Popping Bloomberg-Klein's Final Balloon of Hot, Foul Air

The Times has documented in some detail the fraud designed to make Bloomberg-Klein look like miracle workers in producing soaring City test scores.  After Bloomberg's reelection, the fraud was exposed, and the scores dropped like bowling balls from the top of the Empire State Building. 

Klein's only remaining accomplishment, then, has become the steep rise in graduation rates during his tenure, but that, too, has already been demonstrated to be sham.  Those rising numbers were accomplished with another Enronesque tactic called "credit recovery," a bogus scam to push up graduate rates by bribing CEO principals with big bonuses to do whatever was necessary to get students the credits needed to "graduate."  All explained here by David Bloomfield for Gotham Schools in 2009, a piece entitled "Joel Klein's Race to the Bottom":

by David Bloomfield

By failing to set standards or even track the use of credit recovery in New York City schools, Chancellor Joel Klein has provided a convenient back door for students to pass courses and graduate without subject mastery. The State Education Department has now capitulated to this agenda by promulgating a draft policy based on unpublicized negotiations with the city Department of Education. If implemented, the policy would do nothing to stem this tide of empty credits but, rather, encourage credit recovery by officially recognizing and regularizing it but with inadequate controls and monitoring.

What is credit recovery? The term is sometimes used technically to denote a formal program, such as summer school, with specified content, attendance, and assessment requirements. But the term is widely applied to any effort to help students pass courses that they would otherwise fail because of incomplete or below-standard work. These students substitute the extra work for regular assessments by writing a paper, taking a test, or providing some other evidence of proficiency in a narrow course topic.

Under the new state policy, schools would need only create a committee (which would not include the student’s teacher) to approve a student’s customized credit recovery plan for a course. The same committee would then review evidence of student proficiency once the plan was completed. The State does not require minimum class attendance or proof that the plan addresses all subject matter deficiencies. If a teacher says a book report suffices to show proficiency, the committee would not need to inquire beyond the teacher’s word. No record of how many courses a student passed using CR would be maintained. There would be no monitoring of assignments’ rigor or the frequency of CR’s use by teachers, schools, or the system as a whole.

What is the problem, though, with giving students a second chance at passing or completing a course by filling in the gaps?  First, without standards, there is no way to determine whether credit recovery assignments actually fill those gaps. Second, a course is more than the sum of its parts. For example, a student might fail a test in one unit of geometry and possibly another but if he or she understands other basic geometric concepts, they will likely pass the course. Course failure demonstrates significant overall deficits in factual and conceptual knowledge that a single assignment or mini-course can not erase. But passing the course will mean a lot to the student’s, the teacher’s, and the school’s appearance of success.

Helping students over the hump through credit recovery is not limited to New York City. Nationally, education publishers including Plato and Pearson sell credit recovery kits. But the DOE’s emphasis on data-based accountability, particularly high school credit accumulation and graduation, seems to have resulted in an explosion of credit recovery in New York. Schools are under tremendous pressure, through school report cards’ A-F rating, to produce progress in these metrics.

Credit recovery is a direct route to helping students and schools achieve the 10 credits each year that serve as the DOE’s benchmark of success. Then, with passing grades and a little luck on the Regents — often obtained through narrow and repeated test preparation — students are on pace to graduate. For hundreds of school principals, looking over their shoulders to stay ahead of the peer group against which they are measured, this is a matter of professional life and death. If one principal looks the other way on credit recovery in their schools, others are penalized for more rigorous standards. This race to the bottom will now be officially sanctioned by the State, urged on by Chancellor Klein.

If we do not reject this new policy proposal, more children will seem to be succeeding in high school and more will seem to be graduating with college- and job-readiness. But this will be a mirage. We will be gaming the system for students and administrators alike. We will be saluting proxies rather than real academic achievement.
The Board of Regents needs to put an end to this charade by rejecting this mockery and re-establishing high academic expectations for our youth.

David C. Bloomfield heads the Educational Leadership Program at Brooklyn College, CUNY and is an elected parent member of the Citywide Council on High Schools. He is the author of American Public Education Law.

Another attempt to show American children are bad at math

Jay Mathews is worried about math scores. My comment posted below.

Even our best kids lag in math--middle schools to blame

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/class-struggle/2010/11/even_our_best_kids_lag_in_math.html

By Jay Mathews

I am usually among the skeptics when international comparisons make U.S. schoolchildren look as if they spend their class time playing video games. I am not entirely sold on the conclusions of a new study just published in the journal Education Next.

