Newark Will NEVER Have Control Of Its Schools

To the surprise of absolutely no one, the state-appointed superintendent of Newark's schools' told its duly elected advisory board to go jump in the Passaic:

Newark’s top education official has overruled the wishes of the district’s advisory school board and will lease five district-owned facilities to charter schools, a district spokeswoman said.

Because the district is state controlled, virtually any decision made by the district’s elected school board can be overturned by Newark Superintendent Cami Anderson or acting state Education Commissioner Christopher Cerf.

On Monday, the board voted to strike down four of the five proposed lease agreements after deciding at an earlier meeting to table balloting. Many parents and community leaders oppose the leases.

[...]

School board member Marques-Aquil Lewis said the board voted against some leases because Anderson hadn’t provided information about agreements that allowed charters to share space with district school students this past year.

"How can we vote on these leases when we don’t know the results from last year?" he asked. "This decision is a clear sign of disrespect to the community."

Lewis added the board plans to seek legal advice about reversing Anderson’s decision. [emphasis mine]

Well, I'm sure old Uncle Eli will pick up the legal fees for the district; he's paying for all the other consultants. But here's what really kills me: at the exact same time Anderson was overruling the board, the NJDOE was ensuring that she had the power to do so.

Here is a letter, dated July 2, that explicitly rejects any basis for returning even partial local control to Newark:



Why can't the good people of Newark run their own schools? Because the state says:

In light of a decline in the area of Fiscal Management, the Commissioner cannot
determine that there is substantial evidence the district has adequate programs, personnel and policies in place and in operation to ensure that the prior progress demonstrated by the district has been sustained. For example, business personnel were not properly implementing the district’s policy regarding purchase orders; there were confirming orders. Additionally, the district does not have adequate internal controls to comply with the Public Contracts Law. Specifically, there were instances in which purchases exceeded the quote threshold without evidence of quotes. Moreover, the child nutrition program does not operate without a general fund transfer each year. These concerns are heightened given the size of the district’s budget and the fact that these areas were also noncompliant during previous evaluations.

Anyone see the many layers of irony here?

• The state-appointed superintendent won't release information to the local advisory board to help them make a decision, but she retains her override power because the state says the board isn't forthcoming with evidence that it's following policy.
• The state criticizes Newark's schools for not being in compliance with policy, even though the state has run the schools for 18 years! And there was a decade of state monitoring before that!
• Superintendent Cami Anderson, empowered by the state, is overriding the board, after a year of running the district. Yet the same state that gave her the power to override local control admits the district has not improved since its last evaluation! 

There is simply no way that Newark, under the current New Jersey educational regime, is going to get its schools back. The Broadies who have infested the NJDOE want charters, and they want them run by their people. Nothing is going to stop them; certainly not a bunch of noisy parents who don't want to see school funds dumped into charters that don't do any better than the local public schools.

It's worth pointing out that Supermayor is just fine with this:

Newark Mayor Cory Booker scolded the board for striking down most of the leases and said he supports Anderson’s decision.

"We have an opportunity to expand high-quality school options for children and create revenue for the district, yet we continue to let the interest of adults get in the way of the interest of our kids," he said. [emphasis mine]

You know, I'd have to say I actually agree with Supermayor here: it looks like the interests of certain adults are definitely trumping the interests of kids - and their parents.

Local control is his Kryptonite!

"Unavoidable Costs" Are Avoidable

Bruce Baker Twitter-points us to a great op-ed about the fiscal disaster taking place in Philadelphia's schools. Read the entire thing to understand that huge inequities are taking place right now in Pennsylvania (a situation Chris Christie aspires to bring to New Jersey).

I agree with nearly everything in the op-ed; however, there is one passage I take issue with:

Has the School District been spending more than it was given? No.

