I’ll try to stay reasonably serious this week, but some things are just too ridiculous to pass up. On Friday, the New York City Department of Education (DOE) announced that it had selected the NYC Leadership Academy to provide principal training and development services. The press release proclaimed that the Leadership Academy was “chosen from among multiple bidders in a competitive procurement process.” The DOE is negotiating a five-year contract for a total of $50 million, beginning Tuesday, July 1.

Long-time followers of New York City public schooling are aware that the NYC Leadership Academy was created by the DOE in 2003, and Chancellor Joel Klein serves as a Director of the organization. (At least according to the organization’s IRS filings – its website doesn’t list him as a director.) The Leadership Academy website describes the Leadership Academy as “the centerpiece of the NYC Department of Education’s transformational strategy,” a phrase that also appears in DOE press releases, and the staff have e-mail addresses provided to employees of the DOE. The April press release announcing this extraordinary competitive procurement spent more time crowing about the Leadership Academy’s accomplishments than describing the request for proposals.

So: The DOE had a competitive bidding process to award a contract to an organization that Mayor Mike Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein had created and publicly supported over the past five years. Remarkably, the report of the award indicated that there were three other bidders. I can only imagine who would seriously think they had a shot at this.

Probably the same people who think they have a shot at this. In related news, skoolboy, who has been happily married for many years, is announcing a competitive procurement for spousal services. The successful bidder will have experience attending to the needs of a partner like skoolboy. Prior joint ownership of property with skoolboy and collaborative experience raising a family a plus. The date of the bidder’s conference will be announced later.

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Andrew Beveridge, the New York Times' demographer, turns his attention to New York City's gifted program in this Gotham Gazette column. Based on his estimates, here's the bottom line on the change in gifted and talented admissions in NYC:

Non-Hispanic whites and Asians almost triple their percentage, while the percent non-Hispanic black and Hispanic plunges. In short, students accepted in the Gifted and Talented program are not all representative of the students in New York City, and are less so this year than last year.

Posted by eduwonkette at 9:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Sol Stern nails it in his article on test score inflation:

The premise of NCLB, as of so many current education reform efforts, is that schools must serve the interests of children, not the interests of the adults who work in the system. But in a classic case of unintended consequences, the widespread test inflation produced by NCLB is serving only the interests of the adults. New York education officials like Mills, New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, and his schools chancellor, Joel Klein—along with teachers’ union leaders like Randi Weingarten—advance their varied agendas in the glow of inflated test scores. But the children are the big losers. Sometime in the next decade, the white children of Lake George and the black children of New York City will come face to face with reality. On a high school math Regents test—or on an SAT test, or in a college remediation course—they will discover that they are not quite as proficient as New York State once assured them.

Posted by eduwonkette at 9:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Though we can thank the No Child Left Behind Act for drawing our attention to the "achievement gap" - which is now loosely deployed to reference gaps between African-American and white/Asian, poor and advantaged, suburban and urban, or even male and female kids - it's also done us a great disservice by distorting the way that we measure, and think about, differences between groups.

There are at least two ways of thinking about the relationship between achievement and kids' life chances. The first is to consider, in absolute terms, the set of skills that students have. The second views achievement as relative. Most coveted opportunities - jobs, college admission, a good grade in a college course, or positive evaluations in the workplace - are not divvied up based on students crossing an arbitrary line of proficiency or competence. We don't give everyone a job who's passed a basic reading test, nor do we admit everyone to UC-Berkeley who's received more than a 700 on the verbal SAT. Every student in a college course at NYU can't get an A, and faculty measure students' performance against others to assign grades. In short, all of these decisions are made by comparing the performance of those in a pool, and choosing those who come out near the top.

The proficiency view, to my mind, is certainly important to consider when we are thinking about building stocks of human capital. But if we are concerned about inequality and social stratification - ensuring that, on average, every demographic and socioeconomic group is equally prepared to compete in higher education and the workplace - relative achievement measured on a continuous scale is what matters, not proficiency rates.

