What A Bargain!

According to Sol Stern, the New York City public school system budget has increased by $7.2 billion dollars since Mayor Bloomberg announced his Children First reforms in January 2003.

Back in 2003, the school financing budget was $12.5 billion dollars, including pension costs and debt service. In the current fiscal year 2008, the budget is $19.7 billion dollars, including pension and debt costs.

The additional $7.2 billion dollars is a 50% funding increase in the last five years.

When Bloomberg first gained total control of the New York City public school system in 2002, he said that he was going to “make sure we get the most value for the school system’s dollar.”

Stern decides to take Bloomberg up on his challenge and see.

Stern examines the release of the 2007 Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA) of the federal government’s National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), which compares the fourth and eighth grade math and reading scores on the NAEP exam of 11 of the nation's largest urban school districts, to see just what the extra $7.2 billion dollars has bought.

Stern finds not much.

As has been noted here and elsewhere, New York City students showed little-to-no improvement on the tests.

New York City was the only 1 of the 11 urban districts to show no improvement on eighth grade math scores from 2003 to 2007. In fact, scores remained flat for every ethnic and racial subgroup in the city.

Fourth and eighth grade reading tests were even worse. There was no significant change in proficiency on the fourth grade reading tests between 2003 and 2007 while the reading scores for eighth graders actually fell from 2003 to 2007.

Only fourth grade math scores increased from 2003 to 2007.

Stern concludes:

These results may surprise people who have heard so much over the past five years from the Bloomberg administration and some of the media about New York City’s “historic” gains on the state’s math and reading tests. But the NAEP doesn’t lie; it measures achievement far more accurately than state tests do. No doubt the administration will put the best face on the latest test data. But the reality is that $7 billion in extra education spending has so far produced only pennies’ worth of academic improvement in most grades. The sooner the city faces up to the bottom line, the sooner we can start speaking honestly about how to remedy the situation.

So the additional $7.2 billion has bought a slight increase in fourth grade math scores, a slight decrease in eighth grade reading scores and no significant change in fourth grade reading or eighth grade math scores.

What a bargain!

So, what did Bloomberg spend all the extra money on?

Well, clearly some of it went to teacher compensation. By May 2008, the United Federation of Teachers says teacher salaries in New York City will have increased 40% between 2002 and 2008.

While the editorial writers at the Times, News, Post et al. like to call that increased compensation "raises," the truth is that teachers have given up days, time, a sixth class, grievance rights, seniority rights and other job protections to win the extra compensation.

Nonetheless, it is true that some of the $7.2 billion has gone to salaries for personnel.

Where did the rest of the money go?

Decreased class sizes?

Nope. In fact, Bloomberg and Klein fought the state to use additional state education money on anything but reduced class size:

City educrats have agreed to reduce class sizes in 75 failing, overcrowded middle and high schools in order to collect $258 million from Albany.

The state money was the subject of a dispute between the city and state until a final deal was announced Monday.

Gov. Spitzer had insisted the "Contracts for Excellence" money could be used only to reduce class sizes or support four other state educational priorities, but city officials wanted to support Mayor Bloomberg's agenda, including a program that gives kids standardized practice tests 10 times a year.

Now of course reducing class sizes in 75 schools is, as Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters told the Daily News, "totally inadequate compared to the critical need," but the fact that the state had to take on Bloomberg and Klein to force them to use the money on reduced class sizes in critically overcrowded failing schools goes to show just how little they care about the issue.

So if Bloomberg hasn't used the additional education funding for reducing class size or reducing populations at severely overcrowded schools, what has he used it on?

Well, there is the $80 million dollar ARIS computer system and the additional 8-10 standardized tests New York City public school children will be required to take every year starting in February 2008.

And of course you can't have 8-10 additional standardized tests a year without a testing contract handed out to McGraw-Hill to create those 8-10 additional standardized tests a year.

So far, nobody at the school level actually knows what these 8-10 additional standardized tests a year will look like or what they will test, but I'm sure they'll be great.

What else did the mayor and the chancellor spend the additional education funds on?

Well, there was the constant reorganization of the school system (we're now on our third reorganization in the past five years), the closing of the school districts and the opening of the school regions and then the closing of the school regions and the reopening of the school districts.

