NYC's GPA?

Posted by helen at 8:20 AM

School's out. The kids have their report cards. But official school report cards, that show school stats and test scores? Not just yet.

State-generated school report cards are built on 2005-2006 numbers. City-generated Annual School Reports use old data, too -- data that predate the creation of dozens of new, small high schools, and omit principals posted since '05, and current counts of students and teachers. (This is especially crucial for young, growing schools; some have tripled in size and staff since the report cards were posted.) The New York State Department of Education has repeatedly said that updated report cards will post "around" the end of June. That's Monday; we're skeptical. (Last year, they posted before the end of May.)

We're also waiting for the city and state to release the much-anticipated high school graduation rate, the benchmark against which Bloomberg and Klein measure their Children First reforms. For the first time in decades, NYC's DOE and the NYSED are actually using the same basis for counting grads (in prior years, each defined grads in different ways, making direct comparison dicey). When will the grad rate post? According to Chancellor Klein, that's up to the State, too.

Grade the kids, grade the schools; rate the principals, rate the teachers. Along with reports on how their kids progressed, parents deserve current knowledge on how the city's schools are doing. Why is the wait for these reports stretching into summer?

Test score bounce: Looking at the numbers

Posted by helen at 8:28 AM

New York City and State's big gains in test scores lead the news at the Times and Daily News, and are featured at the Post and the Sun, which focuses on charter-school progress. But amid the celebratory, double-digit party (and leaving aside, for the moment, critical questions about score inflation and comparisons with national tests), disturbing trends persist, and -- not surprisingly -- get far less play than testing's great leap forward.

Have a look at the test score "deck" from the DOE's Department of Assessment and Accountability, which breaks out scores by grade and race.

The achievement gap that yawns between white and Asian students and their black and Hispanic peers has narrowed, but continues far too wide: Overall, 80% of white students earned level 3/4 (grade-level and higher) on the ELA, compared with 54% of black students and 53% of Hispanic kids. That's a 26% or 27% gap. Even if it closes at the rate of 2 or 3 points a year (the recent, upward trend), that's 9 or 12 years, or many kids' entire public-school career, before the races achieve parity -- if white and Asian kids' scores don't rise, which they likely will (again, tracking Bloomberg-era trends).

The abyss that separates 8th grade's middling progress from 4th grade's high scores is even more threatening: About two-thirds of white eighth-graders, 65%, earned levels 3/4 on the ELA; just over one-third of black and Hispanic students (36% and 33%, respectively) posted similar scores. Taken together, 43% of the city's eighth graders scored level 3/4 -- which means that nearly six in ten will proceed to high-school officially reading below grade level.

Cue the party horns here (or not).

Update: According to DOE, the scores were embargoed on State directive, meant for school use in planning placements (as if year-round testing didn't yield sufficient data) and available to parents on request, but not publicly released until their presentation to the Regents yesterday.