EdVANTAGE Blog

Earlier this week, the Washington Post reported, “Experts convened by the nation’s governors and state schools chiefs on Monday proposed a set of math and English skills students should master before high school graduation, the first step toward what advocates hope will become common standards driving instruction in classrooms from coast to coast.”

The proposals are available for review here.  The groups are seeking comments through October 21.  Their plan over the coming year is to draft more detailed grade-by-grade standards.

Read the rest of this entry »

p547h8c2eu

On Monday, we reported that the Board of Regents had approved the selection of Dr. John B. King as Senior Deputy Commissioner to oversee the State Education Department’s pre-K through high school activities.

Here’s a 13-minute video clip of Dr. King accepting a “hero” award from the Robin Hood Foundation for his work as Managing Director for Uncommon Schools.  The Foundation says its mission is to fight poverty in New York City “by finding and funding the best and most effective programs and partnering with them to maximize results.”

Dr. King leads off saying, “I am convinced that schools can be the difference between hope and despair, because of the impact public education has had in my life.”

He explains that both his parents were New York City public school educators, but both passed away by the time he was 12.  He describes some harrowing childhood experiences — for example, living alone between ages 8 and 12 with his father who was then suffering from undiagnosed Alzheimer’s disease.  He said that “School was my refuge.”

He also describes the successes of charter schools he has founded and led.

Also, here is a piece of testimony which Dr. King delivered last June to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and Labor.

He begins, “I am here today to talk about my experiences as an educator and to ask the Committee to support initiatives to increase the number of high performing charter schools serving low-income students.”

He attributes his schools’ successes to “autonomy with respect to budget, staffing, curriculum and instruction, and school culture in combination with greater accountability for performance.”

He notes that Boston’s Roxbury Preparatory Charter School, which he founded in 1999, has been “the highest performing urban middle school in Massachusetts for five years running and a school that has closed the racial achievement gap on state exams.”

Last year, State Senator Stephen Saland convened a hearing to discuss possible changes in school calendars as a way to reduce costs, with a focus on a four-day school week.

Now a parochial school in Niagara Falls will launch an experiment with a four-day week.  Niagara Catholic High School will be closed on Mondays.  The remaining school days will be extended by more than an hour.  It seems to be the first school in the state to try a compressed calendar.

In testifying at Senator Saland’s hearing, we were mostly skeptical toward shortening the school week, reflecting the reactions of our members. Read the rest of this entry »

State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli made it official today, announcing that the employer contribution rate for the State and Local Employees Retirement System (ERS) will rise in 2011, from 7.4 percent of payroll to 11.9 percent.

We previously reported on projected dramatic ERS cost increases continuing past next year (“State study warns ERS pension costs could triple by 2015.”)

Only about 20 percent of school employees are in ERS; most are in the Teachers Retirement System.  TRS will announce an estimated range for its contribution rate in November and will announce an estimated actual rate in February.  The official rate will be announced in July 2010, but in recent years the final rate has been the same as the estimated rate announced in February.

TRS is generally subject to the same pressures and losses affecting contribution rates as ERS.  This year, TRS has one advantage in that ERS sets its rate based on the value of its investments at the end of its fiscal year on March 31st.  The TRS fiscal year ends on June 30th and gains in equity markets over those intervening months may slightly mitigate increases in the TRS contribution rate.

Pension contributions are calculated as percentage of payroll.  Payroll is typically about half of a school district budget.  So if the contribution rates for both systems rose by an average of 4 percentage points that by itself could drive up total school spending by 2 percent, even if all other spending were frozen.

Yesterday’s New York Times ran an article on the Obama Administration’s efforts to use the federal “Race to the Top” fund to push states to change their laws governing charter schools and the use of student test data in teacher evaluation.

Our Board of Regents is understandably determined to ensure that New York receives a share of the $4.3 billion fund.  For the foreseeable future, it is the only plausible source of any significant funding to support education reform initiatives.

But there has been a determined – and mostly off-base – effort to portray New York as ineligible, because of a 2008 law governing the use of student test data in tenure decisions, and a cap on the number of charter schools which may be approved to operate in the state. Read the rest of this entry »

On Wednesday, the New York Daily News reported that “City students are passing state tests by guessing. Thursday, the New York Post had a column by education scholar Diane Ravitch urging that incoming State Education Commissioner Commissioner David Steiner to make toughening state tests an early priority.  Dr. Ravitch expresses optimism that he will:  “Brilliant and well-educated, he’s unlikely to tolerate the way New York’s standards have declined in response to federal pressure.”