Which brings us to how we currently measure "achievement gaps" between social groups, and why this method is tragically flawed. For example, if you look at the NYC press release from this year's test scores, you'll see that gaps are defined as the difference between the percentage of students that are proficient in each group. If the gap in proficiency between black and white students was 29 percentage points last year in 4th grade ELA, and now is 26 percentage points, we hear that the gap has narrowed by 3 percentage points. But it's possible that the gap in the achievement that matters - the continuous measure of achievement - has actually grown.

Let me give a brief example to illustrate. If we use the proficiency logic, the achievement gap that separates the Bronx and the affluent suburbs of Westchester is closing. And indeed on Monday, Mayor Bloomberg crowed that NYC is catching up to the suburbs. If we take a look at 7th grade math, we see that there was a 30 percentage point Westchester/Bronx gap in proficiency in 2007 (73% versus 43%), but this year, there is only a 25 percentage point gap (83% versus 58%). If we use a proficiency measure, the achievement gap has closed by 5 percentage points.

Not so fast. The achievement gap, if we measure the differences in the average student scores in Westchester and the Bronx, has actually increased in 7th grade math. The scale score gap was 28 points last year. Put differently, the average Bronx 7th grader scored at the 23rd percentile of the Westchester distribution in 2007. This year, the gap was 30 points. Now the average Bronx 7th grader has dropped to the 21st percentile of the Westchester distribution, even though the achievement gap, as measured by proficiency, is closing.

Take-home point: when you hear about achievement gaps closing based on proficiency scores, beware of what you're being sold.

Posted by eduwonkette at 7:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (17) | TrackBacks (0)

Savvy New York City parents have long suspected that high achieving kids are losing out in the push to boost the achievement of the lowest performing students. But those suspicions are often cast aside by public officials as helicopter parent whining or muted class warfare.

But a review of 4th grade test score data from 2003-2008 suggests that these parents have been on to something. Between 2003 and 2008, the fraction of students scoring in the highest achievement level on the 4th grade NY state ELA test has plummeted.

In 2003, 15.6% of 4th graders scored at Level 4. By 2008, only 5.8% did. In other words, the fraction of students scoring at Level 4 in 2003 was about 2.7 times higher than this year. At the same time, the percentage of students scoring at proficiency has increased 9 percentage points, from 52.4% to 61.3%.

Put bluntly, it appears that schools are focusing on pushing lower performing students over the passing mark, and shortchanging high-achieving students in the process. In Bloomberg's New York, as it turns out, a rising tide does not lift all boats.



You can find the data from 1999-2005 here, and the data from 2006-2008 here. I analyzed 4th grade scores because tests weren't given in grades 3-5 throughout the entire time period. If anyone knows where to find average scale scores at different parts of the distribution over time (i.e. 10th/90th percentile) - I would have preferred to work with these data for all of the reasons suggested below - please let me know.

Posted by eduwonkette at 10:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

In grades 5-7, grades that have seen sharp increases in ELA passing rates over the past two years, the percentage of New York City students scoring in the highest performance category has decreased substantially. You can find those results here. Interestingly, this is only true for ELA, not math.

* In 2006, 8.7% of 5th graders scored at Level 4 on the ELA. This year, only 4.3% did.

* In 2006, 7.1% of 6th graders scored at Level 4. This year, only 2.2% did.

* In 2006, 4.7% of 7th graders scored at Level 4. This year, only 1.6% did.



Anyone have ideas about what's going on here? Fordham's report on high achieving students in a NCLB era provides some insight, I think.

Posted by eduwonkette at 10:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBacks (0)

Consider this puzzle: in 2007, the average scale score on the New York State ELA Test was 661. In 2008, it is also 661. Yet the overall level of proficiency has increased by 3 percentage points, from 68% to 71%. How is this possible?

When we measure student achievement solely based on the proportion of students who have jumped over a bar, we can end up with pretty misleading picture of student performance.

Take a look at grades 3, 5, and 8 in the graph below, which shows the change in ELA average scales scores and passing rates for New York state. In each case, the average scale score increased by 2 points, or about .05 standard deviations. But the increases in the percentage of students who were proficient varied widely across those grades. In 3rd grade, there was an increase of 3 percentage points. In 5th grade, there was a much larger increase - 9.5 percentage points. And in 8th grade, though the average scale score increased, the percentage of students who were proficient actually decreased .9 percentage points.

