Absurdities and Kneecapping

 Dear Absurdists and Kneecappers,

 Did you see this headline: NY Post Comes Out Against School Grades: These grades flunk

It is becoming increasingly clear that Schools Chancellor Joel Klein is doing no one any favors -- not the public, and certainly not himself -- by assigning letter-grade report cards to city schools. The jerry-rigged system for determining the grades obscures more than it reveals. Thus, the information the cards impart is worse than misleading -- it's virtually useless. And the charter-school movement -- an unambiguously bright light in the city school system -- is particularly ill-served by the letter grades. 

Unambigously bright light? They must suffer from severe pupil dilation.

Poor babies. They're favorite pet charters didn't do so well on the grading system. It must be flawed. But then again we knew that all along. Of course Michael MulGarten stepped into it with this one:

The teachers union -- which detests both the competition from charters and the use of tests to hold teachers accountable -- hopped on the new grades with both feet.
Traditional schools' edge in grades means "either the strategy Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein have touted for so long -- the creation of more charter schools -- isn't working, or that the entire progress-report methodology, which relies almost completely on standardized test scores, is flawed," crowed union boss Michael Mulgrew.

Tweed was quick to point out that the UFT's own charter got a "D" with the comment, "those in glass houses shouldn't cast stones." The UFT charters have suffered one disaster after another with numerous changes in leadership. I actually agree with the Tweedies here. We told the UFT not to get into the charter school game because they would never be able to take a position opposed to charter schools or be able to lead a real fight back for public education if they did. And so they did (get into the game). And so they don't (lead a fight back).

 

Leonie Haimson commented:

Even the NY Post, owned by Murdoch and close buddy of Bloomberg and Klein admits that the school grades are so absurdly unreliable they should be eliminated.

The straw that broke the camel’s back for them this year appears to be the way charter schools got lower scores on average this year.

The jerry-rigged system for determining the grades obscures more than it reveals. Thus, the information the cards impart is worse than misleading -- it's virtually useless.

 Followed by Steve Koss

It's difficult not to guffaw over the absurdist inconsistency in the Post's "new position" on school report cards, what with their having gone from its greatest shills to sudden detractors simply because they disagree with its outcome in respect to the system's assessment of charter schools.

What's even more astonishing is that they either don't see or don't care to see the other astonishing inconsistency in their revised position on the school report cards. If after having spent countless millions of dollars and doubtless reflecting the professional genius of innumerable experts on education, the end result is so inconsistent and unreliable that even the Post's troglodytic conservatives want to throw out this type of reporting at the aggregated school level, what could possibly make any sentient homo sapiens think that INCREASING the granularity of these measurements to the teacher/classroom level will be any better?

Likely without the faintest sense of what they've done, the editors at the Post have kneecapped their own already-indefensible position with regard to value-added analysis and evaluation of teacher performance. After all, if the geniuses at DOE and their wasted millions couldn't do it right for entire schools (where aggregation enables at least some degree of the margin for error to wash itself out), how on earth can it be done for a third-grade teacher with just 25 or 30 children in a classroom?

What could be more better than seeing the Post's editorial troglodytes unknowingly clubbing themselves in the knees without even realizing they're doing it?

Steve Koss

The "top" NYC high schools, with SAT scores, class sizes, and caveats

Check out the NY Post listing on the "top" 50 NYC high schools here: The top 10, 11 - 20, 21 - 40, 41 - 50. The data for all 400 plus high schools, including graduation rates, average SAT scores, etc. is available here.

The Post used the DOE progress reports, plus other relevant outcome data, to calculate this list. Like all such rankings, they have to be taken with a heavy grain of salt. In this case, the salt pile is immense, since so much of the DOE data are either unreliable or incomplete. For example, high school NYC graduation rates are often inflated, because they don't taken into account the numbers of discharged students, a huge loophole that many high schools use to boost their grad rates.

The Post says that the graduation rate in their listings reflects the percent of 9^th graders who end up graduating after four years plus a summer; but that is not true. Many high schools discharge significant numbers of students before they even reach the 12th grade, and many if most of these students end up dropouts, but are never counted as such.

Even in the case of one of top schools on the list (Bard), the reporter notes that “about 20 students in each class transfer out.” In the case of Bard, a highly selective school, they probably enroll in other regular high schools, but for other schools, discharged students often end up in alternative high schools, GED programs or sometimes nowhere at all. The DOE used to make the discharge data by each individual school available in their graduation reports, but no longer does, ever since Jennifer Jennings and I produced a report on the rising discharge figures under Bloomberg and Klein.

