council, says she will likely take a back seat to the new effort to revive the movement. “I really believe in it, but now it’s time for those folks who’ve said they know what they’re doing and they can take it on to do that,” she says. “And the rest of us who were really involved will stand back and hold our breaths and hope that it really happens.”

What do you think of this initiative? Would this model work in NYC?

Remember to Vote!!!

2010-11-02T07:17:00.000-07:00

The GothamSchools voter’s guide for an education election

by Maura Walz

As if you could forget amid all the noise about sanity and fear, today is election day. And while education hasn’t been at the forefront of any of this year’s big races, the issue is never too far from many voters’ — and candidates’ — minds.
We’ve compiled a short guide to where education fits into the biggest statewide races, as well as a few smaller races where candidates’ stances on education may play a key role.
Governor: Cuomo v. Paladino
From the beginning of his campaign, Cuomo has framed himself as a supporter of President Obama’s education policies and as a would-be governor willing to fight with unions. Though he hasn’t said exactly what he would do in office, he has aligned himself with groups like Democrats for Education Reform, which support increasing the number of charter schools, ending seniority-based layoffs, and changes to teachers’ pensions.
Paladino’s views on education are considerably more radical. According to his website, he supports firing the entire Board of Regents, repealing the law that governs how teachers are fired, and instituting school vouchers. Though he wants to cut the state’s budget by 20 percent, he told reporters that he would not cut education funding.
The city and state teachers unions — alienated by Cuomo but even more unlikely to support Paladin0 — are refusing to endorse either candidate. DFER formally endorsed Cuomo only yesterday, but has been raising money for his campaign for months.
Cuomo and Paladino are the two mainstream party candidates among a total of seven running. Of the remaining candidates, some teachers have thrown their support behind Green Party Candidate Howie Hawkins, who has picked up the endorsement of the group Teachers for a Just Contract.
Read more about Cuomo and Paladino’s takes on education here and here.
Comptroller: DiNapoli v. Wilson
Though not the most high-profile contest this election season, the comptroller’s race has been especially shaped by the education debate.
When Albany voted last May to more than double the number of charter schools allowed to open, legislators added a provision explicitly allowing the state comptroller to audit the schools. The change was intended to overrule a June 2009 state court ruling that found that the comptroller did not have the legal authority to audit charter schools.
Charter advocates have said they intend to challenge the new law’s constitutionality if the next comptroller tries to exercise it. But the outcome of tomorrow’s election may determine whether the charter school lobby even deems a lawsuit necessary.
Incumbent Thomas DiNapoli, who was formerly a Democratic State Assemblyman, has aggressively used his audit power to oversee both the state and city departments of education. One of his audits found flaws in the state’s oversight of Regents exam scoring. Others showed that city education officials did not follow regulations on no-bid contracts or charter school oversight. Another audit found that some high schools falsely claimed they discharged students into GED programs. Before the state court stopped him from doing so, DiNapoli also looked into the finances of several charter schools around the state. DiNapoli’s assertiveness is one of the reasons why the teachers unions and the parent activist group NYC Kids PAC have endorsed him.
His challenger, Republican Harry Wilson, has targeted DiNapoli for that aggressiveness, calling it “politically motivated.” Wilson has close ties to the charter school movement through his work as a hedge fund manager, and he has been praised by charter school advocate and philanthropist Whitney Tilson. Wilson has indicated that he intends to focus his audit attention to areas other than education, such as health care spending.
Attorney General: Schneiderman v. Donovan
When Attorney General candidates Eric Schneiderman and Dan Donovan have sparred over education, it’s been in the context of Schneiderman’s close ties to teachers unions in his current position as a State Senator.
Democrat Schneiderman, who has been endorsed by both the city and state unions, stood with the union through this winter and spring’s protracted negotiations over the state’s charter school cap. Schneiderman is also aligned with the union in his support for retaining the “last-in, first-out” policy governing teacher lay-offs.
That fidelity to the union has drawn criticism from his Republican rival’s campaign, which has called Schneiderman “a wholly owned subsidiary of teachers’ union leadership.”
State legislature
Democrats are fighting to retain their majority in the State Senate; they currently hold it by merely one vote.
One race where Democrats hope they can pick up a seat is in Northeastern Queens, where former City Council Member Tony Avella is challenging Republican incumbent Frank Padavan. Avella has strongly articulated views on education, developed during his tenure on the Council and an unsuccessful mayoral bid last year. According to a GothamSchools survey he returned last year, Avella opposes mayoral control, does not believe that test scores should be a factor in deciding teacher tenure, and thinks that “charter schools should not exist at all.” He also told GothamSchools last year that he opposes the way that the city currently funds its public schools and would work for a system in which schools received the same amount of money for every student.
In Long Island, DFER has been raising money for a Democrat fighting to hold onto his Senate seat, Craig Johnson. Johnson played a key role defeating the version of a charter cap lift that the charter lobby opposed in January, and then supported their favored version in May. DFER has also thrown its fund-raising weight behind Buffalo Assemblyman Sam Hoyt, who was also one of the major players in the push to double the cap on charter schools.
The state teachers union, meanwhile, withdrew its support from several incumbents, including Hoyt, who supported charter advocates’ preferred version of a cap lift. In Hoyt’s race, the union endorsed the Conservative Party candidate, Buffalo Councilman Joe Golombek.

In Sharp Rise, 47 City Schools May Close Over Performance

2010-11-01T14:35:00.000-07:00

By SHARON OTTERMAN, Published: October 28, 2010

The New York City Department of Education said Thursday that up to 47 schools could be closed for poor performance, a huge increase from previous years if all remain on the chopping block.
In the eight years since Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has used school closings as a cornerstone of his school reform strategy, 91 schools have been shuttered and replaced with new schools.
City officials gave a few reasons for the jump. Nineteen of the schools were to close last year, but won temporary reprieves because of a lawsuit brought by the teachers’ union and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
The Obama administration asked states to identify their lowest-performing 5 percent of schools for closing or other serious interventions; 12 more are in that category. And the city identified 16 additional schools through its own process, weighing test scores, parent reviews and other measures.
The schools face a potential “phase-out,” a process in which the school stops accepting students and loses one grade per year until it ceases to exist. Simultaneously, new schools open in the building.
Twenty-six of the schools that could be closed are high schools, including John Dewey High School in Brooklyn and Grover Cleveland High School in Queens; 21 are elementary and middle schools, including a few, like Kappa VII Middle School in Brooklyn, that are only several years old.
To reduce the shock and anger that closing announcements met in past years, the city has a new process to explain its thinking before making a final decision. At least four meetings are being held at each school, and parents and staff and community members can object if they feel that part or all of the school should be preserved, officials said.
“Right now, we are looking at those schools that have been consistently struggling to determine whether they can improve with help or need to be replaced with a new school,” said Jack Zarin-Rosenfeld, a schools spokesman.
At Sheepshead Bay High School, one of the schools that could be closed, educators and parents are mounting a spirited defense, said Reesa Levy, the principal. The four-year graduation rate is up to 63 percent, from 49 percent five years ago; most students enter well below grade level. The school, she added, also had one of the top track teams in the country.
“We are working diligently on our academics,” she said. “We improved our graduation rate; we make annual yearly progress. We believe, given a little more time, we could meet all of our targets.”
The efforts at dialogue also respond to the broader issues raised in the lawsuit last year, which found that the city broke the law in how it informed and involved the community in the school closing process.
Still, the phasing out of many schools could create significant turmoil. When schools are phased out, their teachers can end up in a pool of unassigned teachers, where they remain until they find permanent jobs at other schools.
“Closing a school is a difficult thing on the community, but it’s lot easier on the administration than making sure every single one of your schools is working,” said Michael Mulgrew, the president of the teachers’ union.
The city’s final decisions on elementary and middle schools is expected by the end of November, with decisions on high schools by mid-December. Then the official, legally mandated closing process, involving additional public meetings and a final vote by the city’s mayoral-controlled Panel for Educational Policy, begins.