Should we conclude that our 5th graders are much better off than they've been in the past, and 8th graders are falling behind? Definitely not - 5th grade just happened to hit the sweet spot of the distribution - but that's what you'd get if you relied only on passing rates.



In short, know what you're buying when you're looking at passing rates. They can increase substantially by moving a small number of kids up a few points - just enough to clear the cut score. In some of the grade levels above, there are good reasons to suspect that these small moves may partially explain large jumps in proficiency on the New York State ELA test.

Posted by eduwonkette at 9:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I really appreciate the opportunity to join all of you here at Disney World. I can't wait to get over to the Magic Kingdom. I just love cartoon characters; outlandish fairy tales; and wild, stomach-churning roller coaster rides.
-Mayor Bloomberg, Excellence in Action Summit

If you like fairy tales, today is your day. Overnight, the majority of kids in New York City have become proficient readers (up 7 percentage points to 58%) and mathematicians (up 9 percentage points to 74%). Apparently, scores are up even more in Buffalo, Yonkers, and Rochester. Here's Elizabeth Green's article in the NY Sun, Mayor Sees a Test Score Triumph: Or Is It a Case of Inflation of Results? When test scores rise dramatically on one test and are largely flat on the NAEP, we have good reasons to worry that something besides real learning is happening. In this case, it appears that the NY ELA and Math tests were just easier, which drove up scores across the state.

Alas, at the Magic Kingdom, outlandish fairy tales always win the day. Bloomberg is holding a press soiree at P.S. 175 in Harlem this afternoon, and the state is holding its press conference at 11:45. More details to follow...

Posted by eduwonkette at 11:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If you'd ever bumped your head up against test score distributions for entering kindergarteners, you already knew that NYC's shift to a uniform cutoff for gifted admissions - the 90th percentile - could only hurt poor and minority kids' access to gifted programs. So many of you were unsurprised in April when I analyzed the new gifted and talented data, and found that poor and minority kids' access to gifted and talented programs had been seriously diminished. (See maps here.)

Kudos to Elissa Gootman and Robert Gebeloff at the New York Times, who pushed the G&T issue out onto center stage this morning (Gifted Programs in the City are Less Diverse):

An analysis by The New York Times shows that under the new policy, children from the city’s poorest districts were offered a smaller percentage than last year of the entry-grade gifted slots in elementary schools. Children in the city’s wealthiest districts captured a greater share of the slots.

Considered alongside Fordham's report on high achieving students and Stanford prof Sean Reardon's finding that the black-white grows faster among the highest achieving students, these losses in G&T seats should not be taken lightly. Because of NYC's stark residential segregation, high achieving minority students are more likely to attend schools populated by low-achieving students than are high achieving white students. Robert Pondiscio has done a great job educating us about how this unfolds in New York City classrooms, "The 'not your problem' kids walk in smart and walk out smart, largely by accident of birth. While they’re in school, they are nearly completely neglected, and as a result achieve not nearly as much as they would have (while still testing at or above grade level on dumbed-down state tests) had they not been starved for oxygen in an underperforming school, where they were constantly praised for being bright, but had few demands placed upon them, and where opportunities for enrichment, in or out of school, were non-existent."

Let's hope that those concerned with "educational equity" revise the admissions policy for next year. Here's what I'd like to see: If we want to increase access to advanced instruction for disadvantaged kids who are more advanced than their peers, we might consider offering gifted slots to the top 5% of students in each community school district, while also guaranteeing a seat for any student who scores in the 90th percentile or above of the national distribution. This is analogous to states' top 4% (California) or top 10% (Texas) plans for college admissions, which guarantee college admission to students who have excelled in their own high schools. Thoughts?

Posted by eduwonkette at 11:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

At the end of last week, the UFT responded to the New Teacher Project report on ATRs in NYC. (If you missed the backstory, see Why You Should Read the Fine Print in the New Teacher Project Report, Why Buy the Teacher When You Can Have the Teaching for Free?, Tim Daly on the New Teacher Project report, and Joel Klein Blames Teachers for $4 Gas, Subprime Crisis).

