The head of the country’s second largest teachers union has unsurprisingly urged the government to put off linking standardized test results with evaluations of schools, students and teachers until a consensus has been reached. Karen Matthews writes for the Associated Press in Yahoo News that Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, has called for penalties aligned with national standards tests to be delayed until the Common Core benchmarks have been properly implemented.

She fears that without a moratorium on these negative consequences until everyone has reached the same page things will only be made worse.

“The fact that the changes are being made nationwide without anything close to adequate preparation is a failure of leadership, a sign of a broken accountability system and, worse, and an abdication of our responsibility to kids, particularly poor kids,” Weingarten told the Association for a Better New York, a business group.

Forty-five states plus the District of Columbia have acted to adopt the Common Core standards, hailed by many as a way to save a failing education system.

New York is among the first states to administer the new tests and the experience has had some teething trouble and faced some resistance. Matthews reports that some students complained that the tests were too difficult and didn’t allow enough time to complete while there were also reports of children breaking down in tears from the stress of the experience.

While Weingarten claims to be in support of the Common Core standards, what she’s campaigning against is basing teacher and student evaluations on this year’s tests and arguing that instead states should hold off until they have been fully implemented.

“Across the state, scores from this spring’s assessments may be used to determine whether students advance or are held back, to designate a school’s performance, and even to determine whether schools stay open or shut down. And they will be used as 20 percent of teacher evaluations,”

Andrew Kirtzman, a spokesman for the New York City Department of Education, claimed that the resistance was due to a special interest cell trying to protect their own jobs. Merryl Tisch, head of New York’s Board of Regents, noted that the same percentage of teachers would be rated as ‘effective’ under the new system as in past years and added that the New York State Education Department has already stated they would not designate any schools as failing based on this years’ tests.

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As part of their graduation requirement, students in New York state high schools could soon be asked to submit a 1,250 word paper to receive their diploma. The paper is part of the proposal by the state’s Education Department that seeks to align graduation standards with a set of skills the students will most likely need once they leave high school.

The Board of Regents debated the proposal earlier this week. If it is adopted, students who enter high school as early as next year would be affected. The research paper requirement would be the first of its kind in the nation, the Times Union reports and would apply to everyone who takes the English regents exam.

Education Commissioner John King explained that the paper would provide information about the students that a multiple choice test would not. Specifically, it would make it easier to assess their master of the English language.

The proposal is part of King’s goal to raise the dismal percentage of New York high school graduates — 35 percent — the state considers ready for college and career. There also is an incredible gap in what college professors and high school English teachers consider proficient. Eighty-nine percent of high school teachers consider their students ready for college, compared with just 26 percent of college instructors, according to a new survey from ACT, a nonprofit assessment company.

More than $70 million is spent annually in the State University of New York campuses on remediation for incoming freshmen. According to King, this amount could go down in prior to graduation students were asked to research and write a paper, thus giving them an opportunity to get better at something that many colleges would already expect them to know.

Although the minimum standards for the paper would be set by the state, specifics would be decided on a district-by-district basis.

There would be extra accommodations for special education students and English language learners. Students who need extra time could begin the paper in their sophomore year. Students would have to use four sources in their five-page papers, which would have to be completed before they take their Regents exams. A final vote on the proposed plan could come as soon as the June Regents meeting.

The research paper requirement could have also come in response to a growing movement in the state against what some see as an over-reliance on standardized tests. King has previously defended the tests as a positive step for students in New York.

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According to Matthew M. Chingos and Paul E. Peterson in EducationNext, the prototype for the school voucher programs was created in New York City in the mid-90s when Cardinal John J. O’Connor and Mayor Rudy Giuliani couldn’t secure public funding to allow NYC children enrolled in the worst-performing public schools to enroll in Catholic schools instead. To bring the program to life, a group of philanthropists created the New York School Choice Scholarship Foundation and distributed grants of up to $1,400 per student to 1,000 low-income students who were about to enter public school or were already enrolled in 2nd through 5th grades.

