See articles on this year’s elementary and middle school grades, or “progress reports”: Times, NY Post, Daily News, NY1, and this piece in Gotham schools (the best).
They are replete with examples of the absurd results, with schools such as PS 82 in the Bronx jumping from an “A” to an “F” and back this year to an “A”.PS 8 in Brooklyn which got an “F” last year and this year got an “A”, with the principal saying they did nothing different.The three schools that Klein tried to close last year to put charter schools in their place-- P.S. 194, 241 and 150 – all got “As”.
In fact, 84% of the schools got an “A” this year, and only two schools out of more than one thousand got “F”s.This is grade inflation that would put any human being other than Joel Klein to hide his head in shame.
And yet, according to the NY Times, “he clearly took pride in the results. “If you’re asking whether I would rather see less A’s,” he said, “the answer is no.”
Meanwhile, 87% of principals said in a recent survey that their schools were unable to provide a quality education because of excessive class sizes.
The absurdity of the grades this year derive from two profound flaws: First, 85% of the grade is based on one year’s gains or losses in test scores, which experts have found to be statistically unreliable and extremely erratic.
And two, the state tests have become so much easier and their scoring so lax that students can pass them without reading the questions – as long as they manage to fill in a few bubbles along the way. (For more on this scandal, well-reported everywhere except the Times, see the Daily News here and here, Gotham Schools and this NY Post column by Diane Ravitch.)
I wrote an oped for the Daily news about the new grading system when it was first announced in the fall of 2007: “Why parents & teachers should reject new school grades.” It starts out this way: “The new school grading system unveiled this week by Chancellor Joel Klein is a fiasco.”
But what do you expect when you had two guys in charge, Liebman and Klein, who are ignorant as to statistics, the unreliability of test scores, and even the larger goals of education?
Perhaps the best result is where we have now arrived: hopefully everyone realizes that the emperor has no clothes and they should ignore these silly grades, as they should have in the first place.
Let us remember that this man had no qualifications for the job, and proved this repeatedly over the years. In fact the only person who probably knew less about education and how to nurture conditions for learning was the man who hired him: Chancellor Klein. Columbia University finally woke up to the fact that he had been double-dipping: while holding the office of Chief Accountability Officer at Tweed, he was also supposedly on the full-time law faculty for the last year.
The progress reports he designed were widely derided as unreliable and statistically untenable; the quality reviews were an expensive waste of time and paperwork, and ignored when DOE was deciding which schools to close and which schools to commend; the $80 million supercomputer called ARIS was a super-expensive super-mugging by IBM, according to techies who found it laughable how much DOE was taken for a ride.
The surveys were badly designed, and counted for only a small percentage of school grades. Yet because principals were terrified of bad results, parents were pressured into giving favorable reviews for fear their schools would otherwise be punished. And the top priority of parents on these surveys — class size reduction — was ignored; worse, it was repeatedly derided by Liebman et. al. as a goal not worthy to pursue.
Under his leadership or lack thereof, the Accountability office continued to mushroom with more and more high priced educrats, "Knowledge Managers" and the like, few of whom, like him, had any experience or qualifications for the job, no less an understanding of statistics or the limitations of data.
One would think that a man who had focused professionally on the large error rate in capital punishment cases would have a little humility in terms of recognizing the fallibility of human judgment -- but no such luck. When confronted with the question of why schools should be given single grades, rather than a more nuanced system that might recognize their variety of attributes, he opined that a single grade, from A to F was useful "to concentrate the mind."
The ostensible point of the test score data from the periodic assessments and standardized tests, collected and spewed out by ARIS, to be analyzed by each school's "data inquiry teams” and "Senior Achievement Facilitators" was supposedly to encourage “differentiated instruction” to occur , although this goal was severely hampered by the fact that under Klein's leadership or lack thereof, overcrowding and excessive class sizes have continued.
No matter how much data is available — even assuming it is statistically reliable— the best way to allow differentiated instruction to occur is to lower class size.
And let us not forget Liebman’s cowardly run out the back door of City Hall in order to escape parents and hundreds of petitions collected by Time out from Testing — even though City Council Education Chair Robert Jackson had specifically requested that he leave through the front door of the chambers after he testified so that he could receive the petitions with the respect that they deserved. A perfect emblem of his three years at DOE.