Though the NYT article was pretty vague, the UFT actually made six policy recommendations:

1. The DOE should take a more pro-active role in placing ATRs, as the contract requires, by sending ATRs for the first interviews for open positions, before other candidates—new hires or transfers—are considered. Successfully placing more ATRs would avoid the unnecessary costs of hiring and mentoring more new teachers and maintaining a large ATR pool when the talent already exists in the system to staff vacancies.

2. Make teacher hiring selections financially neutral. The FSF budget replaced a longstanding system in which schools were fully funded for their teachers. Schools considered only an educator’s qualifications and “fit” for a position at the school, with no incentive to hire the cheapest candidate. Such a neutral system is fairer all around.

3. As an incentive, DOE could, for a specified period of time, cover the cost of ATRs who are permanently hired in a school.

4. Implement the contract provision that permits the union and DOE to negotiate a buyout to any remaining excessed teachers. Any additional cost would be offset by savings for the school administration.

5. Let the experience and expertise of ATRs be known to principals rather than maligning them, thus encouraging their hiring.

6. Offer a coaching and skills training program to ATRs who wish to enhance their marketability.

These recommendations sound pretty reasonable to me, and I see no retreat on mutual consent here. I can't say enough times that creating an incentive to hire the cheapest candidates was one of the poorest policy choices the NYC DOE has made. For similar reasons (the problem of creating different price incentives across candidates), I'm not crazy about #3 - but the real action above is in reforming "Fair Student Funding" and negotiating a buyout.

And to eduwonk's point about the dispute over how many ATRs are performing the duties of full-time classroom teachers: student schedules and report cards/transcripts are a good place to start looking. If you're responsible for evaluating students for more than a marking period, you are their regular teacher.

Posted by eduwonkette at 6:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

No one expected that Graeme Frost, a 12-year old who suffered brain stem injuries in a car accident, would become a political target after he delivered a late September radio address in support of the State Children's Health Insurance Program. Commentators demurred that if a political party "send[s] a boy to do a man’s job, then the boy is fair game." The episode raised difficult questions over the role of children in political debate. Are they mini-protesters, learning the ropes of democracy, or simply political pawns?

New York City is likely to encounter these thorny questions this week, as multiple flights of public schoolchildren are slated to protest at Tweed Courthouse under the auspices of the Kids Protest Project. Truth be told, my own view on kids' budget protests is strongly shaped by my own participation in such protests as a kid. When we were in elementary school, we wrote letters. When we were a little older, a few of us piped up at budget hearings. And when we were in high school, we organized a hundred teenagers to fill rooms at Board meetings, and scared the bejesus out of the Board in the process.

We didn't understand the larger issues, but we were advocating for our short-term interests. Wouldn't each of us be marginally better off if our school had more dough? All of these experiences were formative in my attitudes towards political engagement, and I look back on them fondly - which is all a long way of acknowledging that I'm the wrong person to offer nuanced analysis on kids protesting budget cuts.

So I'll leave it to you to tease this one out - isn't this just like the Regents using a one-sided prompt on Teach for America? Or is it different because students' short-term interests are served by garnering more funds? You can read letters to Chancellor Klein from kids at PS 87 below.

Dear Chancellor Klein,

My name is Danny, and I am a student at P.S. 87. My brother is coming into this school next year. It will be my 5th year next year in this school.

The purpose of this letter is to stop you from taking money from the schools. Would you like it if you were in third grade and the chancellor was going to take money from your school? I hope this letter will change your mind.

Sincerely,
Danny

***

Dear Chancellor Klein,

Hello. My name is James. I go to P.S. 87. I just heard that you're cutting the school's budget. I don't want to be mean, but next year I'm going to be in the 4th grade, and I want it to be even better than last year, but it won't be if you lower my and other schools' budgets. There won't be enough money for books (and I'm crazy over books) and chairs for sitting on, and pencils to last us through September to June, and a lot more reasons that I don't want to talk about! So, please, stop cutting my and other schools' budgets, so that I will have a wonderful 4th grade.

Sincerely,
James

***

Dear Chancellor Klein,

Hi, my name is Nicole. I'm a student in P.S. 87. It is a public school. Please do not cut anyone from the school, and please don't take money from the school.