Since the program was oversubscribed almost immediately, the founders established a lottery system to determine who would get the scholarships. The winning families were guaranteed scholarships for the first five years in school for each one of their children.

And thus was born not only one of the first voucher programs in the country, but an unparalleled research opportunity for anyone interested in looking at long-term impact of vouchers. EdNext explains that the opportunity was not one that SCSF was interested in passing up, so it asked an independent research team to look at the difference in outcomes between families that entered the voucher lottery and won and those who did and lost.

Families who won the voucher lottery were told that scholarship renewal was dependent on participation in annual testing at a designated site other than the child’s school. Families who lost the lottery were compensated for participating in subsequent testing sessions, and their children were given additional chances to win the lottery. Those who won a subsequent lottery were dropped from the evaluation control group. Those families who won the lottery but who did not make use of the scholarship were also compensated for participating in subsequent testing sessions. The original evaluation identified, after three years, large positive effects of the voucher opportunity on the test scores of African Americans but not on the test scores of students from other ethnic groups.

Brookings had published the previous phase of the study which looked at academic outcomes when it came to achievement and graduation. Now Chingos and Peterson expanded their scope to see if participation in SCSF’s program had any impact on college enrollment rates.

The paper takes great care to outline the methodology used to study the college enrollment impact and concludes that for the entire population studied, the increase in college enrollment in the three years after high school graduation was only .7% – not considered statistically significant. However, as Chingos and Peterson explain, this small increase masks much more substantial impact when the results were broken down along demographic groups – especially for African-American students.

The SCSF-NSC linked data indicate that a voucher offer increased the college-enrollment rate of African Americans by 7 percentage points, an increase of 20 percent. If an African American student used the scholarship to attend private school for any amount of time, the estimated impact on college enrollment was 9 percentage points, a 24 percent increase over the college enrollment rate among comparable African American students assigned to the control group (see Figure 1). This corresponds to 3 percentage points for every year the voucher was used.

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New York State Education Commissioner John King continues to repeat his message that new standardized tests now being given in New York will prove to be a blessing for the state’s kids. In a press briefing with reporters, King stressed that the tests are a crucial link in a plan to make sure that New York students are graduating from high school ready for both career and college — and won’t require expensive remediation before being prepared to enter higher education.

Not all parents, however, are convinced.

The exams in questions are to be administered every year between the grades 3 and 8 and are based on the Common Core Standards that are being adopted by most of the states in the country. Advocates for the new tests say that they’re needed to check how well students are doing with what is considered a more complex and challenging curriculum. As standards rise, King predicts that scores will drop in the short term.

King has said – and repeated today – that the new tests will be more difficult and that scores are likely to drop.

Officials at New York State United Teachers have said they are not opposed to the new standards, but that it is too early to give tests that are aligned with them because they are so new.

King said schools have had since 2010 to prepare for the new standards. He said the state cannot afford to wait another year to hold schools accountable for them.

The standards are so low now, he said, that 65 percent of students leave school without having the skills necessary to succeed, whether they graduate or not.

Meanwhile, at least some of the parents in Syracuse are unconvinced by King’s arguments and plan to have their kids boycott the upcoming exams. Susan Grobsmith has instructed all three of her kids to push the test away when it is placed in front of them and plans to pick them up for school rather than have them sit in the classroom while their peers take the test.

Grobsmith is far from the only one who feels this way. Her family is part of a national movement that seeks to encourage parents to opt-out of standardized exams and at the same time lobby lawmakers and education experts to stop focusing on testing at the expense of everything else.

A Rochester school board member recently announced that she is refusing to have her child take the exams. The Saratoga Springs school board voted unanimously to call on the state to place less emphasis on the tests. A two-day protest was staged earlier this month at the U.S. Department of Education.

