Ravitch on NCLB

Posted by Unknown at 4:26 PM

The headline on Diane Ravitch's op-ed piece in the Times today reads "Get Congress Out of the Classroom." It's a shame that title obscures the important point Ravitch makes about the necessary role of federal government in public schooling.

The piece's main point is that No Child Left Behind needs serious revision. The transfers it purports to make possible don't take place in practice, the law leaves decisions about school sanctions to congressmen unfamiliar with education policy, and worst of all, the law pays lip service to a goal that is ultimately unattainable.

But Ravitch also points out a crucial role that federal government should play in public education: that of providing full information about our schools. The current NCLB law, by requiring constant improvement on test scores while leaving test design up to the states, has created a perverse incentive to write absurdly easy standardized tests. Instead, Ravitch argues, Congress should "supply unbiased information about student academic performance," presumably by mandating nationwide standardized tests and publishing the results. Such an arrangement would allow local governments to take the actions best suited for their individual schools while nevertheless providing a standardized national benchmark of accountability.

Low expectations strike again

Posted by Unknown at 11:12 AM

The Times today published a story on teacher Austin Lampros, who resigned from his post teaching math at Manhattan's High School for Arts and Technology after the school's principal overruled his decision to fail a student. The Times's Samuel Freedman writes:

Mr. Lampros’s introduction to the high school’s academic standards proved a fitting preamble to a disastrous year. It reached its low point in late June, when Arts and Technology’s principal, Anne Geiger, overruled Mr. Lampros and passed a senior whom he had failed in a required math course.

That student, Indira Fernandez, had missed dozens of class sessions and failed to turn in numerous homework assignments, according to Mr. Lampros’s meticulous records, which he provided to The New York Times. She had not even shown up to take the final exam. She did, however, attend the senior prom.

The full article is well worth a read.

Study: NYC charter schools outperform public schools

Posted by Unknown at 9:59 AM

A new study on New York charter schools provides compelling evidence that charter school students see greater test score gains than they would have in regular public schools. The study, written by Harvard Economics Professor Caroline Hoxby and the National Bureau of Economic Research's Sonali Murarka, can be downloaded here. (Be forewarned: the study is 81 pages long, but the Executive Summary outlines the main findings in two pages.)

Hoxby and Murarka find that charter schools raise student performance by about .09 standard deviations in math and about .4 standard deviations in reading. We can put those numbers in terms of our standardized tests: On New York's standardized tests, students receive scores from 1 (not meeting standards) to 4 (exceeding standards); a score of 3 is considered proficient. Charter schools raise math scores about 12% of the distance between a score of 1 and a score of 2, or between 2 and 3, etc. For reading scores the gain is about3.5% of a performance level. Keep in mind that these gains are in addition to whatever gains the students would have made in ordinary public schools.

The findings in Hoxby and Murarka's study are particularly convincing because they use truly random sampling to compare charter school students and regular students. The notorious challenge in evaluating any educational policy is that it is often extremely difficult to separate the effects of the policy from other correlations. For example, if we tried to compare the effects of private school and public school, we certainly couldn't just compare standardized test scores of public school students with those of private school students, since the students differ in many ways besides the school they attended. If private school scores were 20% higher than public school scores, for instance, some of that difference might be a result of the differences in education quality, but some of it may come from differences in parental education or socioeconomic status. Even small class size, which many parents and educators have long believed to be good for student achievement, has been very difficult to measure how beneficial small classes are, since students often differ in other ways as well. (If parents who tend to be more concerned for their children's education tend to demand small classes more often than other students, and if those concerned parents also read to their kids more, for instance, some of the test score differences between small-class and large-class students may come from differences in how much they're read to at home.)

So how can we accurately measure the effects of some educational policy? If students are randomly assigned to either "treatment groups" (those with the effect) and "control groups" (those without), we can compare those two groups without worrying about other factors that might bias the results. Fortunately, New York City charter schools provide an ideal opportunity for such a comparison. In New York, when more students apply for a charter school than can be admitted, they are selected by lottery-- a random sample! So Hoxby and Murarka compared the scores of students who were selected for admission with those who entered the lottery but were not selected. This type of comparison is typically considered so convincing that researchers will weigh the results of one good random-comparison study more heavily than any number of other, non-random results.

Finally, the study notes that charter school advocates would say the true benefits of charter schools are even greater than the findings in this study suggest. Since one of the supposed benefits of charter schools is that they bring competition for regular schools, advocates would say that charter schools actually improve the quality of education in regular public schools, as those schools are forced to improve to keep students from leaving for charter schools. If that's true, even the non-charter school students, i.e. the "control group," would have benefited from the effects of charter schools.