Then there was the city-wide reading and math curricula that were added after the mayor took total control of the schools in 2002. The rationale here was that every child in every classroom in every school across the city should be learning the same problem at the same time on the same day as every other child in the same grade.

The key to these curricula changes was "sameness."

So we had the city hire people to measure bulletin boards to make sure the margins were "regulation" and investigate classrooms to make sure they had reading rugs (teachers with irregular bulletin board margins or without the proper reading rugs were written up.)

The reading and math curricula have since gone away and were replaced with a mania about data.

DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA!!!!

The mayor and the chancellor brought in an outside entity to conduct "school quality reviews" that were heavy on the "what are you doing with your data" variety.

The mayor and the chancellor also took the $80 million dollar ARIS computer system and ran the testing and graduation rate data along with student, parent and teacher surveys through it and kicked out school report cards that managed to give D's and F's to many schools that did very well earlier in the year on the "school quality reviews." Many of these schools also have very good test scores, but the report cards measure "progress," not "performance," so schools with excellent test scores in math and reading still managed to receive very low or failing report card grades.

The 8-10 additional standardized tests to be added next year will be added to the ARIS stew and used for the school report cards in the future.

At least until the next mayor comes in and cleans up the mess this one has created.

But to get back to the matter at hand, the mayor has also spent budget money on merit pay for teachers and merit pay for students, closing large overcrowded schools and creating lots of small overcrowded schools in their place, turning toxic waste dumps into school buildings, doling out no-bid contracts to cronies like the Snapple company, holding teacher fairs to alleviate the high teacher turnover problem and let's not forget adding lots and lots of public relations to win over the public and the media to their reforms.

That's a ton of stuff that Bloomberg has spent education money on in the last five years and he sure has little to show for it.

The ironic thing is, if he had taken the $7.2 billion dollars and spent it on lowering class size, reducing overcrowded schools, fixing the existing school infrastructure and providing new and safe school infrastructure for the future, retaining quality veteran teachers and attracting new teachers who learn their profession and stay in the system beyond 3-5 years rather than hiring a bunch of Teach For America/Teaching Fellows missionaries who are trained for 3 months before they're tossed into the classroom to sink, Bloomberg could have done a whole lot more to improve the school system and the NAEP test scores.

But of course Bloomberg and Klein didn't really come in to improve education in New York City.

They came in with an ideology that what the public sector - especially public education - needs to improve is market-based, privatization solutions that will convert the public sector into a quasi-private sector run with a corporate mindset that privileges quarterly results, constant "progress", and ruthless efficiency over long-term results and realistic progress.

Let's call it the "Walmartization" of public education

Never mind that children shouldn't be treated like widgets and quarterly test scores cannot be used to measure school effectiveness the way quarterly profit margins can be used to measure a corporation's performance.

Never mind that constant reorganization of the school system and constant changes to the curricula hurt children who need stability and constancy the most.

Never mind that the Jack Welch/Mike Bloomberg way of treating employees (make them fear for their jobs) has created an environment of hostility and anger in the system rather than forged a partnership between school administration officials and teachers to try and move schools forward together.

You see, when you have billionaire businessmen, failed anti-trust lawyers and their wealthy private sector cronies making 100% of the calls on education policy with no say from anybody outside of their narrow circle, you get a school system that is heavy on the spending, heavy on the p.r., and heavy on constant change, but pretty light on actual results.

Oh well.

The mayor knows that nothing improves a school system better than additional money spent on public relations efforts to fool the public and the media into thinking the smoke and mirror reforms are working.

With Bloomberg set to run for president in '08 as an independent, you can bet we'll see a lot more TV commercials and print advertisements lauding Mayor Bloomberg's education reform record.

But it's all phony.

As Sol Stern and other education experts like Diane Ravitch have noted - the NAEP results don't lie.

There has been little-to-no progress since Bloomberg and Klein started their dog and pony education reform show back in 2002.

The Big Picture

While Mayor Bloomberg's "reforms" do not appear to have improved test scores (the only factor of education he seems to consider important), they seem to have contributed in other ways. It appears teachers are resigning in record numbers. Doubtless the mayor attributes this to the work being too easy and the pay being too high.