Love,
Nicole

Posted by eduwonkette at 8:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

Imagine that you are a public servant. This year, you've left families in a lurch by centralizing an enrollment system that you lacked the organizational capacity to run effectively. It is June, and kids and families are still in the dark about their middle and pre-school placements for September. How should you react?

a) You should issue a heartfelt apology, explaining that you've make a serious mistake, that you take full responsibility for the mistake, and that you understand how terribly you've inconvenienced the families you serve. In addition, you should explain how you will be sure this doesn't happen again.

b) A press spokesperson for the organization should say, "It's simply not correct to say that we're running way behind."

c) The person running the office that made the mistake should say, "I know that there are parents who are upset that they haven’t gotten a letter yet. Rest assured they will by the end of the week, and we have committed to parents we will work to get this done earlier next year.”

d) Both B and C

If you answered d), you should look into a position in the press office at the New York City Department of Education. It's a growth industry, and I heard the pay's alright.

Posted by eduwonkette at 11:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Administrators at four New York City schools that received F’s on their Progress Reports, and five that earned D’s, are eligible for bonuses, which range from $5,500 to $15,000 for principals and from $2,750 to $7,500 for assistant principals. One of my favorite haiku pretty much sums up this story:

Amateur Night's spozed
to be at the Apollo
not at Tweed courthouse

-Anonymous 7:50 AM

Posted by eduwonkette at 10:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

McDreamy? McSteamy? You decide.

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With the release of Scott McClellan's tell-all, everyone's been asking whether the press did its due diligence on the Iraq war. Closer to home, last week's Newsweek article provides similar occasion for us to reflect on the press coverage of small schools over the last six years.

Let me first throw in my prejudices about small schools - I like them. I followed the first wave of small schools that opened in the 1990s, and was thrilled when the Gates Foundation put up millions of dollars for the second wave. And I am willing to believe that students will be more attached to school in smaller schools.

All that said, what should we make of the endless parade of glowing stories about how much better small schools are doing than their predecessors? If any of these reporters had perused the basic stats, they would have uncovered that these schools are not serving the same population. (Needless to say, in my excitement about the Gates Foundation's grant back in 2003, I did not anticipate that small schools would have the effect of clearing out the old students, replacing them with higher achieving ones, and pushing the leftover students into increasingly crowded large schools.)

Over the course of the year, I've made tables comparing the new and old populations at three different NYC high schools that have been converted into small schools: Evander Childs High School in the Bronx, Bushwick High School in Brooklyn, and now Morris High School in the Bronx, the subject of the Newsweek article. As stunning as the differences between the old large and new small school populations is the fact that few reporters covering small schools (save Sam Freedman, who sadly wrote his last column this morning) have bothered to ask if these populations were different, and if so, why.

Why has the press missed the boat? I'm not sure. Here are some ideas:

* Math is Hard: Reporters are trained to write and report, not to analyze data. It's unsurprising that they've avoided the city's statistical treasure troves. But that answer is unsatisfying to me - these are all bright people.

* Positive Story Starvation: Jay Mathews offers a different answer in reflecting on reporting about KIPP, "I understand why we education reporters try to make KIPP sound like more than it is. We are starved for good news about low-income schools. KIPP is an encouraging story, so we are tempted to gush rather than report. We don't ask all the questions we should." Maybe this explains some of the puff pieces, but still falls short of a full explanation.

* All City Kids are the Same: Perhaps the problem runs deeper than training and optimism. Too many people assume that because the kids in the old school were black and brown and poor, and those in the new school are as well, they must be the same.

* Everyone Loves Individualization: skoolboy weighs in with this thought: "The small school model is so appealing because it taps into a variety of modern narratives. Small schools are personal, provide more customized (i.e., middle-class) educations, and therefore can compensate for the breakdown of families and other social institutions in central cities. In this view, whoever is served by these schools is better off than they were before, and those who were in the schools before just get ignored."

* Power and Money Talk: Small schools are backed by big foundations. Money buys, and helps to influence, evaluations conducted by firms that are contract dependent. Money also buys PR - and a lot of money buys the best PR money can buy.