Klein's statistics painting too pretty a picture?

Posted by Unknown at 3:16 PM

Chancellor Klein's PR staff deserves as much credit for the City's recent statistical gains as the administration's reorganization, according to Sol Stern's recent column in City Journal. Stern is a scholar at the conservative-tending Manhattan Institute. Stern's piece gives yet another look at the history of NYC's education reform, but it goes beyond a simple history to do a bit of investigative journalism, delving into the tactics of Klein's formidable public relations staff. Stern writes:

The most notorious case of Bloomberg’s data manipulation occurred during the 2005 mayoral race. In May of that year, city hall bused education reporters to P.S. 33, a poor, predominantly minority school in the Bronx, where Bloomberg congratulated the children, their teachers, and Principal Elba Lopez on a miracle: 83 percent of the school’s fourth-graders scored at grade level on the 2005 reading test, compared with only 35.8 percent the previous year—an unheard-of one-year gain of close to 50 percentage points. The school’s score was just 4 percentage points below the average for the state’s richest suburban districts. Further, the mayor announced, the percentage of the city’s fourth-graders passing the state’s reading test had risen by a “record-breaking” 10 points in just one year.

If Bloomberg had really introduced accountability into the city’s education system, the implausible P.S. 33 scores would have raised red flags at the education department and perhaps even prompted a fraud referral to the city’s Special Commissioner of Investigations. Instead, the mayor got the political boost that he sought, with front-page headlines hailing the “historic” gains. Almost no commentary pointed out that fourth-grade reading scores rose by almost 10 percentage points in the rest of the state, too, suggesting that the 2005 test might have been easier than the previous year’s.

Though the full article is nearly 4000 words, it's well worth the time. Thanks to NYC Public School Parents for bringing this one to our attention.

BREAKING NEWS: Cell phone ban challenged by City Council

Posted by Unknown at 12:12 PM

Today the City Council voted overwhelmingly (46-2) in favor of a law giving students the right to carry cell phones with them during the commute to and from school. Monday's New York Sun article sums up the issue nicely, and at 1:30 today the proposal went before the full council. Seth Pearce, of the New York City Student Union, weighs in on the vote over at NYC Student Word. He writes, in part:

Today, as a student, I would like to applaud the City Council's decision to let students have their cell phones during the commute to and from school. I am glad that it has become clear to them that for us students, this is not a matter of convenience but a matter of safety.

Plainly, students should not be scared to go to school. Just as our School Safety Agents work every day to keep us safe inside, City policy should protect us outside the walls of the school building. A student should not have to be afraid that in the event of an emergency, they will be isolated and imperiled because they were forced to leave their cell phones at home.

Definitely check out his full post, and keep an eye out for more of Seth's contributions.

Update: The Staten Island Advance has posted an article on today's result as well.

Contracts for Excellence plan draws critiques from Council, public

Posted by Unknown at 2:26 PM

This morning the City Council's Education Committee conducted a hearing on the Department of Education's proposed plan to spend $228 million in state Contracts for Excellence funds. [See previous posts on this topic.] The hearing was organized by Councilman Robert Jackson, president of the Education Committee. Those testifying included officials from the Department of Education, the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, and the teachers' and administrators' unions, among others. The hearing was basically an opportunity for council members to get information and, in some cases, to offer their thoughts on the DOE's plan; the plan does not require a signature of approval from the City Council to move forward.

Jackson directed the meeting, and the most interesting part by far was the first two hours, during which Chancellor Klein and Marcia Lyles outlined the DOE's plan and argued that it does, in fact, conform to Governor Spitzer's mandates. (Other testimony, of course, was also pertinent, but was very similar to what we saw during the public hearings on the plan.) Below are what I took to be some of the high points from that segment of the hearing.

• The DOE website has (finally) published a breakdown of Contracts for Excellence funding by district. Although this breakdown does show the amount of money to be spent on each of the five permitted "program areas" in each district (e.g. smaller class sizes, more time on task, etc.), Jackson complained that the document is hardly a comprehensive plan. Instead, it is simply aggregated, by district, individual schools' planned spending in each area.
  
