Where Is The NJ Charter Report?

Matt DiCarlo asked a question on the Twitter machine a couple of days ago:

In March, C. Cerf promised an "independent analysis" of NJ charters "as soon as humanly possible." Any progress? http://bit.ly/eEo1KO

Ah, yes - the old charter data war. Let's revisit the battlefield:

Matt has an excellent post from back in March that recaps the early skirmishes. Everyone knows both ACTING Ed Commissioner Chris Cerf and Governor Christie are big backers of charter school expansion.  So it was no surprise when the NJDOE released a report that purported to show the superior performance of charter schools compared to their home districts. Cerf and Christie both crowed long and hard about the results.

Problem is, the report did not take student characteristics into account. "Cream skimming" - taking the easiest and cheapest kids to educate into charters, while leaving the most difficult and most expensive kids in public schools - is at the heart of the charter debate. Matt objected. Bruce Baker objected. I objected. And Bob Braun, God bless him, did what real journalists are supposed to do; here's Matt's description:

But for the efforts of one columnist – Bob Braun of the New Jersey Star Ledger – this issue would have gone largely unnoticed in the mainstream press. In a series of stories (also here, here and here), Braun pressed the state on its unfounded conclusions, and repeatedly asked that they release more detailed data, finally resorting to filing a public records request. The state delayed for weeks, and then refused to release data linking testing performance to school poverty and other student characteristics, arguing that it is under no legal obligation to produce analyses of student achievement by income (they also claimed that some of the data do not exist). For his part, Cerf called Braun’s request for an interview “transparently silly,” and claimed that his “anger and bias” compromised his objectivity. 

Yesterday, Cerf and the state responded a bit more productively. He spoke at a state board of education meeting, acknowledging that the data “…are not what you might call nuanced,” and that the issue requires “deeper analysis.” He also announced that the state, in an effort to “increase transparency,” would release more data online and commission an independent study of NJ charter performance “as soon as humanly possible.” [emphasis mine]

Let's first take a moment to appreciate how ACTING Commissioner Cerf deals with criticism. Above, Cerf lays into Braun. Here's what he had to say about Bruce after this fiasco:

6:00: "Dr. [Bruce] Baker has never seen a reform he likes, so at least he's consistent on that point. He's against charter schools, against using data in any way, shape or form to evaluate teachers. I don't think he's been for any kind of accountability system when it comes to differentiating between excellence and mediocrity."

Nice. I don't recall that he said anything about Matt; he didn't have to, however, because Gov. Christie took care of it:

This whole affair may be relatively unimportant in the grand scope of things, but it is still instructive. I am reminded how, back in January, Governor Christie was sent my original post on Twitter, and he responded as follows: “Just read it. Same old, warmed over union attacks sponsored by an institute named after union leader. Oh so objective! Thx” 

Putting aside how strange it is to be accused of being non-objective by Chris Christie, of all people, he is of course partially correct – I do work for an institute named after a former union president. In my post, however, I specifically stated that I did not know how New Jersey charters performed this year. They may actually have done better than comparable district schools. Or they may have done worse. Or there may be no difference at all. My only point was that the analysis did not prove anything one way or the other. The name of the organization I work for doesn’t change these basic facts.

The guy/gal who sent that to Christie, by the way, is the invaluable @stopthefreezeNJ.

Now, I know ad hominems are all fun and games for the NJDOE, but let's not lose sight of the real point here, which Matt articulates so well:

If the analysis ends up concluding that charters did indeed outperform regular public schools in NJ, I suspect (but am not certain) that Cerf will imply that he has been vindicated. But, at least to me, this is not about whether charters got higher test scores. It’s about how a state agency released a fourth-grade analysis on the same day its governor announced a policy “supported” by the results of that analysis. It’s about their standing by their study, even now, when everyone who has even a passing familiarity with research methodology knows that it proves nothing.

This is exactly right. Something is very, very wrong with a society that continues to misuse research methods even as our elite overlords sing the praises of data-driven policy. The trend has become alarmingly ubiquitous: in the debate about the financial crisis, Freddie and Fannie are blamed for things that were not their fault. Social Security is trashed by ignorant and intellectually lazy presidential candidates. And the dangerous and willful stupidity about global warming is, to me, infuriating (I try to keep it in check).

And so it goes with education "reform": major policy changes are implemented on the basis of no evidence. Except here, the charter cheerleaders have made a promise: that they would go back and analyze the data "as quickly as is humanly possible." ACTING Commissioner Cerf made that promise on March 7, 2011 - 292 days ago. I've asked around to a lot of folks who follow this stuff, just in case I missed it; no one has seen the report.