One Standardized Test to Rule Them All

2010-11-01T13:17:00.000-07:00

By Neil deMause Wednesday, Oct 27 2010
For New York City schools reeling from their dismal scores on the newly toughened state exams, another tectonic shift is on the way.
As a winner in President Obama's "Race to the Top" competition, New York State is directing part of its $700 million windfall toward the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, a 26-state consortium that has set itself the daunting task of completely redefining the way K-12 students are evaluated. On the coalition's agenda, according to the state education officials and think-tank leaders who are leading the effort, are a shift from paper tests to computer-based ones, and long-form essays and research projects in place of fill-in-the-dots multiple choice. The ultimate goal: to create, by 2014, "an assessment system that will ensure students graduate college- and career-ready from high school."
"College readiness" is a holy grail that has long eluded education reformers as they try to repair a system that—as Waiting for Superman is currently reminding moviegoers—falls far behind such educational superpowers as Finland in both high school and college graduation rates. But education experts disagree as to whether the quest to build a better testing mousetrap is long overdue, or a multimillion-dollar boondoggle.
The complaint that today's standardized tests are a poor chisel for carving out college students is a common refrain, even among those who oversee them. Massachusetts education commissioner Mitchell Chester, who heads the PARCC governing board, notes that while his state's current test is considered admirably tough—so much so that Massachusetts schools have found it difficult to compete with those in more lenient states on federal No Child Left Behind rankings—"it is in many ways a very traditional assessment that you sit down and take in a one- or two-hour time frame near the end of the school year. And as such it has limitations."
One is that the skills many college administrators complain are lacking in their incoming students—the ability to conduct a research project, say, or evaluate a problem and figure out the most efficient path to a solution—are not easily gauged in an hour or two of sitting at a desk and coloring in ovals. To remedy this, PARCC plans on incorporating open-ended essays and take-home research projects. "In some cases, it will require students to take several days to complete an assignment," says Chester.
The consortium also plans to spread its assessments out in a series of mini-tests throughout the school year. "We hope it's not viewed as 'the big bad test at the end of the year' that you have to change everything you're doing to prepare kids for," says Matt Gandal, the executive vice president of Achieve, the D.C.-based education think-tank that was hired on as project manager for PARCC. "It's not about test prep—hopefully this is about an assessment system that actually helps them along the way."
PARCC is currently casting a wide net for input, consulting not only K-12 testing experts but college faculty and administrators. Gandal admits this will be "not easy, because the two systems are not used to working together." The hoped-for payoff, though, could be worth it. "At the end of high school, there will be a set of tests that students take that will tell them whether they're ready for college," he vows. "If you score college-ready, you should be able to walk in the door at any two- or four-year institution and not require remedial courses."
Skeptics of standardized testing are, predictably, skeptical. "I wouldn't be surprised if they can create a somewhat better standardized test—I expect they will," says Monty Neill, the director of the Massachusetts-based National Center for Fair and Open Testing. But, he fears, "the overall results are going to be nowhere near the time and the money that's put into it."
The main problem, insists Neill, is that in a high-stakes testing world—and the PARCC test would remain high-stakes, both in determining which students get into college and in setting schools' "accountability" scores—it would remain too tempting for teachers and school administrators to game the system. For example, Neill points to the Massachusetts state test, which includes a single essay question on its language-arts exam. The main achievement so far, he says, is that "there's a huge amount of effort to have kids incessantly practice the so-called five-paragraph essay. So kids learn to write that, but they can't write anything else."
As for PARCC leaders' promises of multi-day research projects and other open-ended assignments, Neill worries that these won't be feasible without making the tests prohibitively expensive to grade. (Chester acknowledges the challenge, but says PARCC hopes that economies of scale and the use of "artificial intelligence" to score tests can keep costs manageable.) And, Neill adds, there's an even bigger inherent obstacle: If assignments vary too much with each test, it's impossible to establish consistent scores that can be compared from year to year; if they don't vary enough, they become just another canned exercise to do test prep for. "If you can establish score consistency, you can rapidly have these things turn into something that you pick the lock on," he says. "It's in the end academically pretty pointless."
Students and teachers alike will be able to judge for themselves soon enough. PARCC says it should have pilot programs ready to roll out for initial trials next school year, with a full-scale field test slated for 2012–13.
Chester insists it can be done, pointing to European nations that use more varied assessments as a model. "We're going to aim at a level that makes us competitive with other nations," he says. "On some level, I do believe this is an American competitiveness agenda."
Neill, however, sees a very different lesson from the same nations. "Finland, they essentially don't test—there is testing for college admissions, but it's actually optional," he says. "So why the hell are we?"

The Misuse of Test Scores to Evaluate Teachers

2010-10-28T10:44:00.000-07:00

Time Out From Testing reported the following information yesterday at a meeting for the Save Our Schools campaign.

The New York City Department of Education is prepared to release 12,000 internal teacher data reports, with individual teachers identified, rated, and ranked based on their classes' state test score changes in English Language Arts and Math from one year to the next.

There are several problems with this public release:

The calculations are unreliable because they do not take into account all variables that affect test scores, such as the influence of tutors and the deliberate decision of principals to place struggling students with particular teachers.
There is many errors in the raw data used to calculate scores.
The tests on which the evaluation has been placed are themselves unreliable. These tests have become easier to pass in the past few years, and are, thus, not an accurate measure of improvement.
The DOE's technical advisers for the evaluations warned that they should not be used to judge teacher performance as these test scores only capture one dimension of teacher effectiveness.
The public release of these evaluations may promote more "teaching to the test."

How can we hold teachers accountable without resorting to public evaluations based on flawed data?

Read our Newsletter!

2010-10-27T07:55:00.001-07:00

THE BROOKLYN YOUNG MOTHERS' COLLECTIVE

In This Issue

Support BYMC When You Shop!.

Welcome To BYMC!

New Initiatives

Congratulations

Thank You!

Quick Links

Get Involved

Donate to BYMC

Support BYMC When You Shop!

Imagine a world where a percentage of every online purchase you make goes directly to the Brooklyn Young Mothers' Collective; at no additional cost to you. That world exists! When you shop online through goodshop.com up to 37% of each purchase can go directly to BYMC! You are still able to shop at all of your favorite stores like Amazon, Best Buy, The Gap, eBay, and many more. Through goodshop.com you can also access coupons for over 1,000 stores.

It takes just a few seconds to go to www.goodshop.com, select Brooklyn Young Mothers' Collective as your charity, and then click through to your favorite store and shop as usual. Just type in Brooklyn Young Mothers' Collective on the homepage and hit verify.

Wish List

If you are interested in donating the following items please call us at 718-596-7074.

Maternity clothes
Diapers
Baby Formula
Books
New or lightly used children's clothing
Child safety supplies
METROCARDS

Hello Friends!

Welcome to fall 2010! I will be brief because I am so excited to share with you news of BYMC's growth. It is still very hard for me to believe that I started BYMC in 2004 at my dining room table while caring for my newborn daughter. I wanted to make a difference in the lives of young families and because of your support, Brooklyn will never be the same.

Warmly,

Benita

WELCOME TO BYMC!

Stephanie Ferrell is a graduate student at Fordham University's Graduate School of Social Services. Stephanie is BYMC's first social work intern and will work with program staff to support members. Originally from Houston, Texas, Stephanie graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a degree in Youth and Community Studies in 2009. She spent the last year working with a college access non-profit in Central Texas through the AmeriCorps program.

Yeashea Braddock joined BYMC last April as a community-based doula. Yeashe was trained as a direct-entry midwife at the Florida School of Traditional Midwifery. During her time in Florida she worked with teen moms and helped create a teen childbirth education curriculum.Yeashea holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Public Health - Natural Sciences from John Hopkins University.

Last May, Chanel L. Porchia- Albert joined BYMC as a community-based doula. Chanel holds a B.A. from William Paterson University in African American History and Political Science. Prior to becoming a doula, Chanel worked as a stockbroker in NYC for five years. She is enrolled at the Institute of Integrative Nutrition studying to
become a certified Health Counselor.

Chrissy Etienne is a recent graduate of Middlebury College in Vermont where she received a B.A. in English and Theater. She enjoys bringing her passion for activism to youth work and to the community of young people. She joins BYMC team after a summer internship with the Sadie Nash Leadership Project.

Hannah Wohl is BYMC's education policy fellow. Hannah, a recent graduate of Brown University, is charged with leading BYMC's policy initiatives. Additionally, she will be training a cohort of young mothers to be part of BYMC's policy campaign team.

New Initiatives

Brooklyn Young Mothers' Collective at The Brooklyn Birthing Center

In an effort to expose young women to an array of birthing options BYMC teamed up with the Brooklyn Birthing Center. BYMC members learned from the birth center's director, Katherine Ableson about the services offered and the major differences between midwifery care and obstetrical care. As BYMC members and staff left the birth center there was such a sense of excitement and awareness of about childbirth options. Kate Zondervan, a center birth assistants said, "I wish we could tape them this is a perfect commercial!" in reference to overhearing a member tell her partner, "Babe, I can have a water birth!"

Partnering with H.E.A.T.

BYMC is partnering with the H.E.A.T. Program (Health Education and Alternatives for Teens) to bring monthly on-site HIV testing and counseling, and educational workshops to members. Young women in Brooklyn face some of the highest rates of newly diagnosed cases of HIV in the nation. BYMC is excited about this new partnership and opportunity to provide additional services to BYMC members.

Young Men's Coordinator

Segun Akande joined BYMC last July to work with young fathers as part of a pilot program funded by Twenty-First Century Foundation. Segun, a Brooklyn native graduated with a B.A. in Political science from Duke University in 2007. Prior to joining BYMC, he worked for New York City Council Member Daniel Garodnick.

Check Out BYMC's New Education Policy Blog

BYMC has launched a new education policy blog! Stay up-to-date: http://brooklynyoungmotherscollective.blogspot.com

Congratulations!

Staying Current

BYMC program director, Aisha Domingue and program coordinator Liz Thomas, were awarded scholarships by the Department of Youth and Community Development (DYCD) to attend New York City's Family Development Training Program. The Family Development Training and Credentialing Program (FDC) is a major New York State initiative that provides front-line workers with the skills and competencies they need to empower families. Congratulations Aisha and Liz!

Congratulations on your New Job!

Congratulations to BYMC member, Toni Walles, on her new job with DonorsChoose. Toni will be a clerical assistant. Toni is a student at Brooklyn Democracy Academy.

Thank You

A big thank you to Board Members C.J. Masimore , Meghan Hogan, Onida Coward-Mayers and, Kristin Meister for ending BYMC summer on a high note by raising much needed funds to support BYMC's work!

Working Single Mothers Lag Behind in Income

2010-10-22T10:37:00.000-07:00

The following report was posted on the Women of Color Policy Network Blog:

The World Economic Forum released the 2010 Global Gender Gap Report recently, showing gains for the United States' global ranking. The US ranked 19th globally, breaking into the Top 20 for the first time. Yet many single women mothers in the US continue to face financial peril. They aren't making as much as single men fathers, have much lower wealth, and are much less likely to have benefits such as paid sick days.

Our latest report, "At Rope's End: Single Women Mothers, Wealth and Asset Accumulation in the United States ", by Dr. Mariko Chang and Dr. C. Nicole Mason, Executive Director of the Women of Color Policy Network, uncovers the realities that single women mothers face:

- Estimates show that over 18 million children live in households headed by single women
- Single women mothers possess only 4 percent of the wealth of single fathers: $100 compared to $25,300
- Black and Latino single mothers have a median wealth of zero, whereas single white women mothers report a median wealth of $6,000

Meanwhile a recent Wall Street Journal article says that young, single women in their 20's are making more than their male counterparts. But as some financial commentators observe, much of these gains are due to high levels of education and childlessness. When it comes to single women mothers under 40, over half have zero or negative wealth.