The District ran surpluses of about $30 million a year in 2009, 2010, and 2011.  In 2012, after massive spending cuts to make up for a 15 percent reduction in state and federal funding and unavoidable cost increases in areas like health care, pensions, utilities and charter schools, the District says its 2012 budget is close to balanced. So, the District is not living beyond its means. [second emphasis mine]

It's the use of the word "unavoidable." OK, I understand the term is used here to mean "unavoidable for the Philadelphia school district," but we need to continually remind ourselves that so many of our "unavoidable" education costs are completely avoidable.

Take health care. Our country spends more than twice as much as Britain, Sweden, and France, yet has worse health outcomes, and not everyone is insured. That is insane, and it directly affects costs for districts like Philadelphia. Maybe Obamacare will really cut costs, but it's obvious to me it won't cut them nearly as much as a single-payer system would have.

How about pensions? Well, let's look at Pennsylvania:

Despite their tepid returns, retirement systems that have bet big on alternatives are paying a hefty tab. While funds with little stakes in hedge funds and private equity pay an average of 17 cents on every $100 invested, funds with large stakes pay 77 cents.

The Pennsylvania state retirement system, which has about 46 percent of its money in alternatives, paid those managers 77 percent of the system’s total $195 million in fees last year. Last fall, the system replaced the two consulting firms that had emphasized those investments. Over the last five years, its annualized returns of 3.6 percent lagged behind its peers’.

In a series of e-mails, Pamela Hile, a spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania fund, said that the fund had made many new investments in alternatives from 2004 to 2007. Some of these entities, like venture-capital funds, often have negative returns in the early years as that money is invested, she said.

Noting that pension funds have time horizons that stretch into decades, Ms. Hile added that the retirement system had outperformed its 8 percent target over the last 25 years, with an 8.8 percent annualized return. [emphasis mine]

Wait - is that before or after the fees?

The sad truth is that Wall Street has been overselling itself for years as a justification for taking more and more off of the top. The promise of deferred compensation kept public employee salaries artificially low. But now that employees are demanding the promises made to them be fulfilled, politicians are breaking their word (see the top of this blog).

Was this "unavoidable"? Absolutely not. We've allowed Wall Street to write its own rules for years, and this is the price we're now paying. Taxing the "wealth" generated in financial markets would go a long way toward making pensions solvent. Hell, they're making money hand over fist by playing around with our funds; why do we allow them to pay reduced tax rates for the privilege?

Utilities? This country has never been serious about weaning ourselves off of fossil fuels; what if we were? How much would we have saved by now if we had implemented real energy conservation measures in our schools and all over our public infrastructure?

And charter schools? Well, don't even get me started...

Maybe not all of these cost increases were completely "avoidable," but they all could have been mitigated - they still can be. The problem is that a local school board does not have nearly the political clout needed to make these things happen. This has to be a nationwide effort.

We, as a country, as wasting a ton of money in health care costs, retirement costs, energy costs, and yes, on school "choice." If we chose to, we could cut all of those costs and still have good health insurance, decent retirements for teachers, plenty of energy, a cleaner planet, and money to affect real change in the lives of children in poverty.

It is not the fault of the education system, nor of educators, nor of their unions, nor of local districts, that we, as a nation, continue to make these poor decisions. Every one of them is "avoidable."

The only question left is whether we care enough about our children to put aside the interests of those who profit from these completely "avoidable" choices.

International House of Education Statistics

I'll be doing the #soschat tonight on the Twitter machine, which should be fun (if TweetDeck for Mac stops acting so quirky). Stop in if you can: 9:00 PM EDT.

We needed a topic, and I'm sick of talking about Chris Christie, so I thought we'd talk about international comparisons. Why? Because they seem to be a lynchpin of the entire reformy argument: "Our kids suck compared to the rest of the world! Even our kids who we say don't suck really suck! 'Cause their teachers suck!" Blah, blah, blah...

It's just not true, and we need to say so. I thought it might be helpful, therefore, to have some links to my stuff and others about this topic.