But there is enough believable bad stuff there to wonder why, after many years of mediocre results, we have not discarded our notoriously free and easy way of educating middle school students.

The study by Eric A. Hanushek and Paul E. Peterson of Stanford's Hoover Institution, and University of Munich economist Ludger Woessmann, reveals that only 6 percent of U.S. eighth and ninth graders score at an accomplished level in math on the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). As a test, PISA has its problems, but the authors link its results closely to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the most reliable America test of student achievement, and provide what looks to be a fair comparison.

We rank behind 30 other countries. Leading the international pack in the 2006 version of PISA was Taiwan with 28 percent of students reaching the accomplished level in math. Hong Kong, South Korea and Finland had at least 20 percent.

The authors anticipated some complaints from us skeptics, such as, the U.S. being unfairly handicapped by its many recent immigrants and low-income minorities. The authors said, okay, let's look just at white U.S. students. The accomplished portion rose to only 8 percent. When they looked at just U.S. students with at least one parent with a college degree, the number went up only to 10.3 percent.

The authors blame our overall failure to raise standards for teaching and learning, particularly in math and science. I blame our middle schools. Elementary schools are also a problem, but the way we run middle schools has to be a prime culprit, since we are talking about results for eighth and ninth graders.

For more than two decades our middle schools have followed a warm and welcoming system of dividing students into teams, with each team having a math teacher, a science teacher, an English teacher and a social studies teacher whom they saw each day for roughly equal periods.

The educators who conceived this approach felt it introduced surly and fragile early adolescents to all the major high school subjects, without the pressures of SAT tests or Advanced Placement courses or college admission competition. Nobody cared what kind of grades they got in middle school. The colleges would never see them. As the new study shows, this system has not produced much progress, at least in math.

Middle school students have had to take state tests under the No Child Left Behind law, but those results rarely had any effect on their grades or their chances of being promoted. Many middle schools introduced Algebra I, a high school course, to eighth grade, but the NAEP data suggest that it has not been well taught.

Brookings Institution scholar Tom Loveless, an expert on both PISA and math education, told me "middle schools once offered special, accelerated classes to high achieving math students. Today, the push has been to make those classes available to all students--or not to offer them at all."

This study includes an intriguing analysis thrashing those who say NCLB hurts advanced kids because of its emphasis on basic proficiency. If that were true, they say, "we should see a decline in the percentage of students performing at NAEP's advanced level subsequent to passage of the 2002 federal law. In mathematics, however, the opposite has happened. The percentage performing at the advanced level was only 3.7 percent in 1996 and 4.7 percent in the year 2000."

The authors conclude that the standards have to go higher and the teaching has to get better. That makes sense to me, but ignores a social bias in this country. Careers in math and science lack the prestige they enjoy in Asia and parts of Europe. I am not sure how we fix that. The authors insist our solution to date is the wrong one.

"Admittedly, the United States could simply ignore the needs of its own young people and continue to import highly skilled scientists and engineers who were prepared by better-performing schools abroad," they say. "But even such a heartless, irresponsible strategy relies on both the nature of immigration policies and the absence of better opportunities abroad, two things on which we might not want the future to depend."

So what did your middle schooler learn this year? In most cases, not much. That may, finally, have to change.

Read Jay's blog every day, and follow all of The Post's Education coverage on Twitter, Facebook and our Education Web page.

MY COMMENT: Just a few countries, not so in reading and science, strong evidence for effect of poverty, other factors, percentage or absolute numbers?

A look at the full report, available at the Education Next website, suggests that these researchers looked hard to find evidence of a STEM crisis, and kept looking until they found a statistic that seemed to show it.

The math gap is caused by just a few very high-scoring countries– Taiwan with 28%, Hong Kong with 24% and Korea with 23% of students at the advanced level. Without these countries, US children with at least one parent with a college education do pretty well. Our highest scoring state, Massachusetts, has 17% of its students at the advanced level, making it 5^th in the world, not counting the three exceptionally high scorers.

The three highest scoring countries in math do not do nearly as well in science and reading.

Taiwan, first in math, is near the bottom of all countries in percent of students scoring in the top group in reading, and loses to all states in the US except Mississippi, and this is based on ALL American students in a state, not just those with a college-educated parent. Massachusetts would rank fourth in the world, nearly tying for third. And other states would rank highly too, again, counting ALL students.

Fifteen US states (again, all students) have a higher percentage of top science students than Korea (third in math) does.