Opponents of the testing say it stresses students, provides limited measurement of a child’s capabilities, takes away valuable teaching time that inspires creativity and shares personal information with private companies that provide the tests.

The post King Reassures, But Testing Opt Out Movement Grows in New York appeared first on Education News.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has made an agreement with state legislature leaders to have a teacher evaluation system in place even after pacts between school districts and their local teachers unions expire. New Yorkers are hopeful that this change in the law would facilitate a final agreement between New York City and its unions even after they both missed the January 17th deadline to have a deal in place.

All the districts are now working out the four-tier teacher evaluation plan mandated by Cuomo in order for the state to unlock access to the missions of dollars of federal funds.

In January, Mayor Michael Bloomberg identified stumbling blocks to a deal. He cited a disagreement with the union over arbitration rules for teachers and his concern that agreements across the state would expire after one year, which he said rendered them essentially toothless because it takes at least two years of bad evaluations before districts can quickly fire a tenured teacher.

The deal reached in Albany this week would ensure that the terms of a teacher-evaluation agreement would remain in place after it expires, much the same as contractual protections do.

The new law will not only paper over the disputes between school districts and their unions, it will also make it so yearly funding increases are distributed only to districts that have completed teacher evaluation agreements with their faculty and staff. The provision was attached to the long-awaited comprehensive budget legislation and is almost guaranteed passage when it comes to a vote.

Speaking after the compromise was announced, Cuomo’s spokeswoman Lauren Pessalacqua didn’t express certainty that the deal would finally act to bring the recalcitrant unions into line, but that the new measure will short-circuit any games of chicken that unions were attempting to play by holding off approving evaluation systems until after the deadline.

UFT President Michael Mulgrew praised the agreement. Speaking of Mr. Bloomberg, he said: “We told him from day one that the agreement that was on the table did not stop him from disciplining teachers,” he said. “Why he keeps on insisting on saying it? If he was in my class, he would fail the test.”

The legislation also sets a new deadline of May 29 for the four districts without a system. Districts that fail to settle by then will face a state-imposed system designed by Education Commissioner John King.

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Although girls have been outperforming boys in academic benchmarks and grades, when it comes to standardized tests they continue to lag behind male students, The New York Times reports. This lag is most obvious when it comes to admission to New York City’s 8 specialized high schools which use the results of a standardized test as their sole admissions criteria where boys outnumber girls, sometimes substantially.

Student bodies of the the two high schools that focus on mathematics, technology and science – Stuyvesant in Manhattan and Bronx Science – are 60% male, while at the new High School for Mathematics, Science and engineering at City College, boys make up 67% of total students.

While studies suggest that girls perform as well as boys in math and science classes in high school, their participation in those fields drops off in college and ultimately in careers, a phenomenon that the White House, with its Council on Women and Girls, and the National Science Foundation have tried to reverse.

The fact that girls are underrepresented in New York’s top high schools, which tend to be focused on math and science, and which have more than a dozen Nobel laureates among their alumni, worries some academics who see the schools as prime breeding grounds for future scientists and engineers.

This isn’t the first time that the demographics of the city’s top schools have made news. The racial makeup of the schools has been a controversy for years, as African Americans and Latinos are greatly underrepresented in the elite high schools. This year only 5% of the admitted students are African-American and 7% are Hispanic.

Minority advocates in the city have led a long – and so far unsuccessful – battle to change the admissions criteria used by the schools such as encouraging them to take into account middle school grades, among other proposals.

Shael Polakow-Suransky, the chief academic officer in the city’s Education Department, said the eight specialized-test schools represented just a portion of the city’s best schools, so there was a flaw in studying gender disparities solely in those eight schools. “These are not the best schools in the city,” he said of the eight specialized schools. “They are among the best schools in the city.”

He said that at the highest echelons of test-takers, girls scored as well as boys, but that overall, fewer of the strongest female students were taking the exam.

He said the answer to the question of why fewer girls take the standardized exams could go a long way to addressing the problem of gender disparity in technology, the sciences and mathematics.