CUNY Graduation Rates Hearing at the NYC Council

2010-10-21T13:17:00.000-07:00

Today, Brooklyn Young Mothers' Collective testified during the Higher Education Hearing to examine CUNY's retention and graduation rates, chaired by Council Member Rodriguez. Currently, the average six-year graduation rate for CUNYs BA programs is 47 percent. For associate programs, the average three-year graduation rate is just 13.3 percent. Both of these rates are below the national average. CUNYs one-year retention rate is 67 percent. Around 70 percent if NYC high school students need remedial courses upon matriculation. These students come to college unprepared, and, without sufficient support, they quickly drop out. Below is BYMCs testimony:

Good afternoon, Chairman Rodriguez and members of the Council. My name is Hannah Wohl, Policy Fellow at Brooklyn Young Mothers’ Collective. Brooklyn Young Mothers’ Collective is a non-profit organization working to help young mothers succeed academically. Many of the young mothers with whom we work matriculate to CUNY. Unfortunately, young mothers tend to flounder in the CUNY system and are usually unable to graduate. Their educational experiences have repeatedly illustrated CUNYs poor retention rate.

The alarming truth is that even young mothers who have performed well in high school are often not prepared for the academics of CUNY. One young mother with whom we work graduated from her high school as valedictorian, but failed her first semester of college because she had not been introduced to the concepts that were prerequisite knowledge at CUNY. Overwhelmed and demoralized, she dropped out. Many students go to CUNY because it is the most affordable way for them to get a college diploma; they cannot pay to retake courses or enroll in remedial classes. An inability to graduate in four years may prevent these students from ever graduating. New York City high schools must align their standards with CUNY so that students matriculate prepared for the academic rigor that CUNY offers.

CUNY should also support a more flexible attendance policy. Currently, although CUNY has no overarching attendance policy, many CUNY schools, following former Mayor Giuliani’s criticisms, have enacted strict attendance policies which compromise students’ ability to pass courses. This policy has precipitated school failure for students who would otherwise be passing their classes. A more moderate attendance policy would not undermine academic rigor. Students would still be held accountable for the course material and be expected to attend class regularly; it would merely allow students with other responsibilities with the flexibility that they need to succeed. Many of the students who attend CUNY have responsibilities that go beyond their role as a student: they are spouses, parents, and working adults. Occasionally, being responsible in these other roles necessitates absence from class. A young mother may have to miss class because her child becomes ill or her babysitter cancelled. These students should not be prevented from getting a college diploma because they have to fulfill these responsibilities. In recognition of students’ specialized needs, CUNY should have a stronger referral network to social support services. This would ease the burden of students’ competing needs, allowing them to better focus on their academics. For example, a young mother may need childcare in order to attend class, but be unsure of where to find it. Additionally, she may have other unmet needs, such as housing, health care, and public assistance, which may be interfering with her coursework. CUNY should be equipped to refer students to relevant services.

CUNY has suffered decades of poor retention and graduation rates. Pervasive changes are needed; but, improvements are possible. I am confident that closer alignment of high school and college academic standards, a more flexible attendance policy, and a stronger referral network will successfully raise CUNYs retention and graduation rate. These changes will make the CUNY system more accessible to all CUNY students, especially those who are most vulnerable to dropping out. Thank you.

Rethinking New York City's Response to Chronic Absence

2010-10-19T11:34:00.000-07:00

The Vera Institute released a new policy paper: “Getting Teenagers Back to School: Rethinking New York State’s Response to Chronic Absence." Below is a summary of their research.

Nearly 40 percent of New York City high school students—about 124,000 teenagers—missed 20 or more days of school in the 2008–2009 school year. This policy brief looks at one response to the statewide problem of chronic school absence: reporting parents to the child protective system, which handles allegations of child abuse and neglect. Under New York State law, a parent or guardian who fails to ensure that his or her child attends school regularly can be found to have neglected the child. Although the term “educational neglect” is often associated with young children, more than 60 percent of the state’s educational-neglect allegations concern teenagers, particularly 15- and 16-year-olds.
The child protective system is not well equipped to help teenagers improve their school attendance. Nonetheless, educational-neglect reports involving teens consume a large portion of the child protective system’s resources and are diverting the system’s attention from children with more serious safety and neglect issues. The most common responses to teenage chronic absence around the country are punitive, contrary to what adolescent development and school engagement research tell us about what motivates teens to go to school.

Vera’s case-file review and interviews indicate that amending the child protective statute to remove teenagers from the educational-neglect process would not put these adolescents at risk of future maltreatment. Vera’s case-file review found that investigations of educational-neglect reports involving teenagers that were not accompanied by allegations of other abuse or neglect rarely found child safety threats. When measured using the state’s risk assessment tool, these cases had a very low likelihood of future maltreatment.8 Although this empirical analysis was limited to one county, child protective workers and officials from around the state agreed that educational-neglect investigations involving teenagers rarely reveal safety threats. If school personnel have any other reason—beyond absence from school—to suspect a teenager is being neglected, they would still be mandated to report their suspicions to the state child-abuse and neglect hotline.
Many child protective caseworkers and supervisors feel educational-neglect cases involving teenagers divert their attention from more serious cases.
Educational-neglect reports concerning teenagers who are not attending school consume a significant portion of the child protective system’s scarce resources. In 2009, teens alleged to be educationally neglected accounted for 6 percent of all children involved in child maltreatment reports statewide. In New York City, this figure reached 11 percent. Removing teenagers who are chronically absent could reduce the number of teenagers reported to the child protective system by up to 15,407 statewide, allowing the child protective system to focus its resources on families with child safety concerns.
Further, nearly all of the educators Vera interviewed expressed the view that schools are in a better position to address teenage chronic absence than the child protective system. Schools often have an existing relationship with families, know the communities where students live and the issues they face, and are responsible for their educational success. Moreover, school officials have problem-solving capabilities in the educational arena that child protective workers do not have. They can troubleshoot registration and enrollment issues, work to address teens’ safety concerns, navigate the special education system, and arrange for school transfers if needed. Child protective workers have no authority and little experience in these arenas. Eliminating the option of referring cases of teen chronic absence to the child protective system when there is no other reason to suspect maltreatment would thus place responsibility for teens’ attendance with those best equipped to improve it.
Our examination suggested two concurrent actions New York could take to address chronic teen absence: 1) increase schools’ accountability, system incentives, and access to services for engaging chronically absent teens; and 2) develop new approaches to reducing teen absence to address the underlying problem that Vera observed statewide and nationally: a lack of effective methods for re-engaging chronically absent teens. Implementing these strategies will require information-sharing, collaboration, and investment by state agencies including OCFS, the New York State Education Department, and the state Office of Mental Health, as well as partnerships with local school systems, county executives and mayors, an array of service providers, and funders.
New York could develop a new approach to teenage absenteeism that is rooted in research on adolescent behavior and school engagement. The new approach would build on effective practices in some non-traditional schools and decades of research and experience in the youth development field, which has shown that building on strengths, reinforcing positive behavior, and connecting teens with a caring adult produces the best results. It would also take into account the influence of peers and other aspects of adolescent social and physiological development. This approach would replace the punishment-based responses currently in place.
Guiding principles for this new approach include:
> Use an individualized strengths-based approach, for example, identifying at least one genuine strength for each teen who is consistently absent.
> Engage the student in school-based activities that build on those strengths.
> Connect those students to a caring adult who genuinely supports them in the school community.
> Develop and sustain positive relationships between the student and the caring adult.
> Communicate regularly with parents to offer positive feedback about the youth and suggest alternatives to punishment as motivation for attending school.
> Track and recognize attendance with incentives.
Such an approach might require changes in school structure and in the roles of school personnel. Developing, testing, and bringing a new approach to scale will require investment of money, time, and effort.
In conclusion, by challenging the existing systems and traditional interventions used by communities and schools New York State is on the cutting edge of addressing chronic absence among teenagers. The first step toward more effectively addressing chronic absence among teens may be to remove them from the jurisdiction of the child protective system, while simultaneously creating a less adversarial set of interventions to keep youth connected to schools. This would allow the child welfare system to focus on the most vulnerable abused and neglected children in the state. New York State’s strategies in working with adolescents need to be informed by research on effective practices for adolescent behavior change and school engagement. By providing flexibility and incentives to localities to address the root causes of absenteeism in their communities, and offering guidance and practice that supports a strengthening of student attendance, the state will be more effective in its efforts to reduce chronic absenteeism and improve graduation rates. Developing an effective solution to chronic teen absence will improve not only the life prospects of New York’s teens, but also the safety and financial health of our communities. These proposals provide a starting place for a robust dialogue toward more effective collaborative actions.

Our Opinion
BYMC agrees with the Vera Institute's findings that educational neglect cases should be eliminated for teenagers. We support their recommendations for mitigating absenteeism.

Taskforce Meeting

2010-10-15T12:11:00.000-07:00

BYMC staff met with the Senior Program Manager of the Office of Multiple Pathways to Graduation yesterday to discuss improvements in the transfer schools. BYMC continue contact with the Office of Multiple pathways as we work for education reform.

Taskforce Meeting Tomorrow!