The authors did not discuss studies that considered social class and poverty levels, and concluded that American children attending low poverty schools score very well. Bracey (2009) concluded that on the PIRLS reading test, American children attending low poverty schools (25% or less) outscored the top scoring country, Sweden. Bracey also pointed out that "if the students in schools with 24-49.9% poverty constituted a nation, it would rank fourth among the 35 participating nations" (p. 155). Payne and Biddle (1999) reported that when we consider only middle-class children who attend well-funded schools, our math scores are near the top of the world.

Tienken (2010) cites studies showing that a myriad of additional factors operate that artificially depress American students' scores on international tests, including the fact that the US tests nearly all students. Some other countries are selective – on TIMSS, this includes Russia (only native speakers of Russian), Israel (only native speakers of Hebrew), Switzerland (only highest performing regions, 16/26 cantons), Spain (excluded Cataluna), and Italy (excluded high-poverty regions). I don't know if this is true of PISA.

Finally, absolute numbers are more relevant than percentages. Tienken points out that the US had 25% of world's top science achievers on PISA, 2009. China had one percent.

Bracey, G. 2009. Education Hell: Rhetoric Versus Reality. Alexandria, VA: Educational Research Service.

Payne, K. and Biddle, B. 1999. Poor school funding, child poverty, and mathematics achievement. Educational Researcher 28 (6): 4-13.

Tienken, C. 2010. Common core state standards: I wonder? Kappa Delta Phi Record 47 (1): 14-17.

Jay's Missing Footnote for Today's KIPP Ad

As the oligarchs' leading print media promoter for more tests, more charter chain gangs like KIPP, and more data to back up the data that produces the data, Jay Mathews uses his WaPo column to pump these causes on a daily basis.  Today he returns to a snippet from a 2008 SRI California study of KIPP schools to make the case for longer school days:

On the longer-school-day side, we have programs such as KIPP, whose charter middle schools usually have nine-hour school days that last until 5 p.m., plus required three-week summer school and many Saturday sessions. A survey of KIPP students who completed the middle school program showed a 42 percentile gain in math and a 28 percentile gain in reading over four years.

Actually, Jay has chopped off a half hour for some reason (embarrrasing maybe?), since the study he refers to above, “San Francisco Bay Area KIPP Schools: A Study of Early Implementation and Achievement,” clearly notes the 9.5 hour school day (almost half of which is spent on math and reading), the 60 percent increase in school time overall,  and the 65 hour work week for teachers.  What Jay does not mention, too, is the winnowing effect over time that eliminates the weak and recalcitrant "miscreants" in order to maintain the KIPP brand that people like Mathews promote without noting KIPP's abusive psychological sterilization program or the KIPP attrition rates for both students and teachers that would be entirely unsustainable and unacceptable in regular public schools. 

From a 2008 post, quoting the SRI Bay Area KPP study:

Together, the four schools began with a combined total of 312 fifth graders in 2003-04, and ended with 173 eighth graders in 2006-07 (see Exhibit 2-3). The number of eighth graders includes new students who entered KIPP after fifth grade (p.12).

That amounts to a 55% attrition rate, even when adding all the new enrollees during the three years. Imagine what the attrition rate might be if the "researchers" took a measure of the beginners vs. completers without the new recruits.

And who are the students most likely to stick with KIPP? The ones with higher test scores when they entered, of course. And who are the students who are leaving KIPP? You guessed it, the low performing students:

We found that students who remained at KIPP had higher incoming scores in both reading and mathematics than did their peers who entered KIPP in fifth grade but exited before completing the program (see Exhibit 2-5). We also considered the question from another perspective: Are students with lower scores more likely to exit KIPP? We used fall fifth-grade SAT10 scores to predict those exiting KIPP and found that the probability of a student’s leaving KIPP before completing eighth grade is higher for those with lower entering scores (pp. 15-16).

If the segregated, total compliance KIPP containment schools represent the best that Mathews and the urban mind engineers can come up to recommend as the replacement for urban public schools, what does that say about corporate America's unacknowledged racism, classism, and utter lack of imagination and understanding of human needs, of children's needs?  But then these "postivized" hacks are the philosophical descendants of the 20th Century visionaries who inspired 30 states to adopt eugenical sterilization laws.

The Cathleen Black appointment: A precedent

Many people are upset that the mayor of the New York City has appointed a personal friend with no teaching experience as head of education. They are concerned that the new head will continue policies of heavy testing and top-down management that have failed in the past.

There is a precedent: Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.

Will Our Students Save Education?