Any thoughts?

The table below shows the characteristics of the entering 9th graders at Morris High School before small schools started opening there, and the characteristics of 9th graders at the new small schools: the School for Excellence, the High School for Violin and Dance, Bronx Leadership Academy, Bronx International High School and the Morris Academy for Collaborative Studies. Particularly notable are the lower concentrations of full-time special education students, students qualifying for free lunch, students who were below grade level in reading and math, and English Language Learners (with the exception of Bronx International, which is a school specifically for ELL students). If you click over to the links above, you'll see this was also the case with Evander Childs and Bushwick High School.

Characteristics of Entering 9th Graders, Morris High School and New Small Schools

Posted by eduwonkette at 10:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (15) | TrackBacks (0)

In the midst of this budget debacle, along comes an estimate of the cost of NYC's student incentive program at full scale - i.e. if all students in grades 4-7 were eligible to receive up to $500 per year. Even a 50% success rate would cost a cool $90 million dollars - not far off from the $99 million dollars in budget cuts that will be distributed to New York City schools unless the city ponies up.

Posted by eduwonkette at 11:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Everyone loves equity - the US Department of Education, the New York City Department of Education, insert your hometown Department of Education here. If you've got a shaky initiative in mind, best to back it up with the equity line.

Certainly that's the strategy Joel Klein has used in New York City. Want to change the admissions process for gifted and talented programs? It's about equity! (Even when doing so shuts out poor kids.) Want to close down comprehensive high schools? It's about equity! (Even if the most disadvantaged kids can't access those new small schools.) Want to use dollars that the state legislature specifically earmarked for the most disadvantaged kids to plug holes in a budget you cut yourself? It's about equity! (Even if the number of central employees has increased by 18% since 2004 - a jobs program for the Ivy League.)

When it comes to school funding, what does it mean to treat students "equitably?" Does equity imply treating each student the same by providing each student the same level of funding? Or does equity require a recognition that students bring different levels of disadvantage to school, and as a result, disadvantaged students must be treated differently in order to be treated equitably?

In 2007, when the city was bulldozing through its "Fair Student Funding" program, NYC Chancellor Joel Klein argued that educational equity required differential treatment. Poor students face formidable obstacles to school success, Klein explained, and the allocation of tax-levied funds in New York City should reflect that reality.

It was also in this compensatory spirit that the remedy emerging from New York's adequacy suit - now known as the Contracts for Excellence - was designed. Three rules were applied to these funds. First, these funds must be spent on six program areas, including class size reduction, time on task, teacher and principal quality initiatives, full day pre-kindergarten, middle and high school restructuring, and model programs for English Language Learners. Second, these funds must be spent on those students with the greatest educational needs. Finally - and most relevant to this budget debate - these funds must be used to supplement, not supplant, the city's school funding allocations. The idea is that these dollars represent additional investments New York City's most disadvantaged children.

This budget cycle, fairness and equity, according to Joel Klein, require universalism - specifically, a universal budget cut - not differential treatment. The city has cut tax-levied funds to all schools, which will be offset by Contracts for Excellence funds for the neediest schools. But the city's more advantaged schools are facing substantial cuts because they won't receive more state money. Joel Klein is now arguing that an "equitable" solution to this budget problem is for the state to release the restrictions on these Contracts for Excellence funds so that all schools will take a 1.4% cut. And he claims, with remarkable chutzpah, that it is the state's fault, not the city's fault for cutting budgets in the face of a projected $4.5 billion budget surplus, that some schools will suffer more than others.

Ultimately, if equity can be called upon to support any action - even those that nakedly reallocate dollars set aside to serve the city's most disadvantaged students - then equity means nothing at all.

Posted by eduwonkette at 10:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Here's a round-up of yesterday's budget hearings: Chancellor Talks of Cuts for Schools, Amid Hissing (NYT), City Council Spanks Chancellor Klein Over School Aid Cuts (Daily News), School Budget Showdown (Gotham Gazette), and Rollback Set in Schooling of the Gifted (NY Sun). (Sidenote on City Council hearings: one Columbia Law School reader reports that the footage of The Great Liebman Chase of 2007 made rounds in his Criminal Law course.)