2010-10-13T11:22:00.000-07:00

2010-10-13T07:46:00.000-07:00

State Is Likely to Ease a Rule on Extra Help for Students

By SHARON OTTERMAN

Published: October 12, 2010

The New York State Board of Regents is set to excuse school districts from a requirement to provide extra help to all students who fail the state’s standardized exams, a number that grew by hundreds of thousands after the state made the exams tougher to pass this year.
The vote by the board, which is scheduled for early next week, would cover more than 125,000 students in New York City alone. City officials, however, played down the issue, saying it would not change their requirement that schools come up with plans to address the needs of all their struggling students.
John King, the state’s deputy education commissioner, said Tuesday that the loosened restriction was intended to reduce the financial burden on districts at a time of shrinking budgets. It is also part of a move by Albany to give districts more flexibility in following a policy that, since 1999, has mandated academic intervention for children who fail the standardized tests.
When the tougher standard on math and English tests for third through eighth graders was announced this summer, Mr. King said, “districts around the state had already passed their budgets, and there was a question of whether the Regents were in the position to essentially impose a new, unfunded mandate.”
Students who would have failed their English or math exams even under the old, easier standard will still receive extra help, usually in the form of tutoring or counseling. The vote would relieve districts of the requirement to provide help to the large number of students who would have passed under the old standards but failed under the new. The relief would last a year.
Shael Polakow-Suransky, the city’s deputy chancellor for performance and accountability, said that while budget cuts meant there would be no extra money to pay for help for the struggling students, schools were expected to improve instruction and have more flexibility in their planning time. “I don’t think the Regents’ vote will have much impact one way or other,” he said.
But some city elected officials and advocates expressed concern that schools would use the leniency as an excuse not to provide help to children who need it.
“I don’t want to see school districts let off the hook here,” said Bill de Blasio, the city’s public advocate. “We had a seismic change, and so far, what we have seen is an attempt to minimize the meaning of it.”
Mr. de Blasio released new data from the city on Tuesday that gave a clearer picture of who exactly those children were. Of the 239,000 city students who failed the English test, 108,000 would have passed last year. Of the 196,000 city students who failed the math test, most, 125,000, would have passed under the easier standard. Surprisingly, the newly failing students were spread relatively evenly throughout the city’s 32 school districts, which vary widely in income and race. Between 20 and 30 percent of students in many districts were in the category.
Bob Lowry, deputy director of the New York State Council of School Superintendents, said an informal survey of 14 rural and suburban districts found that about half planned to use the state’s flexibility to not offer academic intervention to students who would have passed in 2009.
“Most had said early on they were going to do whatever they could, so I’m surprised,” he said, adding that his association supported the move as a way to avoid more painful cuts, like teacher layoffs. There were also, he said, “significant doubts” in the state about the effectiveness of the mandated tutoring policy.
One group, the Coalition for Educational Justice, planned a rally in Brooklyn on Wednesday to ask the Regents to reconsider.
The exemption for the newly failing students for tutoring and intervention was passed on an emergency basis in July, and Mr. King indicated that he expected the Regents to approve it again next week. That sentiment was echoed by Merryl H. Tisch, the Regents chancellor.
“I just think that at the end of the day the focus on these districts to move their kids to meet the new bar is going to be significant and intense,” even without the mandate, Ms. Tisch said.

A version of this article appeared in print on October 13, 2010, on page A23 of the New York edition.

Our Opinion

When schools mandate that their students pass exams to progress to the next grade, yet fail to provide failing students with the help they, they further doom these struggling students, deepening the students' disengagement from school and narrowing their educational opportunities. A BYMC staff member attended the rally held by Coalition for Educational Justice. At the press meeting, Brooklyn Young Mothers' Collective was publicly acknowledged for supporting the campaign.

2010-10-12T09:50:00.000-07:00

Lauded Harlem Schools Have Their Own Difficulties

By SHARON OTTERMAN

Published: October 12, 2010

President Obama created a grant program to copy his block-by-block approach to ending poverty. The British government praised his charter schools as a model. And a new documentary opening across the country revolves around him: Geoffrey Canada, the magnetic Harlem Children’s Zone leader with strong ideas about how American education should be fixed.
Last week, Mr. Canada was in Birmingham, England, addressing Prime Minister David Cameron and members of his Conservative Party about improving schools.
But back home and out of the spotlight, Mr. Canada and his charter schools have struggled with the same difficulties faced by other urban schools, even as they outspend them. After a rocky start earlier this decade typical of many new schools, Mr. Canada’s two charter schools, featured as unqualified successes in “Waiting for ‘Superman,’ ” the new documentary, again hit choppy waters this summer, when New York State made its exams harder to pass.
A drop-off occurred, in spite of private donations that keep class sizes small, allow for an extended school day and an 11-month school year, and offer students incentives for good performance like trips to the Galápagos Islands or Disney World.
The parent organization of the schools, the Harlem Children’s Zone, enjoys substantial largess, much of it from Wall Street. While its cradle-to-college approach, which seeks to break the cycle of poverty for all 10,000 children in a 97-block zone of Harlem, may be breathtaking in scope, the jury is still out on its overall impact. And its cost — around $16,000 per student in the classroom each year, as well as thousands of dollars in out-of-class spending — has raised questions about its utility as a nationwide model.
Mr. Canada, 58, who began putting his ideas into practice on a single block, on West 119th Street, in the mid-1990s, does not apologize for the cost of his model, saying his goals are wider than just fixing a school or two. His hope is to prove that if money is spent in a concentrated way to give poor children the things middle-class children take for granted — like high-quality schooling, a safe neighborhood, parents who read to them, and good medical care — they will not pass on the patterns of poverty to another generation.
“You could, in theory, figure out a less costly way of working with a small number of kids, and providing them with an education,” Mr. Canada said. “But that is not what we are attempting to do. We are attempting to save a community and its kids all at the same time.”
Few would deny that a middle-class renaissance is under way in the sections of Harlem where Mr. Canada and the Harlem Children’s Zone have focused their efforts. The zone extends from 116th to 143th Streets, between Madison Avenue and Frederick Douglass Boulevard.
All children who live in the zone have access to many of its services, including after-school programs, asthma care, precollege advice and adult classes for expectant parents, called Baby College. The organization has placed young teaching assistants, known as peacemakers, in many of the elementary school classrooms in the area and poured money into organizing block associations, helping tenants buy buildings from the city, and refurbishing parks and playgrounds. By linking services, the program aims to improve on early-childhood programs like Head Start, whose impact has been shown to evaporate as children age.
Amid the facades of new condominiums that signal gentrification, however, deep poverty remains. So does low student performance in most of the neighborhood’s public schools, despite modest gains over the past decade and a growing number of better-performing charter schools, a development Mr. Canada helped pioneer.
Last month, the Obama administration awarded $10 million in grants to 21 neighborhood groups around the country to help them plan their own versions of the Harlem Children’s Zone, and the president is seeking $210 million for next year, although appropriations committees in the Senate and the House have earmarked only $20 million and $60 million, respectively.
But there has been some criticism. Grover J. Whitehurst, a co-author of a Brookings Institution analysis of the zone (pdf), said there was still too little evidence that its approach, of linking social services to promote student achievement, justified an investment of federal education dollars, and urged that a more rigorous study be conducted.
In awarding the grants, Education Secretary Arne Duncan emphasized, the government hoped neighborhoods would coordinate and stretch their existing services, while asking the private sector to step up and match financing.
“The cost is going to vary community to community,” Mr. Duncan said, “but we think this is an absolute investment.”
In 2009, the Harlem Children’s Zone had assets of nearly $200 million, and the project’s operating budget this year is $84 million, two-thirds of it from private donations. Last month, the Goldman Sachs Foundation pledged $20 million toward constructing an additional school building. With two billionaires, Stanley Druckenmiller and Kenneth Langone, on the board, its access to capital is unusually strong.
Gary Cohn, the president of Goldman Sachs, who also sits on the children’s zone board, said that while test scores are important, so is treating Harlem’s childhood asthma crisis, which is a cause of absenteeism. “What it’s about to us is dealing with all of the issues these kids encounter,” Mr. Cohn said.
The zone’s two charter schools are open to all city children by lottery. Officially, the schools spend, per student, $12,443 in public money and $3,482 in private financing each year. But that does not include the costs of a 4 p.m.-to-6 p.m. after-school program, rewards for student performance, a chef who prepares healthy meals, central administration and most building costs, and the students’ free health and dental care, which comes out of the zone’s overall budget, said Marty Lipp, the zone’s communications director.
Regular public schools in New York City spend about $14,452 each year per general education student, less than half of which is generally for classroom instruction.
In the tiny high school of the zone’s Promise Academy I, which teaches 66 sophomores and 65 juniors (it grows by one grade per year), the average class size is under 15, generally with two licensed teachers in every room. There are three student advocates to provide guidance and advice, as well as a social worker, a guidance counselor and a college counselor, and one-on-one tutoring after school.
The school, which opened in 2004 in a gleaming new building on 125th Street, should have had a senior class by now, but the batch of students that started then, as sixth graders, was dismissed by the board en masse before reaching the ninth grade after it judged the students’ performance too weak to found a high school on. Mr. Canada called the dismissal “a tragedy.”
On a recent Thursday, the current high school students, neatly attired in blue and white uniforms, got special help in college note-taking skills, and chatted animatedly about velocity in an advanced physics class. Most were well below grade level when they first got to the school and took three or four years to catch up; many are now ahead.
“You really have to put money into personnel,” said Marquitta Speller, who has been the high school principal since January. “I don’t think you can experience the same level of success without the same level of resources.”
But most of the seventh graders, now starting their third year in the school, are still struggling. Just 15 percent passed the 2010 state English test, a number that Mr. Canada said was “unacceptably low” but not out of line with the school’s experience in lifting student performance over time. Several teachers have been fired as a result of the low scores, and others were reassigned, he said.
Giving administrators the ability to fire teachers for poor performance is one of the central suggestions of “Waiting for ‘Superman.’ ” Over all, 38 percent of Promise Academy I’s students in third through sixth grade passed the 2010 English test under the state’s new guidelines, placing it in the lower half of charter schools citywide, and below the city’s overall passing rate of 42 percent. In Harlem as a whole, just 29 percent of children passed.
“My quarrel is not with an effort in Harlem funded largely by philanthropy, it’s with the federal approach to scaling this up,” Mr. Whitehurst said. “It just doesn’t rise to the level of evidence the president and the secretary of education said they were going to apply in determining their investments.”
Promise Academy II, an elementary school that occupies part of a public school building, did better, with 62 percent passing in English, among the top 10 percent of charters. But because it lost more ground than comparable schools, it got a C from the city on its annual A-to-F report card, and an F in the student progress category. Both schools continued to outperform the city in math, with 60 percent passing in one school and 81 percent in the other. A few recent studies have broached the question of what was helping the zone’s students raise attendance and test scores: the interlocking social services, or what was going on in the classroom? But they were based on state test results in years when the exams were easier to pass, and they may now be less conclusive.
One study, by the Harvard researchers Will Dobbie and Roland G. Fryer Jr., found that while Promise Academy students who entered the sixth grade in 2005 had raised their test scores so much by the eighth grade that they had “reversed the black-white achievement gap in mathematics” and reduced it in English, there was “at best modest evidence” that the social programs were driving that success. In 2009, nearly all the students passed the math test.
“The challenge,” the researchers wrote, “is to find lower-cost ways to achieve similar results in regular public schools.”
Mr. Whitehurst’s 2010 Brookings analysis went further, noting that test performance at the two charter schools was only middling among charter schools in Manhattan and the Bronx, even though higher-performing schools, like those in the lauded KIPP network, had no comparable network of cradle-to-college services.
Dave Levin, a co-founder of KIPP, took issue with the study, noting that most of his schools already had counselors and college-advice programs, and all were expanding to serve kindergarten through grade 12, just like Mr. Canada’s. But KIPP schools do try to stick to the per-student spending of the surrounding district “to demonstrate what schools can do on the money that they have.”
“I think there are differences, but we are both deeply committed to meeting all of the children’s needs,” Mr. Levin said.
The Harlem Children’s Zone is not the only block-by-block effort to ease poverty, though it is unusual in its intensive focus on children. The Annie E. Casey Foundation, for example, is wrapping up projects in seven cities called Making Connections Neighborhoods that promoted a “two-generation approach” with job-training programs for parents. An effort that turned around the East Lake Meadows neighborhood in Atlanta used the construction of mixed-income housing and the renovation of a golf course as the fulcrum.
While it is still years away from confirming its broader theories about poverty, the Harlem Children’s Zone has already had some impact on thousands of children. Its after-school college advice office has helped place 650 students in college, and it supports them until they graduate. Its asthma initiative has drastically reduced emergency room visits and missed school days among its 1,000 participants. Preschool students have made bounds in kindergarten readiness. Parent satisfaction in the charter schools, as measured by city surveys, is high.
And Mr. Canada has achieved superhero status among those who admire him for the breadth of his vision. “The fact that the impact has not been proven doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist, because it is just very, very hard to prove something about an effort as multifaceted and interactive as this is,” said Lisbeth B. Schorr, a senior fellow of the Center for the Study of Social Policy in Washington. “A lot of us feel you learn not just from research, but also from experience.”