• Jackson was frustrated that the DOE had not made substantive changes to its Fair Student Funding plan in response to the Contracts for Excellence requirements; instead, the department claimed that the plan already complied with the required mandates. In response, Klein argued that the same ultimate goals lie at the heart of both the Contracts for Excellence and Children First reforms, and that it is then unsurprising that Children First's Fair Student Funding didn't have to change much to comply with the state's requirements.
• In response to criticisms about the timing of the DOE's public hearings on the plan, Klein stressed the tight timeline his office faced in organizing the coming year's budgets, saying that "while, as noted, there is a near perfect symmetry between the substance of our reforms and CFE, we must all acknowledge the practical timing challenges related to fulfilling the mandate of the new legislation this first year." Klein said next year's process would be smoother and better advertised in advance.
  
• As with the rest of the Children First reforms, Klein emphasized the need not only for more money, but for that money to be spent well. He returned to this theme several times, using to respond to Jackson's skepticism about whether assessments could qualify for increased "time on task" and to Councilman Koppell's worry that arts education would be neglected in the absence of specific Project Arts allocations.
• Jackson and Klein debated the effectiveness of team teaching as a way to reduce class sizes. According to Klein, the Contracts for Excellence regulations allow adding an additional teacher to a classroom as a means to reduce class size. Although he agreed with Jackson that this measure may not be ideal, he said that, in the absence of more space (which will take time under the new five-year capital improvement plan) it was sometimes the only option.
  
• With respect to class sizes, a point of contention was whether CTT classes should count as such a reduction. CTT, or Collaborative Team Teaching, places special education students in a class with regular students, and the class is taught by two teachers, one of whom is certified in special ed. The DOE plan includes CTT classes in its class size reduction plans. Geri Palast, of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity (one of the organizations that sponsored the lawsuit from which the Contract for Excellence funds resulted) criticized this view of CTT classes, saying that CTT programs targeted classes with special needs and autistic students, not students in large classes, and that the funds were therefore not going toward the "highest needs students" as the CFE law requires.

There was, of course, much more covered than can be summed up in these highlights, but these are the significant points that weren't already seen during the public hearings. Have more questions about specific testimony or content? Leave a comment and I'll post some more info.

Ask presidential candidates about education in the next debate

Posted by Unknown at 12:07 PM

Ask about education in the upcoming presidential debate, July 23 in South Carolina. The debate is organized by CNN and YouTube, and debate questions will come from user-submitted videos uploaded to YouTube's site. Roy Romer over at Ed in '08 is encouraging all those interested in education to submit questions on the topic, and apparently people are listening: on Monday, CNN said 190 of the 1,044 questions submitted were about education-- more than any other topic-- Romer reported.

YouTube will continue to accept questions until July 22 (this Sunday). To submit your own, see YouTube's debate question submission page.

NYC special ed lawsuit heads to Supreme Court

Posted by Unknown at 11:32 AM

A lawsuit about special education in New York City is headed for the U.S. Supreme Court, and the Federal Government is siding against the City. Joseph Goldstein of the New York Sun reports on the case, writing:

The case is likely to set standards for when localities must reimburse parents for private school tuition for students with a range of disabilities. The New York City Department of Education says it must only pay for private school if, after a child is first placed in a public school special education program, the school is unable to meet the needs of the child. The city claims that any other policy will require it to pay for the bias many parents have toward an expensive private education.

Check out the full article for more details.

Spitzer's office sheds light on NYC funding plan

Posted by Unknown at 10:26 AM

More on Contracts for Excellence: Yesterday Manuel Rivera, the Deputy Secretary of Education for New York State, spoke during the CPAC meeting at Tweed. Unsurprisingly, many of the questions from committee members focused on New York City's plan to meet the state's Contracts for Excellence requirements.

Ultimately, education policy in New York State is governed by the Board of Regents, whose members are elected by the State Assembly. The Regents select and hire a Commissioner of Education to oversee the State Education Department (currently Richard Mills). The governor's office, however, has substantial influence over education policy and control over the resources going to education. The Deputy Secretary of Education (Rivera) heads up education in Governor Spitzer's administration.

What this means for New York City's Contracts for Excellence plan is that, while Rivera will not decide whether or not the complies with the law-- that job lies with the Regents and Mills-- he will be in a position to offer input on the matter at the state level.

Because the City's plan will not be formally submitted until July 15, and the Regents enforcement criteria won't be decided until well after that, Rivera refrained from saying outright whether he felt the plan complies with the law.