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Bronx’s Stevenson High School and its 3,000 students were in New York City’s Mayor Bloomberg’s eyes what was wrong with public education in NYC. The building that housed the students was constantly under threat from gang violence, had low graduation rates, a high dropout rate and was generally one of the worst-performing campuses in the city. Changing the way schools like Stevenson operated was the cornerstone of Bloomberg’s reform strategy.

After 2002, Stevenson as it once existed was no more. In its place there were 9 separate schools, each offering a more individualized educational experience and providing more support to its students to keep them on the path to graduation and future success.

Of the 337 new high schools that have opened, nine are in what is now called the Stevenson Campus, the most under one roof anywhere in the city. They are identified in their hallways by the color of their door frames, and by flags, like those of Renaissance city-states. Each school has its own vision of utopia, from video game design classes at the new Bronx Compass to college-level discussions of “A Streetcar Named Desire” at Millennium Art Academy. Success varies wildly from floor to floor.

It’s hard to look at the statistics and argue that Stevenson kids have been done wrong by the change. The graduation rate among the students learning on the former Stevenson campus is nearly 60%.

All the usual metrics are up as well. Attendance is up from 75% to 81%, and the crime rate is down by more than 60% since the 2004-05 academic year.

Standardized test scores, however, are less optimistic. SAT results have stagnated as have scores in U.S History. The English Regents scores, however, have improved since 10 years ago.

Yet on the most important of metrics it seems no progress has been made at all. Students enrolled in Stevenson campus schools continue to be woefully underprepared for college come graduation. Fewer than 3% were ready for college-level work after high school – a number that is bad even when compared to the not-particularly-impressive city-wide average of 20%.

Rick Ouimet, 37, a popular English teacher at Millennium who began his career in 1998 at Stevenson, wrestles with whether small schools are the better path. “Is the educational quality necessarily higher?” he asked.

Millennium received five consecutive A’s from the city, until the 2011-12 school year, when it got a B. To Mr. Ouimet, the opening and closing of schools “symbolizes how with all the change, things really haven’t changed that much.”

The post Closure of Big Failing Schools in NYC is Working – Or is it? appeared first on Education News.

New York University President John E. Sexton has lost the support of the majority of his faculty colleagues, according to the results of the no confidence vote taken among faculty members of the university’s School of Arts & Science. The final results of the week-long vote was 52% agreeing with the statement that they had no confidence in the school leadership, with 39% disagreeing and 8% abstaining.

According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, 83% of the 683 faculty members eligible to vote cast a ballot. Although the vote is not in any way binding, faculty members voting hope that it will serve as a lynchpin for serious discussions among the university leadership about the direction of the school.

The vote of no confidence followed months of complaints about what Mr. Sexton’s critics have described as his autocratic nature and top-down management style. The faculty critics have voiced concerns about some of Mr. Sexton’s most-ambitious efforts, with some professors questioning the educational quality of NYU’s programs overseas and many railing against the university’s large-scale redevelopment plan, which would turn Greenwich Village, where many faculty members live, into a construction zone for nearly two decades.

The voices of the faculty don’t carry nearly the same weight of the university’s Board of Trustees, which The Chronicle also reports passed a resolution last month supporting both Sexton’s stewardship of the school and the direction the school is taking. The text of the resolution included a passage that praised Sexton for transforming NYU from a strong regional player to one of the premier universities worldwide.

Martin Lipton, the board chairman, reiterated in a statement on Friday that the board “unanimously and strongly” supports Mr. Sexton. “In a time of great challenges to higher education, John Sexton has become a nationally recognized innovator while, at the same time, maintaining excellence,” Mr. Lipton said. “It is clear to us that NYU is a great success story.”