Our Opinion
BYMC lauds Geoffrey Canada on his success with Harlem's Children Zone. He and other charter schools have created student achievement in some of the most disadvantaged communities in the United States. However, charter schools alone are not a sufficient response to the nation's education crisis, as this solution leaves behind students remaining in mainstream public school. In addition to these charter schools and alternative programs for high-risk students, we need more widespread changes to provide academic rigor and comprehensive social services for all public school students. What public policy changes do you think are necessary to make this change?

2010-10-12T08:59:00.000-07:00

The True Mission of ‘Crisis Pregnancy Centers’

By SUSAN DOMINUS

Published: October 11, 2010

Imagine a young woman riding the subway, consumed by her thoughts: she is pregnant, considering abortion, but unsure of where to turn. She looks up midcommute and notices a sign with three bold words, one beneath the other: “Free abortion alternatives.” At the bottom of the sign are several phone numbers that will lead her to any one of 12 E.M.C. FrontLine Pregnancy Centers around New York City.

The centers — crisis pregnancy centers — provide support for women who would like to continue their pregnancies but are in dire financial straits. They provide useful social service referrals and offer a sympathetic ear for women continuing their pregnancies.
They do not, however, provide a full range of alternatives (like the morning-after pill) or condone all choices. To the contrary, they oppose abortion, and their staff members try their hardest to talk women out of having one, even if that means, according to Planned Parenthood of New York City, showing them graphic images and telling them that “God will never forgive you.”
A yearlong investigation by Naral Pro-Choice New York found that crisis pregnancy centers — in addition to the E.M.C. centers, there are at least four others in the city — feed women information that has been medically refuted (including an old standby, rejected by the National Cancer Institute, that abortions cause higher rates of breast cancer).
Partly in response to findings in that report, Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker, and Councilwoman Jessica S. Lappin, Democrat of Manhattan, are proposing legislation that would require the stance of these crisis pregnancy centers to be clear to all women who visit them — either intentionally, or by accident while seeking a Planned Parenthood clinic across the street, or because the word “abortion” loomed much larger to them on that subway sign than the word “alternative.”
To compensate for ambiguities like unclear signage at the centers, the bill, set to be announced on Tuesday, would require, among other things, signs at the entrance and in the waiting rooms to inform women that the center does not provide abortions or contraceptives approved by the Food and Drug Administration, and that it does not provide referrals for those options, either. Signage would also need to make it clear if no licensed medical professional is on the staff.
There is nothing misleading about the E.M.C. Web site, which boldly announces its agenda in red: “Fighting for life in NYC — the abortion capital of America.” Nor is there anything neutral about what women hear once they are seated across from a staff person at any of those centers.
But the vague signage, the E.M.C. centers’ intentional proximity to Planned Parenthood services, and some of the other centers’ more misleading Web sites can make for confusion. “I think they are deceiving women purposely,” Ms. Quinn said. “But even if you yielded that they weren’t, given how potent the emotions, the politics, isn’t it just smart for us to know who provides what and who doesn’t?”
The signs are not exactly as onerous as the scripts that abortion providers in South Dakota have been required by law to say: that abortion will “terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being.”
Unsurprisingly, Chris Slattery, the president of E.M.C. Pregnancy Centers, considers the New York bill excessive. “They don’t do pro-life counseling,” Mr. Slattery said, referring to Planned Parenthood. “Why don’t we have on Planned Parenthood’s door ‘No pro-life counseling, only pro-abortion counseling’ — O.K.? Let’s just have a level playing field.”
In Mr. Slattery’s mind, his centers are more upfront than Planned Parenthood’s: when asked, he says that he opposes abortion; Planned Parenthood, he argues, never admits to what he believes is an anti-adoption, pro-abortion agenda.
In fact, Planned Parenthood, which has long supported adoption, has seen some of its chapters recently enhance their own adoption counseling. But some conflicted women might imagine that a place so closely associated with abortion rights could not possibly be the right place to hash out the decision — an assumption of polarization seems to kick in reflexively. Based on facts, not just feelings, the crisis pregnancy centers are clearly not an unbiased place for a woman to sort through that choice, and the sooner she knows it, the better.
The term “crisis pregnancy center” is not one of those overly determined phrases that one side or the other of the abortion debate insists upon, but of late, most anti-abortion advocates seem to prefer calling them pregnancy resource centers. It sounds lulling and neutral, does it not? Like the ideal, nonpartisan place where a woman could assume people would understand the depths of her moral dilemma. A pregnancy resource center with no loaded history or agenda whatsoever — if only there were more of them.

E-mail: susan.dominus@nytimes.com

A version of this article appeared in print on October 12, 2010, on page A22 of the New York edition.

Our Opinion

BYMC supports pregnant and parenting students. We make known all available options to the young women with whom we work, believing in their ability and right to make their own choices with the comprehensive knowledge. We believe that these centers often undermine these rights, and we would not encourage young mothers to use these centers as information resources.

2010-10-12T08:34:00.000-07:00

Child Abuse Investigations Didn’t Reduce Risk, a Study Finds

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR

Published: October 11, 2010

Child Protective Services investigated more than three million cases of suspected child abuse in 2007, but a new study suggests that the investigations did little or nothing to improve the lives of those children. In 1973, Congress passed the Child Protective Services Act, designed to encourage more thorough and accurate reporting and record-keeping in child abuse cases. In New York, for example, there are now Child Protective Services offices in every county, paid for in part with federal funds.
Researchers examined the records of 595 children nationwide, all at similar high risk for maltreatment, tracking them from ages 4 to 8. During those years, Child Protective Services investigated the families of 164 of these children for suspected abuse or neglect. The scientists then interviewed all the families four years later, comparing the investigated families with the 431 families that had not been investigated.
The scientists looked at several factors: social support, family functioning, poverty, caregiver education and depressive symptoms, and child anxiety, depression and aggressive behavior — all known to increase the risk for abuse or neglect. But they were unable to find any differences in the investigated families compared with the uninvestigated in any of these dimensions, except that maternal depressive symptoms were worse in households that had been visited.
One possible interpretation of this result would be that the investigated families were at greater risk to begin with, and that the investigation helped them to recover to the expected level of risk. But if this were so, the authors write, households with recent investigations would have greater risk than households with more distant investigations. Statistical analysis found no such association. They concluded that Child Protective Services investigations had little or no effect.
The researchers were in some ways unsurprised by their findings. Even when services are offered, they usually take aim at immediate risks — substance abuse, for example, or domestic violence — not abiding problems like poverty or poor social support. Whatever interventions were offered apparently failed to reduce the risk for future child abuse.
Dr. Kristine A. Campbell, the lead author of the study, said that it may be too easy to blame Child Protective Services. “I believe that C.P.S. has a critical role,” she said. “As a pediatrician, when I’m there in the middle of the night with a child who has been beaten up, I need them. But we have to look at other systems that can really create a safety net for these children.”
Other experts agreed. “I don’t see investigation as an intervention. I see it as an activity to gather information,” said Jill Duerr Berrick, a professor of social welfare at the University of California, Berkeley. “While we might all hope that C.P.S. could do more, in the current context it doesn’t. This is an important study that will get people talking again.” Dr. Berrick was not involved in the work.
The authors acknowledge that the study, which appears in the October issue of The Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, has certain weaknesses: some potentially modifiable risk factors — intimate partner violence and substance abuse, for example — were not included in the data they used. And not all of the five different geographical sites systematically collected information on all risk factors.
In an editorial published with the study, starkly titled “Child Protective Services Has Outlived Its Usefulness,” Dr. Abraham B. Bergman suggests some essential changes: child abuse, because it is a crime, should be investigated by the police; public health nursing services should be the first to respond to concerns of child neglect; social workers should assess appropriate living situations and work with families to obtain services, and not be engaged in law enforcement. But Dr. Bergman, who is a pediatrician at the Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, expressed considerable skepticism that such changes would happen.
Dr. Campbell, an assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Utah, is more optimistic. “I don’t believe that C.P.S. has outlived its usefulness,” she said. “The problem is that someone needs to continue working with these families — those risk factors don’t go away, and I’m not sure we should expect C.P.S. to deal with them. C.P.S. deals with acute issues. We don’t know how to deal with what remains.”

A version of this article appeared in print on October 12, 2010, on page D3 of the New York edition.

Our Opinion

We must change the focus of our social welfare agencies from prosecuting individuals to helping families in need. We must address not only the immediate crisis, the neglect or abuse, but the long-term causes for these crisis - poverty. If these families are not lifted out of poverty by consistent help from a wide range of social services, the circumstances of the children are unlikely to improve.

