My unvideotaped debate with DOE's Suransky re NCLB, testing, and NYC's dismal results

On Wednesday, September 15, I was invited to New York Law School to debate Shael Suransky, NYC's Deputy Chancellor for Accountability, about NCLB and the negative effects of high stakes accountability systems.

I also took the opportunity to rebut the claims of impressive progress in student achievement in NYC that DOE continues to make, even after the state test score bubble has burst, and to point out the many errors in Chancellor Klein's written statements concerning this issue.

Unfortunately, NY Law School did not allow Lindsey Christ of NY1 or Norm Scott of Education Notes to videotape the event, reportedly because of pressure from DOE.

Lindsey was quite annoyed, and said she had never been barred from taping any such forum, either at NYU, Columbia, the New School, CUNY or SUNY.

For more on what transpired, you can see Norm Scott's accounts here and here, and the email exchange between Lindsey, the very testy VP for PR at NY Law School, and me.

As many people have asked for it, I am posting my powerpoint here, part 1 and part II. If you would like me to present it to your organization, please email me at classsizematters@gmail.com

-- Leonie Haimson, Executive Director, Class Size Matters

NAEP 2009 Math Results Show Little Progress for NYC Schools

Last week, math scores for 2009 were released for the eighteen cities now participating in the NAEP Grade 4 and 8 Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA) component, released bi-annually as “The Nation’s Report Card.” Operated under the aegis of the U.S. Department of Education and reported by their National Center for Educational Statistics, the NAEP’s are the only math and reading exams administered across the fifty states (reading test results are expected in Spring 2010). Given on a statistical sampling basis without high stakes consequences, these exams are generally considered the single best measure of national educational progress.

The Math results for 2009 were not the best of news for NYC. Among the eleven large cities who participated in 2007, only Boston and D.C. showed statistically significant gains in Grade 4 and only Austin and San Diego in Grade 8. No city declined, but the rest, including NYC, showed either no gains or gains sufficiently modest that they couldn’t reliably be attributed to real gains (as opposed to random chance). For NYC, these results stand in sharp contrast to the rather sizable gains in Grade 4 and 8 Math reported over the last two years via the NYS Grade 3-8 annual exams (on which School Progress Reports, grade retention, principals’ bonuses, and the Mayor’s political persona are based).

As reported in the local media (Jennifer Medina in the NY Times, Rachel Monohan and Meredith Kolodner in the NY Daily News, Yoav Gonen in the NY Post, and Beth Fertig at WNYC.org), NYC showed a one-point gain in average exam score in Grade 4 (from 236 in 2007 to 237 in 2009) and a three-point gain (from 270 to 273) in Grade 8. In addition, the percentage of Grade 4 students judged Proficient or better on the NAEP exam rose from 34% in 2007 to 35% in 2009; for Grade 8, the numbers were 22% in 2007 to 26% this year. By comparison, the NYS exams showed NYC Grade 4 proficiency or better increasing from 74.1% to 84.9% and Grade 8 moving up an astonishing 25 percentage points, from 45.6% to 71.3%. Comparable numbers since 2003 are shown below.

Grade 4 - % Proficient or Higher (Level 3+4 for NYS exams, Proficient + Advanced for NAEP)

2003 --- NYS 66.7% --- NAEP 21%

2005 --- NYS 77.4% --- NAEP 26%

2007 --- NYS 74.1% --- NAEP 34%

2009 --- NYS 84.9% --- NAEP 35%

Grade 8 - & Proficient or Higher (Level 3+4 for NYS exams, Proficient + Advanced for NAEP)

2003 --- NYS 34.4% --- NAEP 21%

2005 --- NYS 40.8% --- NAEP 21%

2007 --- NYS 45.6% --- NAEP 22%

2009 --- NYS 71.3% --- NAEP 26%

The inflation in all the NYS-based numbers naturally suggests that NYS/NYC students’ mathematical knowledge is nowhere near what is claimed by NYSED and NYCDOE.

This hardly comes as a surprise to most; it largely reflects the inherent fallacy of the NYSED’s testing regime, whose high stakes under NCLB have been substantially amplified under mayoral control of NYC schools until test prep and teaching to a specific test have come to dominate math teaching in the city. Nevertheless, measuring NYC’ students’ mathematical progress against the NAEP’s does suggest that, at least at Grade 4, both sets of scores are moving upward in some degree of encouraging lockstop. The picture in Grade 8 is far different and far more gloomy, particularly viewed within the framework of the huge reported gains in 2008 (14 percentage points, to 59.6%) and 2009 (another 11.7 percentage points, to 71.3% as shown in the table above).

These latest NAEP results offer a highly reliable reality check on the claimed math gains of NYC public school students. At Grade 4, the NAEPs suggest that the NYS test results have a degree of validity with regard to progress, although the 50-percentage-point gap on achievement is a major contradictory indicator of mastery level. At Grade 8, the NAEP’s paint a truly worrisome picture of a 45-percentage-point achievement gap and almost no measured progress in six years on the NAEPs during a period when NYC results on State exams signal gains bordering suspiciously on miraculous.

More disconcerting still is the realization that the 2009-year Grade 8 students who took these latest NAEPs are the first "pre-high-school end products" of the NYC public school system under Joel Klein and mayoral control during the six-year period (2003 - 2009) since the TUDAs and mayoral control both began.

Michael Bloomberg’s campaign for his third mayoral term was predicated in no small part on his claims to be NYC’s “education mayor” as justified by NYS exam scores and a host of other DOE self-generated statistical measures. In my next posting, I will delve much more deeply into the NAEP’s raw data to compare NYC’s progress since 2003 against the nine other large cities who have participated in TUDA since that time and also reveal how many of the DOE’s (and Mayor’s) claims are simply not supported by the only truly independent measure of NYC public school education currently available.

More blatant charter school propaganda

The hype around the charter school, Harlem Village Academies, has been extraordinary.

The school has been featured on NBC Nightly News and many other media venues. The CEO, Deborah Kenny, spouts all the usual cliches: the school's success is based on running it “like a business”, the school supports “great teaching” and has a “culture of accountability.” She also calls Bloomberg a “godsend” for education. One thing is for sure, Kenny is paid like a corporate executive, according to the the blog Schools Matters.

Be sure to check out the hugely deceptive video below from an Oct. 15 segment of the MSNBC show, Morning Joe. Joe Scarborough begins by showing headlines from that morning's NY Times about NY State's lack of progress on the math NAEP exams, also called the Nation's report card, which called into question the validity of the sharp increases of NY students on the state math exams.

But then Joe goes on to say “However, but its not all bad news: for example 100% of the eighth graders at NYC’s Harlem Village Academies are proficient in their math skills."

At the same time, a graphic is displayed with the name of the charter school, stating that 100% of its students scored proficient in math, compared to 34% in the nation. At the top of the blackboard the words “the Nation’s Report Card” are featured, implying that both sets of results are from NAEP.

Yet the 100% figure for this charter school were from the NY state exams – which the NAEP results had just revealed to be hugely inflated! And the 34% is the national average for proficiency on the NAEPs – whose results are far more reliable and whose standards are much higher.

Whether this deception was promulgated by Kenny or was just sloppy reporting on the part of MSNBC, who knows. But at no time did Deborah Kenny try to correct the misimpression created by Joe Scarborough’s remarks or the visual displayed on the screen. I guess she earned her 420K salary that day.