We still have scant details on the "$200 million in central cuts." As of this morning, David Cantor at the NYC Department of Education has not responded to a request for an itemized list of these "central cuts." Here's the best detail I've got (from Klein's powerpoint at yesterday's City Council hearing):

*$21 million from Central. For example,
- Reducing 80 positions (3% of central headcount)
- Reducing NYC Teaching Fellows tuition and stipends
- Reducing IT consultants

* $7 million from Field Offices. For example,
- Reducing 101 positions (4% of field staff)
- Reducing Integrated Service Center staff

* $30 million from Support Services. For example,
- Reducing custodial funding

* $120M from Operational efficiencies and savings. For example,
- Identifying purchasing efficiencies in buying things like trade books
- Reducing amounts of accrual budget at the end of the fiscal year

* $23M from Reduced Program expenditures. For example,
- Reducing Quality Review expenses by transitioning to in-house reviewers and moving to every 3 years for A/WD schools and every 2 years for B/P or higher schools
- Reducing number of periodic assessments in ELA and Math from 5 to 4 a year and shifting to more Web-based professional development

Do you have other ideas for central cuts? Could we spare a benchmark test? The Leadership Academy? Return the level of central staffing back to its 2004 level (a layoff of 366 Tweed staff)?

Posted by eduwonkette at 10:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

A few weeks ago, a solemn President Bush revealed that he honors our soldiers' sacrifice by abstaining from golf. "I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal," he explained.

It was in this spirit that Chancellor Joel Klein appeared before the City Council this morning. Klein dedicated his presentation to the heroic central cuts endured by his bureaucracy. While salty tears welled up in my eyes, I noticed that one slide was missing. Paragons of restraint that they are, the New York City Department of Education has only increased central staffing levels by 18% over the last three years. In October 2004, there were 1984 central staff. By February 2008 there were only 2350.



Some administrative divisions of Tweed, though, are hurting more than others. Please stand while I salute these departmental role models:

* In October 2004, the Department of Assessment and Accountability had 19 staff. In February 2008, they had 80 - that's only a 321% increase.

* In October 2004, the Division of Human Resources had only 235 staff. In February 2008, they had 370 - a 57% increase.

* In October 2004, the Office of New Schools had 14 staff. In February 2008, its spawn, the Office of Portfolio Development, had 36 - a 157% increase. (See 2005 and 2008 data for all headcount figures; these are central staff paid for with tax-levied funds.)

As New York City schools face budget cuts of up to 6%, New York City parents and kids are grateful to the Department of Education for making the sacrifices necessary to send us the right signal.

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A Voice Cries Out reports that this year's high school ELA retest required students to complete the following task:

Today’s ’situation’ told students that they were in a leadership team who has been debating ‘whether leaders should have experience in their chosen fields.’ They were instructed to write ‘a position paper in which you argue that inexperienced people can provide leadership.’

They weren’t even given a choice about which position to take.

They then had to listen to a speech by-you guessed it-Wendy Kopp, about why she started Teach For America. In the speech, Kopp talks about how her lack of experience served to her advantage when creating Teach For America. In the speech she explains that TFA teachers, “challenge the conventional wisdom” that schools are limited in what they can do to ‘overcome the challenges of poverty and the lack of student motivation and parental involvement that is perceived.”

This takes us back to the social justice debate, in which we discussed how schools should and shouldn't deal with contentious issues in the classroom.

So is this fair game for a state test? Those who have pointed out schools' trespasses on social and political issues are generally cool with TFA, but what if the prompt instead instructed students to argue that schools need more funds to be effective, or that unions have a positive impact on public education? I reckon that some ed wonk/wonkettes' heads would explode.

To me, the problem with this question is that it didn't offer a counter-position, nor did it allow students to choose a side to argue.

Posted by eduwonkette at 12:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

Last fall, the New York City Department of Education graded each of its schools on an A-F scale. Schools were warned that those with Fs – there were 49 altogether - faced closure. Shortly thereafter, the New York City Department of Education announced its intention to close 14 schools. Somewhat perplexing was that 6 of these schools had earned Ds on their progress reports. Why would the Department of Education, we wondered, close D schools before F schools if it believed in its own Progress Report system?