I think we've waited long enough.

And thus, I introduce the Cerf Report on Charter Schools Countup Clock!



This clock will live over on the left side of the blog until ACTING Commissioner Cerf releases a report on charter schools that measures student achievement in a way that takes race, poverty, primary language, and other student characteristics into account. A report that will compare the student populations of charter schools to the populations of the public schools in the same district and, ideally, same neighborhood.

In a rational world, I would think the ACTING Commissioner and the Governor would wait for the results of this report before pursuing their expansion of charter schools. Let's see just how much they allow research to drive their decisions.

ADDING: I just came across this, a September, 2011 letter from Cerf's office:

On the whole, charter schools in New Jersey are achieving at high levels. In a presentation to the State Board of Education earlier this year, we shared results from the 2009-10 school year which showed not only that charter schools are outperforming districts in the aggregate in cities like Newark, Camden, and Jersey City, but that charter schools in those districts are performing higher when students are broken out by grade level and both socioeconomic status and race. Preliminary results from the 2010-11 school year show continued growth in student achievement for charter schools overall.

That is one hell of an audacious claim to make. If there is new information available to back this up, I haven't seen it. Where is the report?

Poverty, Shmoverty - Part III

Gonna get wonky here...

I have to admit it: Amanda Ripley really got under my skin. Twice. So much so that I went back to her blog to look at her two recent posts - here and here - about how much American schools suck and how people who tell you that poverty is the overriding cause are selling you magic beans.

Lucky for you, Ripley has "...been to Finland, Korea and Poland working on this book, and I have the luxury of spending hours reading PISA results." Apparently that gives her license to mock Diane Ravitch, David Sirota, and liberals in general. It also seems to give her license to make the following mistakes:

- Failing to understand that Ravitch's comparison of low-poverty US school districts to low-poverty countries allows for poor kids to be included in both sets.

- Wonky alert! Failing to account for the "linearity" of the relationship between socio-economic status and test performance; in other words, your scores rise even faster the wealthier you get (up to a limit, obviously).

- Failing to understand that the group she repeatedly calls "rich kids" are really the top 25% of socioeconomic status - not 10%, or 5% - and that countries could differ greatly in the homogeneousness of that group.

I've been thinking about this last one some more: what is the difference between the scores of the average kid in the 75th percentile for SES compared to the kid at the 95th percentile? Well, I couldn't find the data desegregated this way for the 2003 PISA, which Ripley uses to bash the performance of "rich kids" in math and science (without any sources or references to how she got the data, by the way). But I did find a clue in the 2009 PISA, which does disaggregate the data enough to possibly gain a little insight (p.152):

What this tells us is that the US has the second largest difference between its top 5% wealthiest kids and its top 25% wealthiest kids. Which implies that the kids in the 75th to maybe 90th (maybe 95th) percentile are "pulling down" the wealthier kids more than in other countries.

Maybe. Because who knows how much this really matters in determining overall scores for the top quarter of kids? And because after I looked at this for a bit, it occurred to me that I was making an assumption about something Ripley wrote that I probably shouldn't:

The free/reduced-price lunch figure measures the number of kids from families making 185% of federal poverty line, right? So that means a family of 4 needs to make less than about $40,000 to qualify. Under this measure, roughly 40% of American kids qualify as “poor.”

OK. Then the other measure is the measure usually used in international comparisons of poverty. That is the percentage of kids from families earning less than 50% of the median income in that country. (In the US, this comes out to about 22%. NOT 40%.)

In other words, Ravitch is comparing the test scores of kids from families that earn more than $40,000 in the U.S. to the scores of all kids in Finland (where the median household income is about $40,000).

I don’t have tenure, but even I know you can’t mix and match data like this. Unless you are really, really desperate to find a certain answer, that is. [Edit: After this post went up, an alert reader informed me that Ravitch does not have tenure either; NYU confirms that she is a nontenured “research scientist.”]

Conversely, PISA’s own measure of socio-economic background, the one you can find detailed in Table II.3.1 in PISA Volume II, offers a more valid comparison. And yet Ravitch does not cite it—because it does not show what she wants it to show. [emphasis mine]

See, I read that, and I thought, "Oh, the PISA must use income to compare socio-economic status." Silly me...