Dr. Ravitch contends that state tests — in New York and elsewhere — have gotten easier, as states have sought to have more students deemed proficient in their quest to satisfy the No Child Left Behind Act’s requirement that all students be proficient by 2014.  She derides this worthy but lofty objective as “a utopian goal that no state or nation has ever accomplished.”

I don’t have the expertise to judge whether or not our state tests have gotten easier, and I’ve heard differing perspectives from superintendents.  But, as explained below, both critiques over-simplify how state tests are scored.

What do readers think — have Regents Exams, or the grades 3 through 8 state assessments gotten easier over time?

Read the rest of this entry »

Further evidence of the prominence of state educational tests and their soundness as issues:  Today’s New York Times has a front-page article discussing their role in New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s campaign for a fourth term.

The article notes, “One of the hallmarks of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s seven-year stewardship of New York’s public schools has been an intense focus on standardized tests. The change has also aroused opposition, as critics question whether an overemphasis on developing test-taking skills is overtaking more valuable lessons in critical thinking.”

The paper also recites criticisms that the tests have become too predictable, contributing to inflated scores.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, Ed Week reported that the working drafts of the national common core standards project were leaked. The three drafts: a Preamble, English Standards, and Math Standards, are all now available on-line.

A total of 46 states, including New York, agreed to work to develop these common national education standards. The effort, a project of the National Governor’s Association (NGA) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO – the national association for Commissioners of Education and their equivalents), is an attempt to level the playing field and respond to criticisms that some states have lowered standards in order to raise graduation rates.

The initial leaked drafts have provoked some controversy – both for a lack of transparency in the development process, and also for the content of the standards themselves. However, the NGA/CCSSO both indicated that the standards were draft and preliminary and still subject to feedback from the Development and Work Groups, whose members were just announced.

The Council is interested in superintendent feedback on the working drafts. News outlets have begun reporting on the effort. Some Regents have expressed caution – the national project may produce standards less rigorous than would be adopted by New York otherwise, jeopardizing New York’s adoption of the project.

In addition, the project comes during a critical juncture for New York, which is currently working on new English Language Arts standards, needs to renew the RFP for its testing program, and must meet a legislative deadline for use of the data in a “value-added” testing system. At the very least, the national effort may shift the foundation on which these other initiatives are being built. Similarly, the state must outline the contours of a proposal for Race to the Top grant funds, just as the law preventing the use of student achievement data as a sole indicator for tenure decisions expires.

Clearly, much will be expected of our assessment system in the future; but assessments are meaningless without alignment to standards. Yet at this point, the development of new assessments is slowed by the wait to see if the national standards will be sufficiently rigorous for New York to adopt. Should that effort fail, New York’s standards renewal effort will restart that much further behind.

My alma mater — the University at Buffalo — has produced a thoughtful report examining options for school district reorganization in Western New York.

The report carefully reviews the history of district consolidation in Western New York and past research on the effects of consolidations.  It also examines a neglected aspect of consolidation — the opportunity to promote equity in resources by merging districts of varying wealth.  In Western New York, the study finds, state aid already largely offsets variations in local wealth.

The author concludes, “that only districts with small enrollments are likely to accrue substantial cost savings from district mergers,”  and adds “For larger districts, those with more than 2,000 students, for example, efficiency gains are often much smaller and are sometimes nullified by the costs of merging.”

While acknowledging potential financial and educational benefits from merging small districts, the report does not suggest new mechanisms to encourage more actual district consolidation.

As next steps, it recommends:

1. “Unleash BOCES,” arguing that their “promise as a mechanism for educational excellence and costs savings is constrained by narrow thinking and outdated provisions in state law and policy;”
2. Convene committees of educators, board members, parents, and other local leaders in each BOCES region to explore local restructuring options, as recommended by recent state commissions; and
3. Make increased use of distance learning and other instructional and operational technology that can diminish the importance of physical proximity while achieving efficiencies and expanding opportunities.

Read the rest of this entry »