In a statement released late last week, Sexton said that he was grateful for the Board’s support, and noted that he has received a similarly positive assessment  from the deans, as well as from faculty members of the university’s professional schools, including the medical, dental and nursing schools. He did note that faculty support was important, and noted that although he himself and his team have taken steps to draw that support, as well as canvass the faculty opinion on his plans, these efforts will continue in the future.

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New standardized exams are set to be administered to New York elementary and middle-school students, and teachers, principals and education officials are already predicting an apocalypse. The expectation among those in the know is that the scores will register a substantial drop from the year before.

The culprit is the new exam. Students between grades 3 and 9 will be taking a test that is much different – and more rigorous – than the exams they have been taking in the past few years. Although everyone accepts the inevitability of a decline, opponents of the exam are still protesting that the state was too rash in imposing the new student assessment regime.

However, it doesn’t seem like the government had much choice. New York is one of the states that has committed to fully implementing the new Common Core Standards, which meant that new tests were needed to see how well the students were progressing with the tougher material and thus were going to be adopted eventually.

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan made the adoption of the Common Core a requirement of his Race to the Top grant competition. New York adopted the standards early – part of the reason it won a $700 million grant.

In English language arts, there is a focus on understanding and writing about complex, non-fiction texts. In math, the emphasis is on deeper understanding of concepts and their practical application. The new tests will include more difficult reading passages, more complicated math problems and more open-ended questions that require students to go into depth in their answers.

Still, New York is one of the few states that are set to adopt the CCS-based exams this year. This has some stakeholders wondering “What’s the rush?” After all, there’s no harm in waiting another year to give both teachers and students more time to adjust, especially taking into account the experience in Kentucky, where CCS exams were administered for the first time last year.

To the surprise of absolutely no one, the scores took a dive as a result.

NYSUT supports the new standards, but says it is unfair to teachers and students to impose the high-stakes tests now.

The union surveyed more than 1,600 teachers in November and reported that only a third said they had access to textbooks aligned with the new standards. That includes about half of elementary English teachers and 26 percent of math teachers.

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Twenty New York City middle- and high schools are going to be taking part in a pilot program that will bring a comprehensive computer science curriculum into their classrooms, Mayor Mike Bloomberg has announced. The pilot program is part of the effort by the city to prepare its students to succeed in a world that is becoming more dependent on technology every year.

Like other parts of the country, companies based in New York City are reporting a severe shortage in qualified engineers, computer programmers and other technology workers, and hopes that efforts like Software Engineering Pilot will make it easier to produce homegrown candidates to fill this gap. With this goal in mind, the schools taking part on the pilot will begin offering courses covering topics like computer programming, web design, embedded electronics, robotics and mobile computing starting next year. As part of the pilot, teacher training programs will also be put into place.

“We know it’s vital to prepare our children to succeed in an increasingly technology-centered economy, and the Software Engineering Pilot will help us do just that,” Bloomberg said in a statement today. “This groundbreaking program will ensure that more students receive computer science and software engineering instruction so that they can compete for the tech jobs that are increasingly becoming a part of our city’s economy. We’re creating the home-grown workforce our city needs and teaching our students skills that will open up new doors for them and their future.”

Among those selected to participate are schools located in all five boroughs and includes at least one specialized school – the Brooklyn Technical High School commonly known as “Brooklyn Tech” – which requires an entrance exam. The city’s acclaimed public school for gifted kids – Mark Twain IS. 239 will also participate in the pilot.

The announcement follows the “Made in NYC” campaign that Bloomberg announced last week, which supports the city’s startup community. Students participating in the SEP program will likely be strong applicants for Cornell NYC Tech’s campus, which is scheduled to open in 2017 (classes have already begun in temporary Manhattan locations). If all goes according to plan, NYC’s engineer shortage will be less of a problem in several years.

It is no coincidence that Brooklyn’s High School of Telecommunication Arts and Technology served as the setting for the announcement of the new educational push. The school, which is one of the participants, was created as part of an effort by the Bloomberg administration to bring better STEM education to the city.

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