However, there's little reason to think this upsets Tweed. Firstly, Deputy Chancellor Chris Cerf disputes the numbers. Typical of Tweed's M.O. , Mr. Cerf sees no need to provide alternate numbers or explain in any way whatsoever why the UFT's numbers are flawed.

Don't expect too much in the way of follow-up from City Hall. Transitory teachers are a bargain. They get the lowest pay, are replaced by others who get the lowest pay, and they never take sabbaticals or receive pensions. That they may never learn to teach is totally irrelevant.
Experience is reviled in this city, and it's all about filling wooden chairs for as little as possible. While this policy may preserve valuable funds for seats in sports stadiums, it reflects nothing less than contempt for this city's schoolchildren.

Thanks to Schoolgal

Houston Miracle: Bloomberg/Klein Edition

It is becoming pretty clear that the progress Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein have claimed as a result of their education reforms in the New York City public school system is phony.

Last week the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test scores were released for 11 cities including New York City.

The NAEP scores showed eighth graders have made no significant progress in math or reading since Mayor Bloomberg started his reform campaign in 2002 while progress for fourth graders has stagnated in the past few years.

The poor NAEP score results stand in marked contrast to the "steady" gains fourth and eighth graders have made on state exams since Bloomberg took office, leading B. Jason Brooks, director of research at the Foundation for Education Reform & Accountability, to say that the state tests have clearly been "dumbed down" and "simplified."

Today the NY Daily News reports that Chancellor Klein has sent out a mass e-mail to 100,000 principals, administrators and teachers touting the NAEP results as a success. Klein claims new immigrants have been unfairly tested in reading, but if you strip those students out from the test scores, you will see upward trends for the system that show a "story of good progress."

But on the very same day that Klein is trying to defend himself and his mayor from charges that their education reforms have resulted in little-to-no gains in national test scores while other cities around the country like Atlanta have passed New York City by, the NY Sun reports that Klein and Bloomberg essentially cheated on the 2007 NAEP tests by adding tons of testing modifications:

So many New York City students received extra time and other accommodations on a respected national test this year that several testing experts are saying the results should be considered invalid.

On the test known as the nation's report card, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, New York state gave accommodations to more fourth-graders than any other state in the nation, and New York City gave more help than any of the ten other major cities that participate in a separate city-by-city comparison. On three of four tests the accommodation rate hovered around 20%. On the last — a fourth-grade math exam city officials are trumpeting as evidence the Bloomberg administration's schools program is working — the rate was 25%.

The math test this year showed the city's fourth-graders making record gains, with 79% of students reaching the basic level, up from 73% in 2005 and 67% in 2003. At the same time, the number of students receiving legally allowed accommodations, such as extra time to take the test, having the test read out loud, and receiving a translation into the student's native language, more than doubled, to 25% this year from 12% in 2003.

Shown the numbers, several testing experts said they were shocked.

"That's a percentage which is large enough basically to invalidate the test," a professor at New York University who has advised the city and federal government on standardized testing, Alan Siegel, said. "When you change the statistics for 25% of the people who are guaranteed to be at the lower end, that's going to have a tremendous impact."

An educational statistician who has written multiple studies of NAEP results, Donald McLaughlin, told the Sun he could not recall seeing testing accommodation figures as high as New York City's were this year ever.

That's right - ever.

McLaughlin went on to say that with testing modifications trending so high, there was good reason to "be very suspicious" about claims academic achievement is increasing under Bloomberg and Klein.

The NYCDOE defended the huge increase in testing accommodations by saying that state policies had increased the number of English Language Learners who had to take the standardized tests. In New York, NYCDOE officials told the Sun, all ELL students are eligible for accommodations on both math and reading tests.

But another education analyst, Richard Innes, told the Sun that the rise in testing accommodations in New York City is part of a national trend in response to pressure to show improvements on tests:

"The schools are figuring out: Gee, I've got a weak-performing student. If I consider him learning disabled, he's going to get a higher score on the test," Mr. Innes said.

Increasing accommodations on tests may be a national trend, but as we can see from the stats, New York City is far in the lead of this trend.