The PISA determines a student's SES by asking students questions about his or her parent's job, education, and possessions in the home (p. 29):

Socio-economic background refers to a combination of characteristics of a student’s family that describes its social, economic and cultural status. Socio-economic background is measured by the PISA index of economic, social and cultural status (ESCS). This index captures a range of aspects of a student’s family and home background that combines information on parents’ education and occupations and home possessions. The index was derived from the following variables: the international socio-economic index of occupational status of the father or mother, whichever is higher; the level of education of the father or mother, whichever is higher, converted into years of schooling; and the index of home possessions, obtained by asking students whether they had a desk at which they studied at home, a room of their own, a quiet place to study, educational software, a link to the Internet, their own calculator, classic literature, books of poetry, works of art (e.g. paintings), books to help them with their school work, a dictionary, a dishwasher, a DVD player or VCR, three other country-specific items and the number of cellular phones, televisions, computers, cars and books at home. The rationale for choosing these variables is that socio-economic background is usually seen as being determined by occupational status, education and wealth. As no direct measure of parental income or wealth was available from PISA (except for those countries that undertook the PISA Parent Questionnaire), access to relevant household items was used as a proxy. [emphasis mine]

They didn't have the parents' incomes, so they used questionnaires completed by the kids to make comparisons. I'm no sociologist, so I'm not qualified in the slightest to discuss the validity of all this. But for a woman who is so worried about defining poverty, it seems like quite a stretch to claim so assuredly that this is a "more valid" comparison than Ravitch's. At the very least, Ripley needs to explain the methods of the ECSC and her rationale for why she thinks it's superior.

Has she bothered to think about this at all?

Which is actually my point: this stuff is really, really knotty. International comparisons of academic achievement are hard enough; comparisons of relative wealth and socio-economic status are damn near impossible.

I'm not saying the PISA should be ignored; it's probably as good as we can get at the moment. We should continue to look at other countries and compare their methods, their outcomes, and the characteristics of their students.

But Ripley goes much, much further:

Interestingly, this is not the kind of talk you hear in places with higher-performing education systems. In those countries, the very same countries that Ravitch says should be models for US schools, educators also think poverty is a big problem. But they think it istheir problem. They think it is a problem so intractable that our schools must be outstanding in order to help overcome it. See the difference?

Of course, if we think about it calmly for more than 5 minutes, we can probably agree that poverty interacts with schools, like a chemistry experiment. Bad schools make poverty worse, and great schools make it possible to overcome poverty. In fact, great schools are among the most effective anti-poverty measures known to humanity. Neither schools nor poverty work in isolation.

And yet this debate rages on, with a stunning lack of sophistication.

To prove her thesis, Ripley believes she has to show that "rich kids" in the US suck at learning (she's not worried that even if she showed the schools for "rich kids" suck, it wouldn't tell us a thing about schools for "poor kids" anyway). So she dismisses US poverty measures and claims international measures of SES are superior, without any exploration of why that may be. She confidently asserts that their "rich kids" do so much better than our "rich kids," without stopping to think calmly for 5 minutes what the definition of "rich kids" really is. She ranks countries without showing the differences in their mean scores. She presents no caveats about the tests and their alleged universality.

But she does tell us she's been to Finland, Korea, and Poland. Swell.

Folks, I wish I could tell you this stuff is atypical for our country's education dialogue; sadly, it's not. We are awash in reforminess: people who confidently aver that their particular prescription for American education's ills will cure all of our problems. But when you really start to pick apart their arguments, you find they have neither the tools, the training, nor the talent to back up just about anything they snottily claim to be the truth.

Lord, save us from these supremely self-confident "sophisticates."

ADDING: Paul Thomas has much more.

Jersey City's Tangled Reformy Web

So Acting NJ Education Commissioner Chris Cerf is sticking his fingers into the Jersey City schools pie:

Outgoing Jersey City Board of Education member Sean Connors continues to raise questions about an e-mail sent earlier this month to Board President Sterling Waterman by the state's Acting Commissioner of Education, Chris Cerf.

In an e-mail dated Dec. 2, Cerf wrote: "It is now abundantly clear to me that this board is not interested in pursuing an agenda of transformational change for the children of Jersey City. You are presented with a unique moment in time in which courageous leadership would make an extraordinary difference. Parochial concerns, interest group influence, and personal political ambitions need to give way to boldness and willingness to accept the inevitably challenging [consequences] of real reform."

Cerf encouraged Waterman to share his e-mail with the other members of the board, which Waterman did.

The Jersey City school board is currently conducting a national search to replace School Superintendent Charles Epps, who will leave his position on Dec. 31.

Cerf is a graduate of the Broad Superintendents Academy, which trains folks outside of education in reformy, business-influenced school leadership practices. Broad Academy graduates include disasters like Jean-Claude Brizzard of Rochester and Maria Goodloe-Johnson of Seattle.

