THE SCHOOL REPORT CARD ON THE RIGHT COAST where the mayor wants the schools to look good: "Suddenly, New York City looks like Lake Wobegon, where all the children are above average…"
By JENNIFER MEDINA and ROBERT GEBELOFF | NY Times
September 2, 2009 -- The news could have been cause for a huge celebration: a whopping 97 percent of New York’s elementary and middle schools earning an A or B on the city’s annual report card. Yet Chancellor Joel I. Klein was tempered in his praise, careful to say that the high marks did not necessarily mean that the city was filled with excellent schools.
<<Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times - The schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, arriving at P.S. 189 on Wednesday.
“We want to make clear that that means that they met their progress targets,” Mr. Klein said, a tad defensively, at a news conference at Public School 189 in Washington Heights on Wednesday. “Not by any stretch of the imagination that those schools don’t have a lot of improvement ahead of them.”
At the same time, when asked if there was something wrong with a grading system in which nearly every school earned top marks — 889 of the 1,058 graded schools got A’s, and just two received F’s — he clearly took pride in the results. “If you’re asking whether I would rather see less A’s,” he said, “the answer is no.”
Last year, 38 percent of elementary and middle schools got A’s and 41 percent B’s; in 2007, the first year that schools were graded, 23 percent earned an A and 38 percent a B.
Suddenly, New York City looks like Lake Wobegon, where all the children are above average — or like the Ivy League, noted for grade inflation that makes, say, a B-minus seem like the new F.
More than half the schools that received grades on Wednesday — 550 of them — did better this year than last year. Another 438 received the same marks; the vast majority already had A’s. Forty schools saw their grades fall.
The grades — which are designed to give parents a clear idea of how well a school is teaching their children, and are also used to help determine bonuses for principals and teachers — have become one of the most contentious policies of Mr. Klein’s tenure. They are primarily based on how much student test scores at each school improve from one year to the next, and rely heavily on comparing schools that have similar demographics.
The system uses a blunt letter grade to call attention to which schools are doing well and which are not. But on Wednesday, Mr. Klein urged parents to dig deeper, to look at the factors and underlying numbers used in the complicated formula that determines the grades. And he emphasized that the results did not necessarily mean that 97 percent of the schools were doing well.
The Bloomberg administration has made accountability the touchstone of its efforts to overhaul city schools. When the mayor and chancellor first released the reports in 2007, they said the grades would be vital in determining if a low-performing school should be closed. In the last two years, Mr. Klein has announced that he would close 28 schools, and he has tried to remove principals from other low-performing schools.
All of the schools that received F’s last year and remained open received A’s or B’s this year. Of the schools that received D’s last year, none earned lower than a C this year. And of the 393 schools that received A’s last year, only three dropped below a B.
The United Federation of Teachers and a group of parents sued the Department of Education last year to block the closing of two schools in Harlem, Public Schools 194 and 241, and one in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, P.S. 150. All three earned A’s this year.
Asked if that meant there was something wrong with the closing process or with the grading system, Mr. Klein again grew defensive.
“I think there’s nothing wrong with anything,” he said. “I know we need to find something wrong here, but there’s nothing wrong with anything. That is to say those schools — and this is not atypical — made progress this year. That’s what the progress report reflects.”
He said that when moving to close failing schools, the city considered other factors, such as student enrollment and whether parents were applying in large numbers to the school.
Two charter schools run by Harlem Children’s Zone that have been praised by Mr. Klein, as well as by President Obama, received B’s this year.
Geoffrey Canada, the president of Harlem Children’s Zone and a loyal ally of the Bloomberg administration, said the report cards helped show administrators and teachers where they needed to improve, but he questioned whether they made much sense to most parents.
“I think they can be slightly misleading if they are taken at face value,” Mr. Canada said. “If you’re at a school where things are improving, you should feel good about that, but there are a lot of schools where you could have done really, really good last year, and just really good this year and you’re getting a lower grade. So it’s tricky.”
Dozens of school districts from cities all over the country and as far away as Australia have worked with Education Department officials to replicate the grading system.
Daniel Koretz, a professor who focuses on testing and accountability issues at the Harvard School of Education, said it was hard to come to any clear conclusions about schools or the system by looking at the grades. It is even harder, he added, because so many questions have been raised about whether the state’s math and reading tests had become easier in recent years.
“The agnostics are right: We just don’t know what’s going on right now,” he said. “The problem is we are stuck with this. We really have no second measure.”
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