Waiting For Superman

2010-10-06T07:46:00.000-07:00

Have you seen "Waiting for Superman," the new film about America's current public education system? Follow this link to see the trailer: http://film.waitingforsuperman.com/videos. Please share your opinions about the film.

2010-10-05T12:41:00.000-07:00

Small Schools, Big Difference
How One City Tackled Its Dropout Problem

By Michele Cahill & Robert L. Hughes

A recent study by the policy-research group MDRC brings encouraging news for those seeking to produce rapid progress at scale in high school reform.

In June, the group published an analysis of New York City's small-high-schools initiative, which has been led by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel I. Klein. The initiative closed long-failing large high schools, typically graduating only one in three students, and replaced them with hundreds of new academically themed small high schools educating no more than 450 students.

MDRC found that students in these new small schools, which have no achievement screens, performed better and had higher graduation rates than did their peers in other schools across New York City. Small schools boosted the performance for all students, particularly students of color and underprepared students, immediately and consistently.

While enrolled, students in the new small schools performed better—had better attendance, greater credit accumulation, and higher passing rates on the state Regents exams—than students in other schools. By the fourth year of high school, the new small schools increased overall graduation rates by 6.8 percentage points—68.7 percent vs. 61.9 percent in other schools—which is roughly one-third the size of the gap in graduation rates between white students and students of color in New York City. More importantly, given the need to prepare students for college and meaningful jobs, small schools improved the chance that all students, regardless of class, gender, or minority status, would earn more-rigorous Regents diplomas.

New York City's is the only high school strategy out there that has produced significant graduation-rate gains at scale. But it doesn't need to work just in New York.

These results are significant because of the unusual rigor of the study, the large numbers of students involved, the students' high poverty rates and academic challenges, and the extent of the improvement small schools conferred upon the students. Because New York City students gain admission to nonselective high schools through lotteries, MDRC was able to track students by random assignment—the gold standard in education research. Analyzing a sample of 21,000 students, the study held student demographic differences constant across schools so the impact of the small schools themselves on student achievement could be evaluated.

How is New York City's achievement relevant to the national school reform debate? One study, no matter the level of rigor, needs replication for wide-scale adoption, and MDRC will continue to analyze data about the academic progress and outcomes of the remaining students in the study who are still in school.

But as two people who helped lead the initiative and who worked with hundreds of others on this high school reform, we believe the results reported by MDRC offer both hope and lessons for the many efforts taking place across the nation to turn around the lowest-performing high schools, dramatically reduce school dropout rates, and increase graduation and college readiness. What made New York City's effort different from many other small-schools projects nationwide that have had mixed results? Here are our first principles:

Be bold. From its inception, the small-schools effort was designed to improve the student experience at scale rather than create a single school model. We conceptualized a strategy that would reverse the situation for the lowest-performing 10 percent of high schools. We worked to mobilize hundreds of students, parents, teachers, community groups, and district and labor leaders to understand and own the failure of these schools and commit to action.

Innovate using research-based principles of school design. The New York City Department of Education, along with New Visions for Public Schools and the local teachers' and principals' unions, supported a rigorous planning and approval process. Proposals for new schools needed to demonstrate the capacity to put in place many of the elements of successful change: strong and capable school leadership, high-quality teaching across disciplines, accountability for all students, an academically strong curriculum leading to a Regents diploma, parent and community engagement, and student voice. Only teams that met these criteria were approved by the department to open their schools' doors—and significant numbers of groups did not meet these standards.

Redefine community schools. As part of this process, community groups and service providers, many of which had formerly worked to improve the failing neighborhood schools, found new ways to contribute to student experience. Partnerships in every school focused on integrating youth-development services, high-quality curricula, and instruction and community resources into an extended school day. Partnerships stimulated and offered opportunities for increasing social capital in communities—the talent, caring relationships, opportunities for student involvement, and use of expanded learning environments too often marginal or established outside the school structure.

Define success in terms of student outcomes. New York City developed new schools as "proof points" of what the system could achieve for the same kinds of students in the lowest-performing of its high schools. Rather than set a goal of mere improvement over the abject failure of the schools they replaced (26 percent to 45 percent graduation), the city set a goal of 80 percent graduation and 92 percent attendance. The idea was to spur accelerated change with very high expectations. We invited parents, community leaders, and elected officials from the affected neighborhoods to visit the first set of new schools and see evidence of promise.

Change the district. New York City's systemic Children First reform was critical to the success of these schools by targeting for improvement school leadership and teacher recruitment, and by deploying resources to high-poverty schools, student admissions, accountability, data management, and school-based budgeting. The department of education initiated cross-functional planning, with timetables for delivering on promises and plans and the use of data for planning, instructional improvement, and accountability. Similarly, union leadership joined senior staff in meeting with teacher groups from all the affected schools, helping implement the radical changes needed to overcome what had been intractable school failure. This process enabled the schools to attract good and committed teachers with high expectations for the students and match their expertise and interest with the mission and theme of a new school. We were also able to attract strong and capable principals. New York made use of resources such as the New Teacher Project, Teach For America, and the city's own Teaching Fellows program to bring in new talent.

Perhaps the most important lesson of the reform is that these strategies worked in concert with one another, not in isolation. The impact of this comprehensive approach is clear. According to MDRC, when the small schools that students in the study attended reach their full capacity—they typically start with one grade and add another each year—they will educate 40,000 students. As the report's authors write, "Imagine, for a school district the size of Houston, increasing the percentage of 9th graders who are eligible for on-time promotion by 10.8 percentage points, the percentage of black males in 9th grade who are on track to graduate by 8.5, or the percentage of high school graduates by 6.8 percentage points."

That is the point. All the elements of New York City's small-schools strategy can be replicated in other districts by strong leaders and smart practitioners of secondary reform. Every city in the country faces similar challenges in its high schools. Indeed, that premise informs the high priority given school turnaround by the Obama administration in its Race to the Top initiative. New York City's record couldn't be more germane to discussions across the states about how to implement the administration's models for reforming the lowest-performing schools: New York's is the only high school strategy out there that has produced significant graduation-rate gains at scale. But it doesn't need to work just in New York.

In the same vein, as Congress works to hammer out a consensus around school turnaround language in a reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, lawmakers need to be reminded of the success of small schools in improving the performance of disadvantaged children and work to reimagine what innovative agreement among states, districts, unions, and advocates could do to rapidly accelerate the change.

As a nation, we are late to enact meaningful high school reform; we lose students every day. The challenges remain difficult, but not insuperable. New York City has done it. There's no reason it can't happen with disadvantaged students in cities and states across the country.

Michele Cahill is the vice president for national programs and director of urban education at the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Robert L. Hughes is the president of New Visions, which has created 96 public schools in New York City over the past decade.

Vol. 30, Issue 05, Pages 22,24

Our Opinion

BYMC supports the small schools initiative. We recognize that many struggling students have thrived under the more individualized learning environment of these schools, and we applaud the NYC Department of Education for their success. It is important to remember that individualized attention in itself is not sufficient to provide quality education. We must be sure that these schools are maintaining both individualized attention and academic rigor. How do you think that this aim can be achieved?

As Returns to Education Rises, College Becomes Less Affordable

2010-10-05T09:22:00.000-07:00

Education Pays 2010 Report Shows College Graduates Weather Recession Better Than Others

College Completion Linked to Health and Civic Participation in Addition to Earnings and Employment Security

09/21/10

Washington — People with college degrees earn more and are far less likely than others to experience unemployment. The gaps have widened in recent years, according to Education Pays 2010, the latest report from the College Board Advocacy & Policy Center.

College Board officials emphasized that the widening gap between college graduates and those without a college degree makes efforts to increase educational attainment even more important.

"If it wasn't clear before, it should be abundantly clear now that a college graduate is far more competitive in today's workplace," said College Board President Gaston Caperton. "What's most disturbing is that noncollege graduates are losing ground on salary and employment, a trend that validates the soundness of an investment in a college education."

While unemployment has risen for both groups during the economic downturn, from 2005 to 2009 the difference between the unemployment rates for those with a bachelor's degree and those with a high school diploma increased from 2.3 to 5.1 percentage points. In 2008, four-year college graduates earned nearly $22,000 more than those with just a high school diploma ($55,700 vs. $33,800). The earnings of college graduates increased more rapidly from 2005 to 2008 than the earnings of high school graduates.

"Even for students who use loans to finance all of their tuition, it would take only about 11 years to recoup the cost plus the foregone earnings. Over the long-run, they would be much better off financially than their counterparts without a degree," Caperton added.

The Education Pays 2010 report also establishes a correlation between education and health outcomes, community involvement, and other life patterns.

"Education pays out more than dollars," said Sandy Baum, an independent policy analyst for the College Board and co-author of all three Education Pays reports. "If you have a college degree, you are more likely to exercise, volunteer, vote and read to your kids, and less likely to be obese or smoke. According to the data, people's level of education profoundly affects both the financial and non-financial aspects of their lives."

Education Pays 2010: The Benefits of Higher Education for Individuals and Society is the third Education Pays report from the College Board. The first report was issued in 2004, followed by a 2007 release. Education Pays 2010 is one in a series of college affordability and financial aid reports issued by the CBAPC to spotlight the current state of education in the U.S. and to demonstrate the importance and benefits of college readiness, access and completion. Upcoming activities will identify higher education challenges for students and families; provide assistance with understanding financial aid, and launch a new initiative to encourage college completion.

Our Opinion

At the same time as the employment and salary gap has widened between those with a college diploma, and those with a high school diploma, college is becoming less affordable. The College Board publishes trends in college pricing by state. For New York state, the cost of attending a 2-year public college has risen 6.4%, the cost of attending a 4-year public college has risen 12.5%, and the cost of attending a 4-year private college has risen 4.6% since last year. Visit http://www.trends-collegeboard.com/college_pricing/2_4_tuition_fees_by_state.html?expandable=0 to view this information. The increasing lack of affordability of college affects low-income students, including most pregnant and parenting students, the most, because they may no longer be able to afford to continue their education. As jobs are scarce, these students will slip further into poverty. How do you think we can make college more affordable and accessible to low-income students?

2010-10-01T12:27:00.000-07:00

Students who score below grade level on state tests may no longer get tutoring

BY Meredith Kolodner and Rachel Monahan
DAILY NEWS

Friday, September 17th 2010, 4:00 AM

Too bad, kids!