[Correction! Updated reports for the classes of 2008 and 2009 do contain discharge data by school, at least for general ed students; see Appendix B at the links above, which reveal egregiously high discharge rates at many schools, with twice the number of official "dropouts" in many cases. What the city no longer seems to report on are discharge rates for D 75 and self-contained students.]

The NY Post's listing does not include any data on the growing practice of credit recovery, which is another manner in which many schools are artificially inflating their grad rates, (see this article by the same Post reporter on the phenomenon.) The DOE refuses to release any data on credit recovery, so it is impossible to know just how widespread this practice is. The class size data are also are not fully reliable; and tend to underestimate the actual size of classes in many high schools, since inclusion (CTT) classes are commonly reported as two separate classes.

I also don't trust the college-going rates in the listings; and the SAT scores don't include information as to what percent of the class actually took the SATs. Finally, the ratings may reflect more than anything else the socio-economic background of the students rather than what the schools actually bring to the table.

Nevertheless, as parents have a right to see this information, I have now posted a spreadsheet with SAT average scores for every school, for 2008 and 2009, as well the schoolwide class size averages for 2009-10 school year, as calculated by the DOE (as opposed to class size averages in each school by grade and subject, that are available here.). Neither of these files are on the DOE website, as far as I know.

Tsunami of pro-charter opinion in the dailies

Before the state raised its cap on charter schools last month, New Yorkers were inundated with a flood of TV, radio and internet ads from the hedge-fund privateers: Democrats for Education Reform and Education Reform Now, both groups trying to disguise themselves as parents, educators and community members.

We were also overwhelmed by a tsunami of editorials and opeds from the newspapers, all in unison purveying the same flawed statistics and arguments, trying to bully the Legislature into submission.

I had my intern, Ann Fudjinski, count all the editorials and opeds in the NY Post, the Daily News, the NY Times and the Wall Street Journal between March 1 and May 29, when the final vote on the cap occurred.

The resulting tally (in excel) is quite astonishing.

In the NY Post, there were 21 separate editorials and 21 opeds for raising the cap in less than three months; sometimes several on one day. Nine were written by charter school authorizers, operators or paid lobbyists. (And this doesn't count the obviously slanted coverage of some of the reporters.)

In the Daily News, there were 25 editorials and opeds, for raising the cap; with only one leaning against (by Andrew Wolf). Eleven were opeds; three by a regular columnist (Errol Louis) and five by charter authorizers, operators, or paid representatives of the charter industry.

The volume was decidedly smaller in the NY Times and Wall St. Journal, but similarly one-sided. One pro-charter editorial and one pro-charter oped appeared in the Times; and one pro-charter editorial and two pro-charter opeds in the WSJ. In all, 99 percent of the editorials, opinion columns and opeds were in favor of charter schools.

Traditionally, opeds are supposed to provide balance to offset the views expressed by the editors and/or the regular columnists.

I emailed the oped editor of the NY Post, Adam Brodsky, to ask him why their coverage was so overwhelmingly lop-sided, but got no reply.

I did get a response from Josh Greenman, the oped editor of the Daily News, who wrote me that balance was less important than the "strength of argument, timeliness, vibrancy, newsworthiness and value added to an important debate."

Which begs the question why the only pieces he thought were sufficiently vibrant, newsworthy and valuable to the debate were those that agreed with the frequently reiterated positions of the Daily News editors.

The city's desperate attack on the NAACP following their lawsuit to block the closings of 19 schools

Yesterday, the UFT, the NAACP, the Manhattan and Brooklyn Borough Presidents, city councilmembers, state legislators, and two Community Education Council presidents all joined to together in a lawsuit to block the DOE's plan to close 19 schools.

The lawsuit states that the DOE failed to comply with the public process outlined in the new governance law, and that its Educational Impact Statements were woefully inadequate, points we have made repeatedly on the blog and in our official comments to the DOE. (Here is the memo of law; here is the notice of petition and affidavits from the two CEC Presidents.)

The best coverage of the lawsuit was from NY1, whose education reporter, Lindsey Christ, continues to excel. See below.



Unbelievably, the NY Times did not run any story about the lawsuit, though it carried the news on its blog (Teachers' Union and NAACP Sue to Stop School Closings). The lack of judgment on the part of the Times editors never ceases to amaze.

Meanwhile the NY Post has a twofer, in their effort to undermine the credibility of the NAACP for joining the suit; a predictably misleading oped from Dennis Walcott and a predictably nasty editorial: The NAACP in the schoolhouse door. The Post's own news coverage on the lawsuit runs only eight lines: NAACP, UFT in school suit.

Methinks the city and its toadies on the Post doth protest too much.

Really, who are NYers going to trust about the effects of these destructive policies on the city's neediest kids, the NAACP or Rupert Murdoch?