Cerf has maintained strong ties with Broad, and grants fellow graduates favors. Recently, for example, he gave a consulting contract to fellow Broadie William Cox, who appears less than qualified for the job. Broad returns the favors in kind: he just gave a $500,000 contract to push charter schools in Newark to Cerf's old firm, Global Education Advisors, which may (or may not) employ Cerf's brother.

You think maybe Cerf has someone in mind for the JC super's job? Someone from his old "school"?

But here's what really struck me:

Second, as first reported by the Jersey City Independent, Waterman circulated two versions of Cerf's e-mail to the remaining eight members of the board, one version of which was apparently altered. One version of the e-mail included the sentence, "Feel free to pass this on to your board and to Mr. Fulop," referring to Ward E City Councilman and 2013 mayoral candidate Steven Fulop, who is allied with the new board majority. The other circulated version of Cerf's e-mail appears to have had the Fulop reference removed.

At the Dec. 15 school board meeting Waterman said he didn't know what Cerf was referring to in his e-mail and did not know how the Fulop reference was removed from some versions of the correspondence.

All of which has parents and board members scratching their heads.

In a Dec. 18 letter addressed to Waterman and circulated to the BOE, School Trustee Connors wrote: "It has become evident that you are clearly not the person who came to the public Board of Education expounding the needs of the children in Jersey City as a parent representative. You spoke transparency, yet you are the most secretive school board president in the history of our Jersey City Public School System. I still do not know what Acting Commissioner Cerf is talking about, but obviously you and he know exactly what he has communicated in an e-mail. It seems the commissioner is speaking in code to you, President Waterman."

Connor adds that several attempts by board members to get clarification on Cerf's e-mail have not been fruitful. [emphasis]

Fulop ran for the Jersey City council in 2009. His campaign manager was none other than Shelley Skinner.

Yes, regular readers, that Shelley Skinner. The charter cheerleader who now works with Derrell Bradford at B4K, the reformiest lobbying shop in Trenton. A member, along with Bradford, of the double-secret charter school review panel; a panel whose members were only revealed after Senator Nia Gill filed an OPRA request. A panel that then-DOE charter chief Carly Bolger said she would "go to the mat" to keep secret, according to Darcie Cimarusti.

Put it all together, and it's all pretty obvious. Acting Commissioner Cerf wants a Broadie installed in Jersey City. Through Skinner, Cerf has ties to Fulop, who backs the majority on the BOE which ousted the old superintendent. So now that the position is open, Cerf, Fulop, and Waterman can install the Broadie of their choice.

And - just like the charter panel - no one need worry their pretty little heads about the details.

I guess I need to update this:

More players, more connections, more power, more money. 'Cause it's all about the kids...

ADDING: If you think Cerf doesn't get involved in appointing folks from his circles to superintendent positions, remember this: Cami Anderson, new super of Newark and former Cerf collegaue in NYC, came with the blessing of Cerf's former NYC boss (and current Murdoch consiglieri) Joel Klein.

It ain't what you know, it's who you know.

More Angels Under the Bus

An update to my post about two schools in Newark whose students and staff were misrepresented by a child advocacy group, the press, and the Newark superintendent:

Branch Brook is the elementary school with the highest grade three reading scores in the city; Camden Street school (it's not in Camden) has the lowest. It turns out Camden Street takes students from all over Newark with diagnoses of autism, cognitive impairment, and behavioral disabilities.

Yet the Star-Ledger, Advocates for Children of New Jersey, and Newark Superintendent Cami Anderson neglected to tell us this rather important fact.

I had just focused on the special needs of Camden Street's children; however, the invaluable Bruce Baker from Rutgers dropped by, and left some Chanukah gifts! Courtesy of the good doctor, here's some more data for us to consider:

The scatterplots tell us that Branch Brook's children are less likely to be classified as eligible for free lunch; in other words, less likely to live in poverty. That's not a knock on Branch Brook: over half of the kids there are eligible. It just means it's less of an issue than at Camden Street.

Some other info:

And here we see Branch Brook has a much smaller population of black students. It is worth pointing out Branch Brook has many more Hispanic students than Camden Street.

I don't have time for a complete analysis of these two schools, but Bruce's graphs, combined with a look at the needs of the students, make it clear: these schools are serving different populations of students.

This is not an excuse; it is a look at the facts. I don't understand how some would dismiss information like this then turn around and claim we must make education a data-driven enterprise. Data means nothing if you don't know how to interpret it. And so:

- Cami Anderson may turn out to be the best superintendent Newark ever had, but she should be judicious in her use of data to identify the problems in Newarks' schools; simply stating the district needs "better leadership" is ignoring the obvious.

- ACNJ may be a champion for New Jersey's poorest, most vulnerable children, but if they are going to take on that role in education, they've got to do better than this report.