More than 100,000 students who scored below grade level on state exams won't automatically get the extra help they received last year, the Daily News has learned.

Before raising the bar for what was required to pass standardized tests, state officials quietly scaled back when districts must provide tutoring, saying only kids that bombed the exam have to get the extra help this year.

"They're saying I failed but I can't get help for it? I think that's kind of harsh," said Ashley Serrano, 15, who scored just below grade level on her eighth-grade math and English tests at Public School 34 on the lower East Side of Manhattan.

The state Board of Regents changed the requirements in July before the abysmal test scores came out, citing the "potential fiscal impact on school districts."

Advocates called on the city on Thursday to provide the extra help regardless.

"It's a betrayal of these students to pull out the services they need - at the time they need it most," said Advocates for Children Executive Director Kim Sweet.

A letter from the newly formed Save Our Schools campaign to Schools Chancellor Joel Klein Thursday called for the chancellor to address the "educational crisis" facing the city because 100,000 more students than last year didn't meet grade level standards on the state reading exam alone.

At more than 350 city schools, two-thirds of students aren't meeting the standards.

"If that's not a crisis, I don't know what is," said Zakiyah Ansari, Coalition for Educational Justice parent leader, at a rally Thursday on the steps of the Education Department's headquarters.

The group also called for the city to suspend for a year all the policy decisions based on the tests - such as holding back students, closing schools, issuing progress reports and giving bonuses to teachers and principals.

Education Department spokeswoman Natalie Ravitz rejected the group's demands not to use the high-stakes tests.

"We need to ensure our students get the education it takes to succeed in this increasingly competitive world," said Ravitz. "Delaying necessary reform, even for one year, will only hurt our kids and take us backward."

An internal agency memo to principals encouraged schools to focus on kids who didn't meet grade-level standards - for example, by using the extra 37.5-minute period for instruction to address students' weaknesses.

2010-10-01T12:17:00.000-07:00

Shortage of teachers leading to city's failure to provide required bilingual services: state letter

BY Meredith Kolodner

DAILY NEWS

Wednesday, September 15th 2010, 4:00 AM

Van Buren/Albany Times Union

State officials say some students have been struggling to learn English for six years or more. The state Education Department reprimanded the city for failing to properly educate students who aren't fluent in English, according to a letter obtained by the Daily News. State officials wrote that some students aren't receiving the required bilingual services because of a shortage of teachers - including 1,330 kids who have been struggling to learn English for six years or more. Also, more than 5,500 students weren't assessed within 10 days of being enrolled at a school. The city must take "corrective action" to make sure English-language learners get the assessments and classes they need, according to the letter dated Aug. 31. State officials did say that the city was making progress on addressing the problems, which were first identified last spring. "The [city Education Department] is working to address the issues," said Deputy Education Commissioner John King. "We are confident things are moving in the right direction." City leaders say they are cooperating with the state to bring themselves in compliance. "Providing a quality education for every one of our students, including our many English-language learners, is a top priority," said city Education Department spokesman Matthew Mittenthal. Education advocates are frustrated that more than 8,000 students didn't receive mandated services for the last two years."It's surprising that it's been two years in a row," said Javier Valdes, deputy director at Make the Road New York. "When it happened last year, we raised a red flag. For it to happen again is concerning."

2010-10-01T12:13:00.000-07:00

City Reports Nearly Fivefold Increase in Students Repeating a Grade

NEW YORK TIMES

By SHARON OTTERMAN

Published: September 23, 2010

The number of New York City elementary and middle school students who failed to move on to the next grade skyrocketed this school year, as weak students faced a higher bar on state tests and the broadening of the city’s tough promotion policy.
Nearly five times as many students in the third through eighth grades are being required to repeat a grade this year compared with last year, the city announced on Thursday. The weakest performance was in the eighth grade: 5,017 students, or 8 percent of all eighth graders, were held back.
Because of budget cuts, no additional money will be devoted to the 11,321 students who failed this year, the city said. Instead, the city will let teachers devote about 37 minutes each week that was intended for tutoring struggling students to developing team-based strategies for how to address the failures. One intervention specialist for every 60 schools, on average, will work with principals to develop these plans.
Matthew Mittenthal, a spokesman for the Education Department, said the city had no plans to rethink its promotion policies in light of the higher numbers and tighter finances.
“We feel very strongly that it does no one any good to promote a student who is unprepared for the next grade,” Mr. Mittenthal said. “Clearly, we have a system with a lot of work ahead.”
The city passed its promotion policy amid considerable controversy in the 2003-4 school year. Under its terms, any student who received a 1, the lowest score, on either the state math or English test must be retained, unless that student can pass a similar city version of the test after summer school. Parents can also appeal to have their child’s work reviewed.
In years when city scores on the state tests rose steadily, the number of students scoring low enough to be retained fell to less than 1 percent of the city’s third to eighth graders, or about 2,400 students last year.
But state officials judged those standards too low and raised them this summer to levels it said were meaningful as a predictor of success in college. Simultaneously, to ease the financial burden on districts, Albany relaxed requirements to provide tutoring or counseling to all students who failed the exam.
The city also decided to broaden the number of students to which its promotion policy applied. This year, for the first time, students can be held back for failing state exams in the fourth, sixth and eighth grades, as well as in the third, fifth and seventh grades.
With the higher bar, summer school proved less effective than last year in helping students. After six weeks of a half-day program, only 50 percent of students learned enough to be promoted, compared with 82 percent last year.
Attendance in summer school was poor. Less than three-quarters of third through eighth graders turned up on a typical day. For high school students, who face a different retention policy and were not included in the numbers released on Thursday, average daily attendance was 55 percent.
The city made its final promotion decisions on Aug. 27 and mailed letters to families. In a few cases — fewer than 20, the city estimated — eighth-grade students did not get the notice from their middle schools that they were being held back. So they went to the high schools to which they had been accepted before learning they had to return to middle school.
Kim Sweet, the director of Advocates for Children of New York, an educational-rights watchdog group, said her organization had received “an extraordinary number of calls” regarding eighth graders who had gotten into high schools they were optimistic about “who now have to go back to the same middle schools that failed them in the first place.” That, Ms. Sweet said, “seems like a complete recipe for failure.”

A version of this article appeared in print on September 24, 2010, on page A26 of the New York edition.

Poor Graduation Rates for Students in CUNY

2010-10-01T11:48:00.000-07:00

If You Thought 12th Grade Was Tough, Wait Till 16th New York Times

In the Schools

September 28, 2010, 12:34 pm

By Sharon Otterman

Here is a multiple choice question: Of the students who began an associate’s degree program at the City University of New York in 2006, what percentage graduated within three years?

a) 10 percent

b) 15 percent

c) 35 percent

The answer? a) 10 percent. Give students an additional year, and still only 15 percent of those who started at CUNY earned an associate’s degree, according to newly released city data. For a bachelor’s degree, the news was better, but not good. Forty-seven percent of students who started CUNY in 2003, fewer than half, graduated after six years.

Now an effort is under way to alert city educators at the elementary and secondary levels that the low college completion rates are no longer someone else’s problem. This year, for the first time, the city sent detailed reports to all of its high schools, telling them how many of their students who arrived at the city’s public colleges needed remedial courses and stayed enrolled. This summer also brought tougher standards on state reading and math tests, which caused proficiency rates to tumble, as part of an effort to call “proficient” only those students on track for a college-ready Regents diploma.

Speaking on Monday at the Education Nation event sponsored by NBC, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced two more efforts to strengthen ties between grade school and college. School, his announcement indicated, will no longer end at grade 12. Look out for grade 14 and even grade 16.

In one effort, IBM will work with the Department of Education and CUNY to develop a new high school that will run from grade 9 until the equivalent of grade 14. It is meant as a preprofessional program for students interested in computer science. The idea is that at the end of grade 14, these students will have a college-level associate’s degree and, possibly, a job with IBM.

In a second initiative, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded the the city’s Department of Education $3 million to work with CUNY to align academic standards and curriculum between high school and college. The high CUNY dropout rate, the thinking goes, stems partly from the poor preparation students receive in city schools. Ill-prepared students use limited financial aid dollars on remediation courses, instead of college credits toward a degree.

The goal is, by 2020, to raise the percentage of students finishing their associate’s degree in three years to 25 percent, and in four years to 40 percent. In a statement, the CUNY chancellor, Matthew Goldstein, called on “all K-16 educators to work together, consistently and openly” to reach every student.

Grade 16? Mr. Goldstein was using an increasingly fashionable term that attempts to underscore the continuum between college and high school, not saying high school would suddenly become interminable. The term “K-16” is also a shorthand way to refer to a movement by educators, political officials and business leaders to work together in a more systematic way to strengthen student achievement. The concept sounds good — as long as colleges do not take it literally and start asking students to raise their hand to go to the bathroom.

The Mayor’s Homework

At the start of his speech on Monday, his first major educational address of the school year, Mr. Bloomberg greeted out-of-town guests by highlighting the city’s history of top-notch alumni.

“Rain or shine, I want to welcome everyone to New York City — birthplace of four Supreme Court justices, and one on ‘American Idol,’ ” he said.

While the mayor gets bonus points for his pop cultural reference — Jennifer Lopez, a Bronx native, was just named an “American Idol” judge — there was one problem with his statement. Only three current Supreme Court justices were born here: Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Antonin Scalia moved to Queens when he was 6, but he was born in Trenton.

Tenure Changes

Finally, the way the city awards teacher tenure is about to change. In his speech, the mayor said the city would now require all principals to give untenured teachers one of four ratings each year: highly effective, effective, developing or ineffective. To receive tenure, which happens at the end of a teacher’s third year, a teacher must have “effective” or “highly effective” ratings for two consecutive years.

Currently, principals base tenure decisions on classroom observations and other evidence of student success, including test scores. That will not change. What’s new is the city’s commitment to develop clearer standards for what qualifies a teacher for tenure, and the need for two straight years of good marks.