Which brings me back to what I wrote in the beginning: the "progress" Bloomberg and Klein tout for their education reforms is phony.

The "progress" on the "dumbed down" and "simplified" state tests comes from manipulating the methodology and rubric of the tests while the federal tests which cannot be dumbed down or simplified show students have made little-to-no progress even after Bloomberg and Klein have doubled the number of students receiving modifications.

When Bloomberg and Klein finally ride off into the sunset and some independent education experts and testing analysts get the opportunity to really look under the hood of the New York City Department of Education, its reform movement, its graduation rates and its test scores, I know that they will find that Bloomberg's "Education Miracle" here in New York is as phony and trumped up as the "Houston Education Miracle" that Rod Paige and George W. Bush cooked up in Texas some years ago.

In fact, the evidence is already in the public domain now:

Bloomberg and Klein have been manipulating state and city test scores to show student progress that federal tests show has not really happened.

They have closed tons of large schools and stopped testing Support Services and ELL students from those schools in order to further manipulate test scores.

They have played with the graduation rates (as I noted in this post yesterday.)

They have continually reorganized the system in order to postpone real accountability for their reforms.

And finally, they have spent millions on public relations to win over the public, the media and the newspaper editorial boards with their smoke and mirror reforms.

For a long time, it worked for them. But the curtain is starting to be drawn back on the "Bloomberg Education Miracle" and as I said earlier, it is becoming pretty clear that the progress Bloomberg and Klein have claimed for their time in power is phony.

Klein Offers Excuses For The "F" He Received On The NAEP Exams

The NY Times picks up the story of the National Assessment of Education Progress test scores which show NYC public school students have made little-to-no progress between 2005 and 2007 on the tests.

The Times notes that the "stagnant" NAEP results are at odds with the improved state test scores over that time period and show that the city's education gains are "limited."

The Times also notes that Mayor Bloomberg has "trumpeted" the improved state test scores as "evidence that the city is setting the pace for urban school reform" but that other cities around the country - like Washington and Atlanta, for instance - have outpaced New York City on the NAEP tests, suggesting that the reforms Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein have put into operation with great publicity have had little effect.

In fact, fourth-graders showed much greater improvement on the reading tests in the years before Bloomberg and Klein took control of the public school system and started experimenting with various reforms and reorganizations.

Now of course Chancellor Klein had to try and spin the NAEP numbers yesterday as a positive for the city and for the various reforms he has helped put into place.

For instance, he said that 79 percent of students in the city are performing at or above basic levels of competence, rapidly approaching the national average of 81 percent.

But the Times reports that federal officials said the slight uptick in the percentage of students reaching proficient or above in math was "statistically insignificant."

In reading, the percentage of fourth graders reaching proficient or above did not change between 2005 and 2007.

In the eighth grade, the percentage of students reaching proficient or above actually decreased by two percentage points between 2005 and 2007.

Yet Klein says these results are proof positive that progress is being made, even though urban school systems that are supposedly in shambles - like Washington, where Klein just sent one of his former deputies to clean up the mess - showed huge gains on both math and reading tests for both fourth graders and eighth graders.

So where's the accountability, Chancellor Klein?

If you and your reforms were judged by the same criteria you used to judge schools for the report cards issued last week (i.e., year-to-year progress, comparisons to similar schools and/or school systems), you would have received an F.

That's right - an F.

Not only did your test scores show little-to-no improvement from 2005 to 2007, but your performance lagged far behind similar urban school systems on both the math and reading tests for both the fourth and the eighth grades.

And yet, instead of holding yourself accountable like you are holding teachers, administrators and schools accountable, you offer lame excuses about how the system is making progress toward "basic" competence and how the dumbed-down, in-house graded state exams are better measurements of mastery anyway.

Again I say, what crap.

Michael J. Petrilli, a researcher at the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute in Washington, noted that the city test scores did not seem to be improving any more than the rest of the state and said “That to me seems quite damning to the Bloomberg administration.”

He means that it's damning that after all the publicity about the reforms and after all the reorganizations and the additional standardized testing and the concessions from the pliant UFT on mayoral control, seniority rights, and grievance rights and the additional school days and the additional seat time for students and the after-school tutoring sessions for failing students and the changes to school financing that allow principals to rid themselves of veteran teachers and bring in cheaper newbies and the stepped-up efforts to fire "unsatisfactory teachers" (as reported in yesterday's Times), Bloomberg and Klein STILL can't improve the scores on the one test where the scores cannot be manipulated and the testing methodology dumbed down.