- Jessica Calefati may be a fine reporter, but she has got dig deeper if she's going to tell the story of Newark's children.

- Branch Brook and Camden Street may be great schools, or they may have problems. Maybe Branch Brook should be doing much better; maybe Camden Street is working miracles. But we won't ever really know until we look much more carefully at how each school is run and the characteristics of the kids they serve.

Forgive me, but I'm going to preach a little here. Because this teacher-blogger has walked the walk, and I have some words for those of you who sit on the sidelines and point fingers at my brothers and sisters standing in front of these classrooms: back off. Shallow comparisons between the Branch Brooks and the Camden Streets are useless and more than a little dangerous. Unless and until you've really looked at these schools - or any schools - and made the case that something has to change, you have absolutely no right to assume that the people who lead them or work in them are the problem. 

Have you ever sat with an autistic child and tried to get her to look you in the eye when she speaks? Have you ever had 150 lbs. of screaming 8th grader bearing down on you with fists flailing? Have you ever had to clean a child covered in his own filth? Have you ever had to come home to your own children after a day trying to teach a girl with a functional IQ of 60?

For that matter: have you ever tried to run a school for these beautiful, deserving children with a governor who slashes your staff's pay at the drop of a hat, a mayor who spends his day hobnobbing with billionaires, and an education commissioner who refuses to let your community run its own schools?

If you haven't, you should be very careful about where you're pointing fingers. I'm all for accountability - I think it's critical for great public schools. But the principals and teachers of Newark and everywhere else are doing a job none of you well-heeled "reformers" would or could ever do. Until someone makes a good case against these people, who day after day do the work of the angels, they have earned the benefit of the doubt.

They Say This Cat Darcie Is One Bad Mother...

Shut your mouth! 

Just talkin' 'bout Darcie Cimarusti - and her new blog, Mother Crusader. And if the posts are going to be anything like this, you're going to be talking about her too:

I just can't let Justin Barra's statement to Gannett Statehouse reporter Michael Symons regarding my meeting with Acting Commissioner Cerf go unanswered.  

Department of Education spokesman Justin Barra said acting Education Commissioner Christopher Cerf met in August with Cimarusti and others from Highland Park, who were opposed to the proposed Tikun Olam Hebrew Language Charter High School, which has been denied three times but has reapplied.

“In addition to evaluating the quality of the proposed program, we also take into account feedback both from districts and the general public. We take seriously all public comment that we receive in the review process,” Barra said. “We welcome an open, honest, and productive dialogue about proposed charter applications.”

While I did meet with the Acting Commissioner, Barra's characterization of the meeting is entirely disingenuous.  I met with him, Carly Bolger, soon-to-be-ex Director of the Charter School Office, and Chief of Staff and former Commissioner David Hespe in August.  Also in attendance were other concerned parents from East Brunswick, Princeton and South Brunswick who feel shut out of the process, as well as one other parent from Highland Park.  

This meeting was NOT about Tikun Olam, the charter school I am opposing.  It was in response to two women, Liz Lempert from Princeton and Lisa Rodgers-Grieco of South Brunswick, attempting to hand deliver a petition to Acting Commissioner Cerf.  Alan Guenther, the director of communications accepted the petition, not Cerf.  The petition asked the Acting Commissioner not to approve an additional planning year to the Princeton International Academy Charter School (PIACS) in Princeton.  The Acting Commissioner did not listen to the voices of those 1200 residents and granted PIACS their second planning year.  

Liz and Lisa continued to follow up and request a meeting, which was granted only after much persistence on the part of these women.  They asked representatives from Highland Park and East Brunswick to also attend as our districts have been very outspoken on this issue.  The meeting was cancelled by the Acting Commissioner when PIACS sued the affected districtsstating that they were using public funds to object to their charter.      

The meeting was rescheduled only after much persistence and multiple assurances that discussion of PIACS would be off the table.  There was little to no discussion about individual charters at this meeting, instead it was about broad overarching issues related to the lack of community involvement in the charter application process.  At one point when I attempted to discuss specifics of the Tikun Olam charter application Ms. Bolger became agitated and threatened to end the meeting.

Zing! She's like NJ's own Leonie Haimson, a fearless mom who's tired of the crap. Thank heaven she's here. I'll be following, and you should too.

This one's for you, girl:

Throwing Angels Under a Bus

Everyone working in schools knows the hardest job is teaching special education - especially to the most challenging children. Like all elementary music teachers, I work with special education teachers every day, and I have to tell you that they constantly amaze me with their sympathy, intelligence, insight, and patience. As far as I am concerned, anyone who devotes his or her career to teaching these deserving but demanding children is an angel on earth. And people who casually dismiss their work ought to be ashamed of themselves.