Rivera did, however, shed light on why the period of public comment-- and the notice for it-- was so short. New York's Court of Appeals affirmed the ruling that the state had to increase funding for New York City last November, and Spitzer proposed his Contracts for Excellence plan in January. That plan was not passed by Congress until April, leaving very little time to implement it for the coming year's budget. Rather than delay the funding for an additional year-- as some members of congress wanted-- Rivera said the Governor's office preferred to implement the law immediately to get more money flowing into New York City's schools as soon as possible. This did not leave affected districts enough time to gather sufficient public input and devise a full plan for compliance, so the law allowed for temporary emergency regulations this year, with the understanding that those regulations would change before next year's budgets are submitted.

So the bad news is that there is little parents can do this year to influence the City's Contracts for Excellence spending plan. However, by getting involved at the state level as the Regents decide how the Contracts for Excellence plan will be enforced in the future, constituents can have a greater say over how the public input process will work in the future.

Public frustrated, some furious, over DOE spending proposal (updated)

Posted by Unknown at 8:31 AM

At the Contracts for Excellence hearing in Manhattan last night, dozens of parents, teachers, advocates, and students voiced harsh criticisms about the Department of Education's plans to spend this year's record increase in state education funding.

The funds, which are a direct result of a joint lawsuit against the state by two non-profit organizations, will result in over $1 billion in additional money for New York City schools during the coming school year. Of that total, $228 million is required to conform to Governor Spitzer's Contracts for Excellence mandate, meaning the money must be used to accomplish one of five specific goals, including smaller class sizes and more "time on task" -- i.e. longer days or more days in the school year. (For more on the history of this issue, check out our previous posts on the topic.)

Last week Chancellor Klein announced his plan for spending the Contracts for Excellence money, essentially claiming that the City's new Fair Student Funding system would automatically meet the requirements of Contracts for Excellence, and nothing more needed to be done. The plan did, however, specify how much money will be used to address each of Spitzer's allowed spending categories. This week the DOE is conducting hearings throughout the City, gathering public comment on the plan, and at last night's hearing in Manhattan the comments reflected serious disenchantment with the plan.

Geri Palast of Campaign for Fiscal Equity (one of the groups that brought the original lawsuit) stressed the need for specific commitments in the plan. "The City's plan is overly broad and is not specific enough," she said, and she asked the city to post individual schools' plans on the DOE's Contracts for Excellence webpage.

Many speakers criticized the lack of serious public input for the DOE's spending plan. The press release detailing the plan and the schedule for public hearings was published July 5, and the plan must be submitted to the state by July 15, leaving only ten days for public comment of any sort. The short notice, and the fact that the hearings are occurring in July-- when education is not at the forefront of many parents' minds-- drew sharp criticism.

Others bemoaned the lack of a long-term plan to comply with the Contracts for Excellence requirements. Leonie Haimson-- a parent and blogger for NYC Public School Parents-- said the plan is in "flagrant violation of state law" because there is "absolutely no five-year plan to reduce class size, as mandated by the Contracts for Excellence."

But the most common criticism by far was the need for more focus on reducing class sizes. Of the $228 million governed by the Contracts for Excellence requirements, the plan classifies $111 million for class size reduction, hiring an additional 1,300 teachers for the coming year. However, it's unclear how much this will actually reduce class sizes, since we don't know how many of those teachers will have their own classrooms. Additionally, Haimson and many others have noted that even if every teacher were to have their own new classroom, average class size across the city would only fall by between .3 and .8 students. The DOE, for its part, provides only the following clarification: "By investing in class size reduction, the DOE projects first-year class size reduction that exceeds the annual rate of reduction over the last five years." Seth Pearce, a senior at Laguardia and representative of the New York City Student Union, also stressed the need for smaller classes, saying reduced class size is "instrumental to improving teacher quality." His complete comments can be read here. Ben Shanahan, of Hunter College High School, also weighed in-- see his comments at NYC Student Word.

For a more complete discussion of the class size reduction plan's criticisms, read Haimson's post on the topic. Otherwise, check back here for continuing coverage.

7/13 Update: NYC Public School Parents has links to the comments made by several more people Wednesday evening.

Care about No Child Left Behind? Tell your representative!

Posted by Unknown at 4:27 PM

President Bush's No Child Left Behind act is coming up for reauthorization in congress, and many are calling for changes. In particular, Edspresso reports today about the Derby, Kansas, board of education's decision to issue a resolution on the matter.

The board voted to endorse the No Child Left Behind Improvement Act (also known as HR 648) with specific recommendations for greater local control. The school board from Highland, Indiana, has followed suit. The Northwest Indiana Times reports National School Board association urged the board to issue the resolution.

