NYC students: undeniable progress under Mayor Bloomberg

Joel Klein / August 12, 2010

In a guest editorial here last week, Sol Stern observed that New York State had significantly raised the bar for meeting proficiency requirements on state tests and that fewer students are meeting the new standard (“The testing mess,” August 5, 2010). Seeking to parlay that into a wholesale attack on New York City’s progress since Mayor Bloomberg took over in 2002, Stern and Diane Ravitch have launched several recent broadsides. The facts tell a different story, however.

It's no secret that many states have low standards; and the gap between “proficiency” on state tests and on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) exams is typically very large. Mayor Bloomberg pointed that out in a 2006 op-ed with Jeb Bush, and recommended that the "well-respected NAEP…should become an official benchmark for evaluating states’ standards.” So NYS did the right thing in raising standards. But that doesn’t erase the fact that, by multiple measures, NYC has made substantial progress. 

NAEP

Let’s start with NAEP, theldquo;gold standard.” In fourth grade, on the Mayor's watch, NYC has made big gains—11 scale-score points in English and 11 in math. The percentage of kids proficient in math went from 21 percent to 35 percent—a 67 percent increase—and the percentage proficient in English went from 19 percent to 29 percent—a 53 percent jump. Indeed, NYC’s performance now matches that of the entire nation in fourth grade, even though NYC serves a much more challenging population. That’s called “closing

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NYC students: undeniable progress under Mayor Bloomberg

The little statute that couldn't

August 12, 2010

Remember that small law named No Child Left Behind? While Washington has been swept up in talk of RTT, SIG, i3, and a host of other acronyms, the one we all love to hate is still going strong. So are its infamous supplemental educational services (i.e., free tutoring), required when a school has been failing for three or more years in a row. While most of the policy world has conceded this provision to be unworkable, the federal dollars keep flowing. Take Texas, for instance, which spent $67 million of its Title I funds on SES last year, but where quality control is virtually non-existent. To wit, there are more than 200 providers on the state-approved list—but none has ever been removed, even after a Texas Education Agency (TEA) assessment discovered that more than a few were doing little to boost student achievement. Moreover, many districts suspect that the tutors are charging for more students than are actually enrolled. An HISD phone-a-thon to parents of alleged SES recipients yielded families that had never even heard of the SES in which their children were enrolled according to SES providers’ respective invoices. Furthermore, these companies are employing all sorts of sketchy, and sometimes illegal, schemes to recruit students, from promising free laptops or cell phones, to paying enrollees to recruit friends. Yet districts can do little to curb such practices—besides file a formal complaint with TEA, which may or may not do

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The little statute that couldn't

Bailing out districts with a teacup

August 12, 2010

Turns out Lehman Brothers and the rest of Wall Street weren’t the only ones to make risky and complex financial deals in the waning days of the credit bubble. Denver Public Schools entered into one such arrangement in April 2008 to close a $400 million gap in its pension obligations to teachers. Instead of issuing regular bonds, the district offered certificates with variable interest rates and an interest-rate swap. Then interest rates collapsed, the market for Denver's debt dried up, and now DPS is out almost as much cash as the original loan, plus another $115 million in interest and fees. It’s not alone: Los Angeles’ municipal government and a few school districts in Pennsylvania are trying to renegotiate or unwind similar interest-rate deals. But there’s more to this story than just a few bad decisions: What made these deals necessary. DPS and other districts face gargantuan pension obligations to teachers, billions more than they can actually pay. Yet these unaffordable promises are now locked into state law, or even state constitutions. Even Colorado’s momentous move earlier this year to reduce yearly automatic raises on pensions, the only such to affect current, as opposed to future, retirees, is just a drop in the bucket. Though CO’s pension fund has avoided insolvency—when “no one would have been paid anything,” as pension fund head Meredith Williams dryly points out—at least for now, it doesn’t solve the larger structural issue

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Bailing out districts with a teacup

Engendering learning

August 12, 2010

They say boys are from Mars, and girls are from Venus, and Imagine Southeast Public Charter School in D.C. couldn't agree more. Part of a growing experiment in single-sex education, Imagine is a "dual academy," which means it serves both boys and girls, but keeps them separated in different classrooms except for special occasions. Imagine’s is one of three popular single-sex models: serving just one gender, serving both genders in only single-sex classrooms, as Imagine does, or serving both but using a mix of co-ed and single-sex classrooms. The uptick in gender-specific education comes after a 2006 change to federal regulations made single-sex classrooms and schools easier to create. But the research is fuzzy. On the one hand, there's evidence that boys and girls not only have different learning styles—boys are competitive and can't sit still, while girls are collaborative and calm—but also biological differences. For example, girls need more time to complete an activity because stress decreases blood flow to a girl's brain, making her less ready to learn, whereas stress increases blood flow to a boy's brain, making him more alert. On the other, early childhood studies show that boys and girls have similar aptitude and preferences at birth, and it's cultural influences, such as that girls should play house and boys never cry, that account for much of the difference. Single-sex education arguably exacerbates these. Then there's the practical side: Wiggling boys distract girls, while girls' ability to read sooner frustrates boys and may