Which is why this next story bugs the hell out of me:

Advocates for Children of New Jersey has been working on child poverty issues for a good long while, but only recently started focusing on K-12 education. They recently released a report - Newark Kids Count 2011 - which bemoans the poor level of reading achievement for 3rd graders in the city. The Star-Ledger's Jessica Calefati picked up the story:

Two of every five Newark kids now live below the federal poverty line, a rate higher than it’s been in the past eight years. For a family of four, that means a median household income of less than $22,000 a year.

City officials, however, said the sobering child poverty level is no excuse for the district’s low performance on state tests, which is also detailed in the report, called Newark Kids Count.

"These figures show we are undermining the ability of our families to provide for their children," said Newark Mayor Cory Booker, who has made job-growth in the city a priority. "But we cannot let poverty be an excuse not to educate our children at the highest levels."

Big surprise hearing that from His Reforminess, but whatever. ACNJ and Newark Superintendent Cami Anderson decided to highlight this "no excuses" educational philosophy by releasing the report at the school that has the highest Grade 3 test scores in Newark; and they made a point of letting us know which school has the lowest-achieveing 3rd graders:

Newark schools superintendent Cami Anderson noted that the district includes some schools with abysmal academic performance and others that are beating the odds, considering the city’s child poverty rate.

At Branch Brook Elementary School, where authors released the findings of the Kids Count report, 85 percent of third graders are proficient. At Camden Street Elementary School, just 10 percent of third graders can read at grade level.

Anderson said one of the most important factors in boosting achievement in spite of poverty is strong school leadership. Before the start of this school year, Anderson replaced more than a dozen principals she felt were not qualified.

"While I am daunted by the challenge of increasing poverty on our families and our system ... it comes down to leadership," Anderson said. [emphasis mine]

It's worth noting that the comparison between Branch Brook and Camden Street schools can also be found on page 6 of the ACNJ report, so we know where both Anderson and Calefati got their information.

It's also important to point out that the way this excerpt is written strongly implies that Anderson has a problem with Camden Street's "leadership." Neither she, nor Calefati, nor the ACNJ report ever mentions any mitigating circumstances that may be responsible for Camden Street's poor showing.

Yeah, I'm not buying it either. Let's run the numbers:

Set aside the huge spike Camden Street had in 3rd Graders; it's painfully obvious that Camden Street is serving a very different population than Branch Brook. The school houses many children with autism, behavioral disabilities, mild and moderate cognitive disabilities... exactly the children we'd expect to see struggle on standardized tests.

Of course, anyone could have learned that serving these children is Camden Street's mission simply by visiting the school's website:

Camden's special needs program houses approximately two hundred students. These students live throughout the City of Newark, and are transported to Camden by bus. Opportunities for integrating classified students into a least restrictive environment are accomplished through inclusion and mainstreaming. Our goal is to meet the various needs of all. To accomplish this task, we provide students with whole group and individual learning experiences. 

Academic success is the mission of Camden Street Elementary School’s staff. The strategy used to achieve this goal is through high expectations and realistic goals. High expectations are communicated to the students by the teachers letting them know specifically what they are expected to learn, and that they can learn. [emphasis mine]

None of this is mentioned in ACNJ's report or Calefati's article. Maybe they didn't think it was important.

In Anderson's defense - and knowing how journalists work - Calefati may have made the juxtaposition between "leadership" and Camden Street on her own. But that juxtaposition leads us to believe that Anderson thinks the leadership is so weak there that it accounts for a 75% differential in third grade reading scores. Shouldn't ACNJ looked at this more closely before trashing the school's performance? Shouldn't Calefati have been more curious about the cause of the dichotomy? Shouldn't Anderson have defended her staff at Camden Street; a staff doing a tough but critically necessary job?

Look, I don't know either of these schools. I definitely think someone should take a look at Branch Brook and figure out why they are having the success they have. And it may well be that there is a problem over at Camden Street that needs addressing.

But platitudes about "leadership" don't tell us a thing, and the deserving children of Camden Street School deserve better from their superintendent, their advocates, and the press. Further, the staff of Camden Street are doing the work of the angels; unless and until someone can show a specific problem with their work, no one should throw these teachers under a bus.

ADDING: Laura Waters swallowed it whole without asking a single question. Of course.