I'd have to agree.

It's too bad that all the Bloomberg/Klein shills who were waving their pom-poms last week over the release of school report cards by the NYCDOE - like the Daily News, Post and Sun editorial boards and NY Daily News columnist Errol Louis - won't be crying for accountability from Klein and Bloomberg the way they were crying for accountability from teachers, administrators and schools.

What Test Score Gains?

The NY Sun reports that New York City students showed few improvements on the the National Assessment of Educational Progress exam (NAEP), a respected national "yardstick" test used to compare student progress across the nation.

The Sun says that NAEP results are usually released on a state-by-state basis, but several large cities agreed to have their own results reported for comparison purposes back in 2002.

Here's how New York City students fared:

Compared to the rest of the country, New York City fourth-graders edge out large central cities slightly on average but fall behind the national numbers. Eighth-graders scored no better on a math test than students in large central cities. That pattern has been essentially unchanged since 2003, the year the Bloomberg administration began to initiate changes in the city's public schools.

...

This year, 34% of fourth-graders scored proficient on the math test, up from 21% in 2003. That is below the national average, 39%, but above the average for large central cities, 28%. When it comes to reading, 43% of fourth-graders in the city this year did not reach the basic level — one step below proficient — down from 47% in 2003. Eighth-grade results were more dismal. In the city, 41% of eighth-graders cannot perform basic reading, up from 38% in 2003, the first year scores were reported, and above the percentages in Houston and Chicago, 37% and 39% respectively. On the math test, 43% of eighth-graders scored below basic, compared with 46% in 2003.

There you have it - after three New York City public school system reorganizations in the last 6 years, countless school closures, curriculum changes, math and reading coaches, additional standardized testing, additional professional development for teachers, additional school days and seat time for students, merit pay for teachers and testing "bonuses" in the form of cash and prizes for kids who improve on tests, there has been little-to-no improvement in the national test scores of New York City students.

Let me repeat, after all the vaunted changes the "Education Mayor" and his chancellor have brought to the New York City school system and after all the glorious press the mayor and the chancellor have gotten for "breaking the status quo" and "bringing accountability to the schools," the national test scores are flat.

Flat.

Sure the dumbed down city and state tests show lots of improvement, but the national tests, which neither the mayor nor the governor can have manipulated or dumbed down to make the scores seem better than they are, are flat.

What do you think about that education reformers?

You have gotten most of what you wanted out of both the UFT and the NYCDOE.

You got a partly privatized public school system with a gutted central bureaucracy and a union that has conceded autocratic mayoral control, merit pay, seniority and grievance rights, and additional days and time.

You got standardized testing added to the curriculum which is used to track school, teacher and student performance on an $80 million dollar computer system.

You got a host of large schools closed down and plenty of your darling small schools and charter schools opened in the past six years.

You got Jack Welch/CEO-style principals in charge of their own budgets and accountable for their own results.

You got school financing reform which allows these CEO principals the freedom to can costly senior teachers and hire cheaper and more pliable Teach for America-type missionaries who will hang around for a few years before moving on to their "real jobs."

You got what you wanted and the result has been flat test scores on the one test that can't be played with by the people in charge of the school system.

Heckuva job, education reformers.

I wonder what happens after you get vouchers, the end to teacher tenure, year-round school and nine hour school days and the national test scores STILL don't show improvement.

Will you then come to acknowledge that there are factors beyond schools that contribute to student performance?

You know, like whether students take some responsibility for their own education and parents take some responsibility for their own children.

Yes, schools have to improve and teachers and administrators need to be accountable for their results.

But parents and students need to be held accountable too.

Whenever I hear education reformers talking about problems in education and their proposed solutions, I never hear them ask for more accountability from parents and students for how students perform in school.

All I ever hear is how teachers suck and the schools are abysmal and something has to change or the United States of America will wither and die.

But until students and parents are asked to take some responsibility for themselves, little is going to really change.