Developing teachers will face a year of probation to improve, while ineffective teachers will be denied tenure and dismissed. The city’s hope is that the new system will increase the rigor of the process. This year, 89 percent of teachers got tenure, 4 percent were denied and 7 percent got an extra year to improve. In 2005, 99 percent of teachers received tenure, a number so high it led to the misnomer of “automatic tenure.” Principals, the union pointed out, have always had the right to deny tenure, for any reason.

Our Opinion

At Brooklyn Young Mothers' Collective, we see too many young women who, upon graduating from high school and matriculating into college, find themselves woefully unprepared for the academic rigors of college. This trend is especially exacerbated for students attending transfer schools, alternative high schools for students who are under-credited, ove-aged students run under New York City's Department of Education Multiple Pathways to Graduation. We have worked with transfer students who, although they graduated as valedictorians of their transfer schools, were unable to complete one semester of community college because they had not been taught the necessary skills. This is unacceptable.

We support the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's efforts to mitigate this problem by aligning standards between high school and CUNY. Additionally, we support programs which extend high school to allow for more intensive preparation for college. As this is a widespread problem in the New York City school system, we must make such efforts more systematized and widespread so that all students graduate from high school with the academic skills necessary to succeed in college.

To view graduation rates for a particular CUNY program, go to http://www.collegeresults.org/.

Gates Foundation Awards $12-Million to Improve College Completion in 4 Cities

2010-09-28T07:47:00.001-07:00

The Chronicle of Higher Education

September 27, 2010

By Jennifer Gonzalez

Four cities will receive a total of $12-million in grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to improve college-completion rates among their low-income students.
The foundation, along with the National League of Cities, announced on Monday that Mesa, Ariz., New York City, Riverside, Calif., and San Francisco would each receive $3-million over the next year three years. The cities will use the money to support a variety of efforts to get more of their residents to graduate from college, including aligning the academic standards of high schools and colleges and adopting early-assessment and college-preparation strategies.
Also on Monday, Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York announced at an NBC News Education Nation Summit that the City University of New York and IBM would open an unusual high school that would allow students to complete an associate degree.
Mr. Bloomberg said students who graduated with a "qualified record" would be guaranteed a job with IBM and "a ticket to the middle class, or even beyond."
He said the ultimate goal of the effort is to reduce the number of students who need remedial help in college and to double the number of students receiving associate degrees from the City University of New York by the end of the decade.
Allan Golston, president of the U.S. program at the Gates Foundation, said that a high-school diploma was no longer enough in today's economic climate and labor market.
"We must not only ensure that young people have access to college; we must ensure that they go on to complete college and earn a degree or certificate with value in the workplace," he said.
The American labor market will be short three million college-educated workers over the next eight years unless there is a significant increase in the number of young adults who complete college, according to the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. The cities selected for the grants have mayors who recognize the importance of increasing college completion and the long-term effects of an educated work force in their local economies, said Donald J. Borut, executive director of the National League of Cities.
The four cities were selected out of a total of seven that were originally awarded $4-million in planning grants last year. That grant supported a nine-month effort that brought together mayors, public-school superintendents, and community colleges to devise new ways of helping more students graduate from college.
The grants announced on Monday will allow the best plans to move forward. The three cities not selected for further financial support were Dayton, Ohio, Jacksonville, Fla., and Phoenix.
Scott Smith, the mayor of Mesa, Ariz., said he hoped the grant money would allow his city to solve a perplexing problem: Many of its students graduate from high school but decide not to further their education. He said the pattern created a huge gap in terms of attracting jobs to the region and improving the city's economy.
"We need our citizens to reach their highest potential," he said. "This is our future. It is how we can compete."

Pregnant and Parenting Students Access to Education Act (H.R. 5894): A Crucial Step Towards Educational Equality for Young Mothers

2010-09-24T13:41:00.000-07:00

Pregnant and Parenting Students Access to Education Act (H.R. 5894) Background:

• For the first time in over a decade, teen pregnancy rates in the U.S. have increased. Every year, there are approximately 750,000 teen pregnancies and 400,000 teen births. Nearly 3 in 10 girls in the U.S. get pregnant at least once before age 20, and the rates are even higher for girls of color.

• Pregnancy and parenting responsibilities significantly increase a student’s risk of dropping out of school: only half of teen mothers have a high school diploma by age 22, compared to 89 percent of their childless peers.

• In a nationwide survey of dropout youth, close to one-half of all female dropouts and one-third of male dropouts said that becoming a parent played a role in their decisions to leave school.

• The dropout crisis experienced by this group of students has severe short-and long-term consequences for the economic success and well-being of their families and communities, as well as our nation. For example, the children of dropouts are more likely to drop out of school themselves.

• This alarming trend stems from the many barriers that pregnant and parenting teens face in enrolling, attending, and succeeding in school, such as discrimination, the challenge of juggling schoolwork with parenting responsibilities, and lack of access to affordable, quality child care, transportation, and other critical services. Schools can and should take steps to engage and re-engage pregnant and parenting students by implementing voluntary programs that provide or arrange educational and related services for them.

• Providing supports for pregnant and parenting students can go a long way toward improving high school graduation rates, especially because pregnant and parenting students often are highly motivated. For example, in the same nationwide survey of dropout youth, those who left school to care for a family member or because they became a parent were more likely than any other group of dropouts to say they would have worked harder if their schools had demanded more of them and provided the necessary supports.

What the Pregnant and Parenting Students Access to Education Act does:

The Pregnant and Parenting Students Access to Education Act provides the necessary framework and resources to states and school districts to ensure that pregnant and parenting students have equal access to educational opportunity. Specifically, the legislation:

• Enables states to create a plan for the education of pregnant and parenting students, provide professional development and technical assistance to school districts, coordinate services with other state agencies, and disseminate information, among other activities.

• Establishes a state coordinator and school district liaisons for the education of pregnant and parenting students.

• Requires school district grantees to provide academic support services for pregnant and parenting students; assist students in gaining access to affordable child care, early childhood education, and transportation services; engage in student outreach, recruitment and retention; provide professional development for school personnel; and revise school policies and practices to remove barriers and encourage pregnant and parenting students to continue their education.

• Allows districts to provide parenting and life skills classes; case management services; referrals to pregnancy prevention, primary health care, family planning, mental health, substance abuse, housing assistance, legal aid, mentoring, or other services needed by the student; and to address school climate issues, including illegal discrimination against and stigmatization of pregnant and parenting students.

• Collects and reports data on pregnant and parenting students annually, including educational outcomes, and requires a rigorous evaluation of the program.

Source: National Women's Law Center

The Brooklyn Young Mothers' Collective

The Blog Has Moved!

Dropout Rates Dropping, but Don't Celebrate Yet

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Report Finds Low Graduation Rates at For-Profit Colleges

Shael Polakow-Suransky Named Second-in-Command to Black

Parents Express Opposition To Schools Chancellor Selection

At Chelsea High, Seniors Go Online to Make Up Classes They Failed

By Beth Fertig

Commissioner names panel of experts to screen new chancellor

Gates Urges School Budget Overhauls

Mayor’s early budget calls for 6,100 teacher layoffs next year

Class Sizes Grew in City Despite Deal to Cut Them

By SHARON OTTERMAN, Published: November 17, 2010

Sec. Duncan: Districts Need to Rethink Class Size, Salary Structure

Class Sizes Jump Again

Nov. 16, 2010by Maisie McAdoo

In her book, chancellor appointee says she’s no data “whiz”

City news outlets join suit over teacher effectiveness scores

Bloomberg Defends Black

By MICHAEL HOWARD SAUL

Trends: Non-educators Leading School Districts

Finding support in the ranks

Expectations not always aligned

NYC School Closings: What You Need to Know

How Does the U.S. Compare?

By Amanda Ripley

More Departures Likely At DOE, Insiders Say

Mayor Takes Idea of Education Outsider to New Level

By ELISSA GOOTMAN and JENNIFER MEDINA

Published: November 10, 2010

Top DOE finance official resigns in wake of Klein’s departure

Chancellor Klein’s exit: the best kept secret in the DOE

NYC Chancellor Joel Klein Steps Down!

By SHARON OTTERMAN and JENNIFER MEDINA

Published: November 9, 2010

DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION RELEASES FIRST DIRECTORY OF HIGH SCHOOL DIPLOMA AND GED PROGRAMS

More High School Students Acquire Online Credits

By BRIAN THEVENOT and SARAH BUTRYMOWICZ, Published: November 4, 2010

The Big Fix

Are you a New York City Parent?

New site gives voice to mothers of color, launches with free giveaways

Ups and Downs in New Report Cards for New York City High Schools

Wednesday, November 03, 2010

By Beth Fertig

Class Struggle The rise and fall--and rise?--of Baltimore's community schools movement

Remember to Vote!!!

The GothamSchools voter’s guide for an education election

In Sharp Rise, 47 City Schools May Close Over Performance

By SHARON OTTERMAN, Published: October 28, 2010

One Standardized Test to Rule Them All

The Misuse of Test Scores to Evaluate Teachers

Read our Newsletter!

Working Single Mothers Lag Behind in Income

CUNY Graduation Rates Hearing at the NYC Council

Rethinking New York City's Response to Chronic Absence

Taskforce Meeting

Taskforce Meeting Tomorrow!

State Is Likely to Ease a Rule on Extra Help for Students

By SHARON OTTERMAN

Published: October 12, 2010

A version of this article appeared in print on October 13, 2010, on page A23 of the New York edition.

Our Opinion

Lauded Harlem Schools Have Their Own Difficulties

By SHARON OTTERMAN

Published: October 12, 2010

The True Mission of ‘Crisis Pregnancy Centers’

By SUSAN DOMINUS

Published: October 11, 2010

A version of this article appeared in print on October 12, 2010, on page A22 of the New York edition.

Our Opinion

Child Abuse Investigations Didn’t Reduce Risk, a Study Finds

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR

Published: October 11, 2010

A version of this article appeared in print on October 12, 2010, on page D3 of the New York edition.

Our Opinion

Waiting For Superman

As Returns to Education Rises, College Becomes Less Affordable

Education Pays 2010 Report Shows College Graduates Weather Recession Better Than Others

College Completion Linked to Health and Civic Participation in Addition to Earnings and Employment Security

Nov. 16, 2010
by Maisie McAdoo