Bloomberg, The Little Oligarch Who Could

For those who suffer from the debilitating illusion that there is some scrap of public accountablility for mayors appointed dictators of urban school systems, Prince Bloomberg provides the proper and bitter antidote.  Years of fraudulent achievement data provided the edge to get Bloomberg re-elected with no repercussions.  So now the Prince's disdain for democratic process has become so complete that Meryl Tisch, or even Klein himself, didn't know that Bloomberg was anointing another Upper East Side pal with no background in education to run the New York City Public Schools, the nation's largest ostensibly-public school system.  Give that rich runt an "A" for audacious! 

The Times has a few juicy details, a couple of which are provided here:

. . . . Even Mr. Klein, who had spent eight years running the nation’s largest school system, did not know whom his successor would be until Monday. And not until 30 minutes before the news conference — or just a little before reporters were told, vaguely, of an important announcement — did Mr. Klein inform his leadership team, apologizing for the secrecy of a process over which he said, with resignation, he had no say.

Inexplicable as it may have seemed to outsiders, the secrecy around the search for someone to run the schools crystallized two tenets of the Bloomberg era: the mayor’s faith in the ability of business leaders to fix the ills of government, and his keen dislike of drawn-out public debates that might derail his agenda.

And, in what has become a Bloomberg hallmark, the mayor relied on someone he knew through business and social networks, someone squarely in his comfort zone of wealthy and socially prominent Upper East Side residents, someone with whom he has shared many friends and colleagues, dinners and drinks.. . . .


. . . .Exactly when Mr. Bloomberg began courting Ms. Black for the job is not clear. Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers, said that when he arrived at a diner for breakfast with the mayor on Oct. 19, he ran into Ms. Black, who appeared to have just met with Mr. Bloomberg. The mayor introduced her to the union chief but made no mention of her having interest in or connection to the schools.

Mr. Bloomberg and Ms. Black, along with Mr. Klein and Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of News Corporation, are regular attendees of the New York investment bank Allen & Company’s annual conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, the exclusive gathering each July of the country’s publishing elite. 

Mr. Murdoch, who provided Mr. Klein with a job as a new executive vice president of News Corporation, was also apparently unaware of the mayor’s choice of Ms. Black until the day of the announcement, according to two people who spoke anonymously so as not to jeopardize access to Mr. Murdoch. These two people said Mr. Murdoch, who has grown more interested in education, had for months been discussing a possible job with Mr. Klein, over meals and at industry events. Mr. Klein said the two met on Sunday to hammer out the details.. . . .

Could we see a merger between Bloomberg and Murdoch, or would such a move simply be too obvious?

Ren2010: a Model of Parent/Teacher/Public Involvement?

DFER's Joe Williams opines on the appointment of Black in the NY Post:

New York City's public schools are dramatically better today than they were eight years ago, in large part thanks to the tireless work of Chancellor Joel Klein. But there's still a long way to go, and the city needs its next chancellor, Cathie Black, to chart a clear path forward, and quickly.

If Black wants to finish what Chancellor Klein started, she must work to make parents, teachers and the public feel invested in the process.

Chicago's Renaissance 2010 plan is an excellent example of this: It let the city's leaders explain to Chicogoans exactly what they hoped to accomplish, and then frame each reform, like closing schools, in the broader effort to improve the system. Mayor Cory Booker is starting a similar process in Newark.

That's interesting, Joe: Black should work to make parents, teachers, and the public feel "invested in the process"; Ren2010 is a good example of "this" (presumably getting parents, teachers and the public "invested"); and Ren2010 is a good example because it let city leaders (ie Chicago's corporate leaders) explain to Chicogoans what they wanted to accomplish.  In just two sentences, Joe goes from pushing for Black to get the public involved to praising the top-down strategy of Ren2010.  Baffling!

Formative Assessment and Next-Gen Technotwits

Below are some words of caution from Margaret Heritage's paper, "Formative Assessment and Next-Generation Assessment Systems: Are We Losing an Opportunity?":

Yet what is striking in current discussions of next-generation assessment systems is that despite the evident connection between the processes involved in formative assessment, which Black and Wiliam identified in their 1998 review, and learning theory, the predominant paradigm for formative assessment in the U.S. persists as one of measurement – formative assessment, construed within a testing culture, as a test. This is not to say that an instrument cannot be used as a formative assessment – it can – in the sense that the information yielded can provide indications of students’ learning status relative to the “gap” that teachers and students can use to make adjustments to learning while that learning is developing. The point here is the relative emphasis given to formative assessment as an instrument. Notwithstanding references in next-generation assessment proposals to “using information formatively” or to “formative processes” the conception of formative assessment expressed is one of an instrument. Absent from this view are notions of consistently working from students’ emerging understandings within the ZPD, supporting learning through the instructional scaffolding, including feedback, and the active involvement of students in the assessment/learning process – all of which are hallmarks of effective formative assessment. Instead of considering formative assessment within the context of a measurement paradigm, perhaps we should be focusing on firmly situating the process of formative assessment within a learning community.