Ghost Of Chris Cerf's Past

Michael Winerip of the New York Times had a brutal piece on Sunday documenting a decade of testing disasters in New York. After years of assurances that the state's standardized tests were valid, the system came crashing down:

JULY 2010 Finally someone — Dr. Tisch, the chancellor of the Board of Regents — has the sense to stand up at a news conference and say that the state test scores are so ridiculously inflated that only a fool would take them seriously, thereby unmasking the mayor, the chancellor and the former state commissioner. State scores are to be scaled down immediately, so that the 68.8 percent English proficiency rate at the start of the news conference becomes a 42.4 proficiency rate by the end of the news conference. Shael Polakow-Suransky, chief accountability officer for the city, offers the new party line: “We know there has been significant progress, and we know we have a long way to go.” Whether there has been any progress at all during the Bloomberg years is questionable. The city’s fourth-grade English proficiency rate for 2010 is no better than it was in February 2001, nine months before the mayor was first elected. [emphasis mine]

Guess who was a Deputy Chancellor in NYC during this time? Current ACTING NJ Commissioner of Education Chris Cerf. And what was Chris Cerf up to at the time - say, in 2008? Among other things, he was pushing for these very same unreliable standardized tests to be used to evaluate teachers:

New York City has embarked on an ambitious experiment, yet to be announced, in which some 2,500 teachers are being measured on how much their students improve on annual standardized tests. 

The move is so contentious that principals in some of the 140 schools participating have not told their teachers that they are being scrutinized based on student performance and improvement. 

While officials say it is too early to determine how they will use the data, which is already being collected, they say it could eventually be used to help make decisions on teacher tenure or as a significant element in performance evaluations and bonuses. And they hold out the possibility that the ratings for individual teachers could be made public. 

“If the only thing we do is make this data available to every person in the city — every teacher, every parent, every principal, and say do with it what you will — that will have been a powerful step forward,” said Chris Cerf, the deputy schools chancellor who is overseeing the project. “If you know as a parent what’s the deal, I think that whole aspect will change behavior.”

Cerf wanted to use these unreliable tests to make high-stakes decisions about teachers' careers. It never occurred to him that maybe making data available to all the stakeholders would be incredibly dangerous if the data itself sucked. And now he's piloting pretty much the same program here in Jersey.

Do you think he's vetting the NJ tests as carefully as the NY tests were vetted?

The "Strange Territory" of Tom Moran and Ed Reform

The spat between Governor Christie and State Senator Ron Rice caught the eye of the Star-Ledger's Tom Moran on Sunday. The basic story is that Rice is holding up hearings on ACTING Education Commissioner Chris Cerf's appointment, so Christie is holding up on appointing judges and taking away Sen. Dick Codey's car in retaliation. Yes, you read that right.

I actually agree with much of what Moran writes until he steps once again into the reformy breach:

Why is Rice objecting to Cerf? This is where the story veers into strange territory.
Rice sees the governor’s reform agenda as one front in a national conspiracy by hedge fund owners to privatize public education, and to enrich themselves by diverting some of the $600 billion in education spending each year into their own pockets.

“The whole notion is to make money,” Rice says. “I’m not going to be part of helping these people make money off these kids under the auspices that they are helping them.” 

How is that? The meat of the governor’s education agenda is to reform tenure, expand charter school, and experiment with small voucher programs. Not much chance there for hedge-fund profits.

I'm starting to feel like I'm writing the same post over and over and over and over again. But unless and until Tom's willing to actually address my points, I'll go through this one more time:

I don't know what exactly Rice said during your interview, Tom, but I do know this: there is no question that very wealthy and powerful people are looking to privatize large swaths of this country's education system. Polk Award-winning journalist and NY Daily News columnist Juan Gonzalez has reported on the use of arcane tax credits in charter school construction to double investors' money in seven years. Critically acclaimed author Jonathan Kozol reports in his seminal book, The Big Enchilada, that Wall Street has been looking at the privatization of the "education industry" as a huge market opportunity. John Walton of Wal-Mart and the reformy Walton Family Foundation admits that he believes there is money to be made in the education sector.

It is hardly "strange territory" to acknowledge that there are many privateers out there ready to cash in on education reform; in fact, it would be naive to assume that there aren't.

Enter ACTING Commissioner Cerf, whose resume I have been over again and again. Former President of Edison Learning, a (failed) school privatizer. Head of the public-private partnership for the NYC schools. Deputy Chancellor in NYC, where he was found to have violated conflict-of-interest laws.

As the Star-Ledger, Moran's own newspaper, has reported, Cerf has enriched friends and (maybe - we can't get a straight story) relatives since coming to New Jersey. Former employees of Cerf's are floating proposals to take special education services private. Voucher proponents are secretly appointed to charter school review panels at his DOE.