So the wave is starting, and local education groups are weighing in. Check out the current state of No Child Left Behind, and if you have thoughts, tell your congressional representative or organize a resolution within your PTA or district.

(Slightly) smaller classes on the way (updated)

Posted by Unknown at 6:27 PM

In an extension of our recent post about NYC's use of $1.03 billion in additional state education funding ($228 million of which must conform to Governor Spitzer's Contract for Excellence requirements), the Times reports today on Chancellor Klein's plans for the money.

Specifically, Klein talks about how the Department of Ed plans to fulfill the Contract for Excellence requirements with the required $228 million: $106 million of it will reduce class size by hiring 1300 new teachers. Other funding will extend class time and provide more resources for training and development.

This is the first I've heard about Klein and the DOE acknowledging that Fair Student Funding would meet the requirements for the state's Contract for Excellence requirements. Some, including Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters, were less than thrilled with the announcement, the Times reports, calling Klein's planned class size reductions "so minimal as to be meaningless."

July 11 update: For criticism of Klein's plan, check out NYC Educator's post on the topic.

Does more state money really mean more accountability?

Posted by Unknown at 3:39 PM

Elizabeth Green at the New York Sun reports today about the City's use of the upcoming dramatic increase in state education funding, which are supposed to be used in accordance with Governor Spitzer's "Contract for Excellence" initiative. (For more on the Campaign for Fiscal Equity's lawsuit behind the increase and the details of the Contract for Excellence, see Green's article or the recent Insideschools piece on the parent letter to the Board of Regents.)

The city will see an increase of about $700 million for the 2007-2008 school year, and, in principle, this money must be spent on one of the five priorities outlined in Spitzer's Contract for Excellence, including reducing class size, providing after-school programs, and lengthening the school year. However, there are a number of loopholes that allow the money to be used for other purposes, such as charter schools and "experimental programs."

Green writes:

The state had reported in April that $317 million of the new funds would be governed by Mr. Spitzer's accountability plan, called the Contract for Excellence. But new numbers released Thursday will likely leave just $228 million to be governed by the contract's restrictions, a city spokeswoman, Debra Wexler, said.

Some are disappointed with this change, including Michael Rebell, one of the attorneys who brought the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit, Green reports.

For an alternative view, check out the dissent by Joe Williams on the Dems for Ed Reform blog.

'Overly aggressive' police in classroom

Posted by Unknown at 11:55 AM

In a New York Times column (subscription required) today, Bob Herbert writes about a case of police harassment in the classroom-- one incident on a long list compiled by the New York Civil Liberties Union in its report "Criminalizing the Classroom: The Over-Policing of New York City Schools."

According to Herbert's column, Principal Michael Soguero of Bronx Guild High School was suspended in 2005 after being arrested in front of a classroom full of students by Officer Juan Gonzalez. His crime? Defending a 16-year-old girl who had cursed within earshot of a police officer on her way to class. When the officer attempted to arrest the student, Principal Soguero intervened. Charges were later dropped, and Soguero has since moved to Colorado. Although Police Department and the district attorney initially supported Officer Gonzalez, Herbert writes that he has since learned Gonzalez is "indeed a problem officer," and that his gun and badge have since been confiscated.

Parents, angry about DOE survey, post their own

Posted by Unknown at 10:59 AM

If you visited the DOE website recently, you probably saw ever more frantic calls to fill out the DOE Parent Survey. The survey was part of a major plan to get parental input, and Chancellor Klein assembled a parent focus group to help put it together.

Some of those parents were seriously disenchanted when the final survey was published, and it lacked questions about parent support for mayoral control, trust for Klein and Mayor Bloomberg, and other issues about public school policy-- all questions that those parents had called for during their focus group meetings. In response, some parents put together their own survey, one that asks questions the DOE survey didn't include.

The parent survey is sponsored by Class Size Matters, a NYC organization that has been at odds with much of the Klein reforms. Class size matters called for a boycott of the DOE parent survey, asking parents to return the form with the questions crossed out, instead writing "We want real parent input – as well as smaller classes, less testing, and new priorities at Tweed to deal with the real problems in our schools."

The survey includes questions like: "How responsive do you feel Joel Klein and the leadership of the New York City Department of Education have been to the needs and priorities of parents?" and "How much stress to standardized tests cause your child? (a) too much stress (b) too little stress (c) the right amount of stress, or (d) don't know."

Special ed still more segregated in NYC

Posted by Unknown at 10:09 AM

Special ed students in NYC are placed in separate classrooms more often than in the rest of the state, and more than twice as often as the national average.