The second half of this paragraph is particularly important.  Few of those pushing for next-generation assessments understand formative assessment - as envisioned by thoughtful practitioners -  is a process, not an instrument (or mostly data collection with a few metrics spit out).  Yet another case of "reformers" picking out a very promising idea and twisting it into something very different.

Goldman Sees Gold

From Marketwatch:

PRESS RELEASE
Nov. 9, 2010, 10:28 a.m. EST
LISC, Goldman Sachs Partner on Charter School Financing Facility

NEW YORK, Nov. 9, 2010 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- The Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) and The Goldman Sachs Group Inc. today announced the formation of a $25 million charter school facility that will finance the development of approximately 16 charter schools over the next two years.

The Goldman Sachs Charter School Loan Facility will be capitalized by Goldman Sachs and credit-enhanced by funds awarded by the US Department of Education to LISC, which will also manage the facility and its lending program. LISC currently supports 130 charter schools nationwide. This facility will be focused on the greater New York City and New Jersey areas. In total, the fund is expected to leverage approximately $100 million in additional capital to support high-quality charter school facilities.

"Providing financing for charter school facilities that benefit low- and moderate-income families is a critical component of the firm's commitment to comprehensive community development," said Alicia Glen, Managing Director and Head of the Urban Investment Group at Goldman Sachs. "To date, the Urban Investment Group has committed approximately $150 million for charter school facilities in New York and New Jersey, and we are thrilled to partner with LISC, who has been a leader in charter school finance."

Since 1997, LISC has provided $127 million in charter school financing through direct loans, credit enhancement and New Markets Tax Credit investment authority. Supporting quality local schools is part of LISC's Building Sustainable Communities initiative, a comprehensive strategy to help transform distressed neighborhoods into good places to live, work, do business and raise families.

"Access to a quality education is fundamental to families and is at the core of healthy communities," noted Michael Rubinger, LISC President and CEO. "By funding this facility, Goldman Sachs ensures that thousands of low-income children will have access to innovative local schools that also help revitalize blighted neighborhoods."

"Securing and operating quality facilities are among the greatest challenges for charter schools," noted Reena Bhatia, Director with LISC's Educational Facilities Financing Center. "There are 1.5 million children educated through charter schools and 400,000 additional kids on waiting lists. There is tremendous need, especially in low-income communities.

"In the current economic environment, meeting that need is more difficult than ever," she continued. "Despite the fact that charter schools are a high-performing line of community development lending, private financing is severely constrained. That's why this Goldman Sachs facility is so critical. It offers children without a decent school option the chance at the educational opportunities they deserve."

Shades of a Juan Gonzalez article from earlier this year.

The Kanamits of Kaplan "Serving the Poor"

I don't want to pick on Kaplan too much, for it is surely not the only corporate culture devoted to "serving the poor."  Fortunately, though, for many millions who were lined up to fly away on what they expected be a great educational adventure, a few hardworking Congressmen have been able to translate Kaplan's slick catalog, "To Serve the Poor:"  
DON'T GET ON THAT EDU-SHIP, FOLKS --"TO SERVE THE POOR"--IT'S A COOKBOOK!

From NYTimes:

. . . .“We purchased colleges that served mostly poor students, and we have embraced that role,” Mr. Graham said. “For students with risk factors, older working students with children, Kaplan has dramatically better graduation rates than community colleges.”

The company has acknowledged, however, that the new rules could hurt Kaplan. According to 2009 data released this summer by the Department of Education, only 28 percent of Kaplan’s students were repaying their student loans. That figure is well below the 45 percent threshold that most programs will need to remain fully eligible for the federal aid on which they rely. By comparison, 44 percent of students at the largest for-profit, the University of Phoenix, were repaying their loans.

Kaplan is facing several legal challenges. The Florida attorney general is investigating eight for-profit colleges, including Kaplan, for alleged misrepresentation of financial aid and deceptive practices regarding recruitment, enrollment, accreditation, placement and graduation rates.

Kaplan is also facing several federal whistle-blower lawsuits whose accusations dovetail with the findings of an undercover federal investigation of the for-profit industry this summer, including video of high-pressure recruiting and unrealistic salary promises.. . .