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Engendering learning

Addressing summer reading setback among economically disadvantaged elementary students

Amber M. Winkler, Ph.D. / August 12, 2010

Richard Allington, Anne McGill-Franzen, Gregory Camilli, Lunetta Williams, Jennifer Graff, Jacqueline Zeig, Courtney Zmach, Rhonda Nowak; University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Journal of Reading Psychology
September 2010, forthcoming

It’s well known that low-income kids lose academic ground from June to August, while middle- and upper-income kids are apt to continue to gain (or at least stay constant) due to camp, libraries, and other summer enrichment. The experimental study reported here sought to test one way of ameliorating summer learning loss. Researchers supplied students from seventeen high-poverty schools in Florida with a dozen self-selected books each summer for three years. The control group, kids drawn from the same schools and matched to the treatment population on a variety of demographic and academic variables, received no books. Three summers later, the treatment students outperformed the control group on Florida’s state reading test (FCAT)—and reading gains from the poorest kids were even larger. Not surprisingly, most youngsters chose books that pertained to pop culture—not “curriculum relevant” titles. Evidently reading about Britney Spears and Hannah Montana (a couple of the favorites) is better than no reading at all. Analysts estimated that supplying low-income pupils with summer reading costs about $50 per child, but that the overall impact of this intervention is similar to that of (the much more expensive) summer school. In other words, this learning loss intervention is cheaper than solutions currently being used, and gets a lot more bang for the buck. While it’s

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Addressing summer reading setback among economically disadvantaged elementary students

Childhood and adolescent onset psychiatric disorders, substance use, and failure to graduate high school on time

Karen Baker / August 12, 2010

Joshua Breslau, Elizabeth Miller, W-J Joanie Chung, and Julie B. Schweitzer; UC Davis School of Medicine
Journal of Psychiatric Research
June 2010

It’s no surprise that psychiatric and substance-abuse disorders have a negative impact on graduation rates, but teasing out the origins of these disorders could help to target efforts at intervention. Researchers used data collected in 2001-02 on the National Epidemiological Survey of Alcohol and Related Conditions for nearly 30,000 students. After isolating the most significant indicators from commonly overlapping psychiatric and substance-abuse disorders, and adjusting for demographics and other variables, they found that one-third of students with the most common form (of three types) of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) drop out or do not graduate on time. That is more than twice the percentage of students with no disorder, of whom 15.2 percent drop out. The surprise here is that ADHD appears to be more predictive of dropping out than conduct disorder, which is thought to be the most prognostic, and which refers to a group of behavioral and emotional problems that manifest in aggression and difficulty following directions (think: the student who is always acting out). But the third most predictive behavior/disorder is even more surprising: cigarette smoking. Twenty-nine percent of smokers drop out compared to drug users at 25 percent, drinkers at 20 percent, and a host of other disorders, such as mania, panic disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder, in the high-teens/low-twenties. Perhaps none of this

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Childhood and adolescent onset psychiatric disorders, substance use, and failure to graduate high school on time

Ed Data Express

Janie Scull / August 12, 2010

U.S. Department of Education
August 2010

This week, ED launched a new online database that presents state-level achievement, graduation, accountability, demographic, and budgetary data in a single resource. Because it’s billed as the analyst’s dream come true, we decided to have a look ourselves. Here’s what we found: The data are not new—all of the information that the database compiles could previously be found scattered across ED’s website—but it does assemble that information and allow data to be compared across states and years. Sources include departments within ED, the National Center for Education Statistics, and the College Board, as well as self-reported state numbers. And it is indeed user-friendly: Drop-down menus make it easy to construct a table of a single state’s data or to compare data across multiple states. This allows for quick and straight-forward results, a handy tool for any researcher, journalist, or policy wonk (although ED cautions that state test scores should NOT be compared to each other or to NAEP). The database also includes some nifty bits, such as data on how many students took advantage of the opportunity to transfer from schools that did not meet adequate yearly progress under NCLB—and presents some data graphically. Sadly but unsurprisingly, given the data they had to work with, you won’t find anything here at the district or school level. And you need to be wary of self-reported state data, the more so when trying to compare states. Still,

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Ed Data Express