This isn't a surprise: Cerf's former boss in NYC, Joel Klein, is being paid a boatload of money to get Rupert Murdoch deeply ensconced into the education sector. His company, Wireless Generation, is responsible for NJ's screwed up Race To The Top application. Murdoch is looking to move more public funds away from classroom instruction and toward his own technology products. And Cerf is a defender of Murdoch's even now.

Given this and much, much more, who could possibly believe that Ron Rice's problems with Chris Cerf are the stuff of tinfoil hats and Illuminati myths? Who would have a problem with holding Cerf to account for all of this?

Who else? Tom Moran:

Challenge Rice on this, and he veers off into a smorgasbord of connected conspiracy theories, going back to the birth of the privatization movement under Milton Friedman in the 1950s.

This, too, is vintage Rice. He is well-liked, his moral convictions seem entirely sincere and the people in his district love him. But when he gets rolling on a conspiracy theory, you want to just bang your head on the table in despair.

Yes, it makes a lot of sense to bang your head in despair because a state senator actually knows something about Milton Friedman and education:

The alternative arrangements whose broad outlines are sketched in this paper distinguish sharply between the financing of education and the operation of educational institutions, and between education for citizenship or leadership and for greater economic productivity. Throughout, they center attention on the person rather than the institution. Government, preferably local governmental units, would give each child, through his parents, a specified sum to be used solely in paying for his general education; the parents would be free to spend this sum at a school of their own choice, provided it met certain minimum standards laid down by the appropriate governmental unit. Such schools would be conducted under a variety of auspices: by private enterprises operated for profit, non profit institutions established by private endowment, religious bodies, and some even by governmental units. [emphasis mine]

How crazy is it that Rice would bring this up in New Jersey in December of 2011! Like it's relevant or something...

But so it goes - yet again - in the reformy world of Tom Moran. A world where state senators are mocked for wanting a full account of the questionable histories of the privatizers who would run our schools. A world where bloggers who lay out all the evidence are questioned as half-crazy. A world where those who tout disproven "reform" strategies are given the benefit of the doubt, but those who would question their orthodoxy are not.

Just to be clear, Tom: folks like Senator Rice - and, for that matter, me - are not going anywhere. You may not believe this, but there are a lot of sane, rational, smart people out there who like what Rice is doing. You're going to have to deal with them and their arguments at some point.

Rather than dismissing them, I suggest engaging them.

Accountability For Thee, But Not For Me

Whitney Tilson - Wall Street maven and part-time corporate education reformer - says it's imperative to fire bad teachers, even if good teachers are fired in an inaccurate process:

I don't know this teacher of course – maybe the Impact system did evaluate her unfairly, which raises an important question: no system is perfect – this is why I oppose the death penalty, because I'm not willing to accept even 1 innocent person being executed for every 99 guilty people who are – so what error rate are we willing to accept?  In the case of the ultimate penalty, I won't accept even a 1% error rate, but I'm certainly willing to accept getting rid of 99 horrible teachers, even if I knew that 1 good teacher would be unfairly fired.  I'd feel badly about that teacher, but he/she could surely get another job, if he/she is a good teacher – and even if this wasn't the case, the good for students of removing 99 horrible teachers far outweighs in my mind that harm to 1 teacher.  But what if the error rate were 5%?  10%?  20%?

Remember: Whitney Tilson runs a hedge fund. How's it doing?

When at first you cover a soaring knife near its all time high, try, try again to catch it on the way down. And if you are Whitney Tilson, this is precisely what you do. The fund which is now down 25% YTD has lost 21.4% on its second round Netflix investment, something which Zero Hedge readers were on the other side of for the entire 50% pick in one month. But heaven forbid you learn a lesson: "A couple of weeks ago we sent you an article we published entitled “Why We’re Long Netflix and Short Green Mountain Coffee Roasters,” which is attached in Appendix B. Since then, both stocks have moved against us, making them even more attractive in our opinion." Lordy...

If Wall Street was run like Whitney wants to run schools, he'd be out on his ass - even though Whitney thanks his investors for their "continued confidence."

The titans of the business world keep telling us teachers that we have to run schools more like they run the private sector. What a disaster it would be if we did.

The Internets Have Spoken!

As of Friday, December 11, 2011, here are some Facebook stats:

A true champion of education:
New Jersey Teachers United Against Governor Chris Christie's Pay Freeze (aka Stop The Freeze NJ)
77,863 "likes"
Financial backers: None.  

The "reformiest" FB page in Jersey:
B4NJKids-Better Education for New Jersey Kids
3,484 "likes"
Financial backers: Some of the richest dudes in New Jersey.

You have to wonder: if some sugar daddy was funding STFNJ, how big would his/her following be?