Theories abounded. A widely circulated explanation reasoned that Klein et al. were hell-bent on rooting out experienced – and thus expensive – teachers. If this was the case, closing schools should have higher average salaries than other D and F schools that are not closing.

The tables below, derived from school-based average teacher salaries, do not suggest that schools with higher average salaries are more likely to be shuttered. Below, I’ve cut the data three ways – first looking at closing and non-closing salaries for both D and F schools, and then breaking these data out separately for D and F schools. One exception is among F high schools, where the school that is closing has the highest average teacher salary. There are 7 other F high schools with salaries ranging from $57,289 to $69,154; Canarsie High School has an average teacher salary of $72,370.

But there’s something in this post for everybody. Many have speculated that the district is closing large high schools and replacing them with smaller ones, in part, to drive out experienced teachers.

What’s clear is that smaller high schools have substantially lower average teacher salaries than the larger high schools that they’re replacing. (See the graph below.) Schools with fewer than 400 students have average salaries of $61,293, while those with more than 3000 students have average salaries of $71,296. While we can’t confirm the district’s intent, the effect of closing down large high schools has been to replace experienced teachers with inexperienced ones.





* Note: The data I presented on Friday come directly from schools' Galaxy budgets; these data are from an aggregate Fair Student Funding file, and thus the salaries reported for individual schools are not identical.

Posted by eduwonkette at 10:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've got NYC's school-level teacher salary data fired up, and will write a few posts using these data next week. Here's a preview. New York City is slated to close 14 schools this year, though many will not close immediately, but will phase out over the coming years. Per the whole "Absent Teacher Reserve" (ATR) debate (here, here, here, and here), how many teachers are employed at these schools, and what are their average salaries?

These schools employ a total of 822 teachers, and a number of these schools have relatively high average salaries. Given current budgeting rules, through which schools are allocated dollars rather than positions, what's the chance a principal will, all else equal, hire an excessed teacher from Franklin K. Lane who makes $80,000 when he can hire a teacher with 3 years experience for about $46,000? (See the teacher salary scale here.)

If you've got questions that you'd like to see answered using the teacher salary data, please leave me ideas below.

Posted by eduwonkette at 9:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

Imagine that you had 8 staff that cost a total of $904,636. Next year, you will also have 8 staff, but they are only budgeted at $1117, for a mean salary of $139.63. (See p. 446.) That's the deal with Joel Klein's staff - his 8 staff stay, but they are working for sweatshop wages.

Hmmmm - if I wanted to make the central Department of Education budget appear smaller than it really is, might I make these monies reappear after public scrutiny of the budget subsided? I'm just saying.

If I am missing an alternate explanation (i.e. maybe budgets are meaningless after all?), please let me know.



Update: Thanks to Dave Bellel for sending along this page. Click to enlarge.

Posted by eduwonkette at 9:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A) 3,894,812 subway rides
B) 15,579 pairs of Prada heels
C) 1812 hours with the Emperors VIP Club
D) 315 years of education at the Brearley School
E) 18 staff for the New York City Department of Education's Division of Assessment and Accountability

On page 446 of New York City's FY09 budget, we learn that the Division of Assessment and Accountability is budgeted at $8,287,282. $7,789,623 will buy you 18 staff - that's $432,757 per person!

The irony of NYC's selective attention to budgeting issues? Priceless.

Update: NYC Parents dishes the goods on Bloomberg's $4.5 million dollar slush fund, which he used to reward city council members.

Update II: NYC DOE's Press Secretary David Cantor posted the following correction to the NYC education news listserve:

The actual headcount in the DOE's Office of Accountability is 79, not 18. The actual budget for salaries is $6.7 million, not $8.3 million. The correct headcount figure is reflected in the most recent DOE Financial Status Report, located online here on page 13. The correct budget figure will appear in the next iteration of the City budget. Sorry for the confusion.

As skoolboy said, "The fact that the people responsible for assessment can't put together an intelligible budget should give us great confidence about the assessment data they report."

Posted by eduwonkette at 12:39 AM