Today the New York Times published the results of a state report on special education, reporting that educational officials called New York City's statistics "disturbing." Of particular concern is the lack of special ed integration into regular classrooms:

New York State recommends that students with disabilities be integrated into the general population in regular classrooms wherever possible, saying that they benefit academically and socially from the broader contact.

But in 2006-7, 9.4 percent of students in New York City were taught in separate settings, compared with 6.8 percent for the state. The city’s number was more than twice the national average of 4 percent, state officials said. That is virtually unchanged from a decade ago, when 9.5 percent of special education students were in segregated classrooms in the city, the report said.

Although the article did contain some praise for Chancellor Klein's special education policies, overall the city's progress in this area is clearly lagging.

No big surprise: voucher results are "inconclusive" thus far

Posted by Unknown at 2:31 PM

The first test results from Washington D.C.'s voucher experiment were released late last week, and (not surprisingly) both sides of the debate are claiming victory, or at least not admitting defeat.

The Washington Post article linked to above does a good job of summarizing the results and the history of the issue there; the ultimate result, in my eyes, is that it's really still too early to tell whether the results are positive or not. Most programs that fundamentally change the game in public education take more than a single year to demonstrate results. So I wouldn't grant the naysayers too much credence quite yet.

That said, some on the pro-voucher side have said that the simple fact that students who switched schools didn't do worse is support for their position. I'm skeptical of this argument, too-- ultimately I think we just need more time to wait and see.

On a procedural note, I was heartened to read about how the effects of the vouchers were measured, comparing voucher applicants who received vouchers to those who applied but did not receive them. Since the vouchers were awarded by lottery, this method should accurately provide the random variation necessary for a good control group. If this method can be used in subsequent years, after the effects of school changes are more substantial, I'm hopeful that we'll be able to see the real results of D.C.'s program.

Bill to ease college bills advances in State Senate

Posted by Unknown at 4:00 PM

The New York Senate Majority Conference has just advanced a bill that would help ease the burden of higher education expenses. The bill includes such things as an increase in the maximum tuition deduction and debt relief for graduates facing daunting student loans.

Klein: ELL students will wait longer before taking tests

Posted by Unknown at 10:02 AM

Yesterday NY1 reported on Chancellor Klein's new plan to allow English Language Learner (ELL) students more time before requiring them to take standardized tests. Whereas ELL students currently have to take the tests during their first year in school (even students who haven't yet been in the States for a full year), Klein plans to change that requirement, exempting those students from required tests for their first two years.

While I think Klein is probably correct to exempt ELL students from state tests, since those students hardly need to spend time taking exams that won't yield meaningful results, I can't help but be skeptical about Klein's motivation for the change. ELL test scores are, of course, far below the citywide average, especially the scores of ELL students during their first two years of NYC public education. Therefore removing them from the test pool will probably result in a significant jump in test scores, giving the mistaken impression that test scores have greatly improved. With the end of Bloomberg's administration in site, and mayoral control of the city's public schools sunsetting in 2009, I can't help but think this measure could be a last push to show test gains under the Bloomberg-Klein reforms.

Of course, I could be wrong-- one could avoid the misleading test results by removing from past averages the scores of first- and second-year ELL students when calculating improvement statistics. Then the statistics would truly track how the same types of students were performing from year to year-- comparing apples and apples-- which is the only way to accurately measure the effects of school reform over time. We'll see if the DOE takes this step, or if instead they forgo statistical accuracy for the sake of political gain and claim credit for a test gain that never occurred.

Merit pay for teachers: the state of the debate

Posted by Unknown at 1:30 PM

Today the New York Times published an article by Sam Dillon on the growing trend toward merit-based pay for teachers. Although Chancellor Joel Klein's plan for incentive-based teacher pay in New York City has stalled, the Times article reports that the movement is gaining steam at the national level. Dillon cites University of Wisconsin's Allan Odden, a professor of educational administration who studies teacher pay. According to Odden, the merit pay trend has now reached "critical mass," and teachers unions (whose members have historically opposed merit-based compensation) have begun to cooperate with the movement in some regions.

In New York City, Klein has wanted to implement an incentive-based compensation program since he became chancellor, but the issue has stalled over conflicts with the city's teachers union.

Despite the standoff over Klein's incentive pay proposal, merit pay did see a recent boost in New York City when a group of NYC charter schools received a federal grant for $10.5 million from the Teacher Incentive Fund. Check out the New York Sun's article for more.

For more on the state of the merit pay debate, check out the Economist's May 10 article.