First, here's me:

• International Test Score Comparison Fail - Part I
• International Test Score Comparison Fail - Part II
• Poverty, Shmoverty!
• Poverty, Shmoverty! Part II
• Poverty, Shmoverty - Part III
• Poverty, Shmoverty: Part IV
• Dare To Compare
• Poverty Matters

Tino Sanandaji is an economist who has blogged about this stuff before. He hasn't had a lot of play in the debate, but I find his work to be fascinating. Here are just a few of his posts:

• The amazing truth about PISA scores: USA beats Western Europe, ties with Asia.
• How well do above average American States do compared to above average countries in test scores?
• Breaking Matt Yglesia's Heart

Valerie Strauss has had some excellent posts about international comparisons:

• What international test scores really tell us: Lessons buried in PISA report
• Hysteria over PISA misses the point
• You MUST read this one! Do international test comparisons make sense?

Of course, any time Matt DiCarlo tackles a topic, it's worth reading:

• PISA For Our Time: A Balanced Look

Same with Bruce Baker:

• Ed Next’s triple-normative leap! Does the “Global Report Card” tell us anything?

Here's Paul Thomas:

• High-Stakes Testing: Lessons Ignored

And Mel Riddille:

• PISA: It's Poverty Not Stupid

It occurs to me I have a lot of reading to do before tonight. See you there.

Zombies, pancakes, and test scores: bringing the world together.

The Shot Against Charters Heard 'Round the World

A citizen revolution has been brewing in Newark for some time, with local citizens getting increasingly sick and tired of being left out of decisions that affect their own children.

So, if this is a revolution, yesterday was the Battle of Lexington and Concord:

The Newark public schools uneasy relationship with the city’s charter schools stirred more debate last night, as the district’s advisory board rejected leases to share space with the alternative schools. Newark Superintendent Cami Anderson, however, appeared poised to overrule and let the leases proceed. 

The proposed leases of five district buildings to charter school operators for next year has been the latest source of friction in a long run of contentious community meetings surrounding the state-run schools. 

Unable to make a decision last week, the district advisory board met in a special meeting last night to further consider them. The state has a deadline for issuing its final charters for next fall by July 15. 

After lengthy public comment, the board formally and overwhelmingly voted against four of the five proposed leases.

Remember: Cami Anderson is from New York City, the hotbed of colocation. Big charter guns like Eva Moskowitz have used colocation to grow their charter networks in Gotham, despite the fact that they themselves admit their results are not replicable for large student populations. As Diane Ravitch points out, Moskowitz is happy to shill for increasing her management fees even as she sucks the life out of her neighboring public schools.

Well, maybe we're finally seeing the one upside to all of this: the good people of Newark need only look across the Hudson to be forewarned about what's coming their way. Of course, Chris Christie rules Newark with the same iron glove Bloomberg uses in NYC, so it really doesn't matter much what the mere plebes think:

Still, almost as soon as it was taken, many expected that Anderson, appointed by Gov. Chris Christie last year, would promptly overrule at least some of the votes.

Anderson quickly left the meeting without comment, but spokeswoman Renee Harper said a decision could come as soon as today. Harper would not make a prediction but said the veto was a clear option.

“She maintains that right and will act in the best interest of the district and of all the children,” Harper said in an interview. “We’ll see what happens.”

The meeting at the Belmont Runyon Elementary School continued the run of raucous community meetings that have grown commonplace in the city over charter schools and the state’s ongoing control of the district overall. The state seized operation of district in 1994, appointing its superintendent ever since.

It is Anderson as the latest superintendent who has made the sharing of district space with charter schools one of the centerpieces of her sweeping reorganization of the district.

Let's be crystal clear about this: the people of Newark have no control over their schools. Eli Broad has paid a relatively small sum of money (for him) to basically reshape the Newark schools however his protege, ACTING Commissioner Chris Cerf, sees fit. It doesn't matter if the plans themselves are hack junk; they want to close neighborhood schools and replace them with charters that serve substantially different student populations. So that's what they're going to get - period.

And if anyone says "boo," well...

Others brought up what is becoming a recurring theme of the community meetings, that the state is selling out the public schools to for-private interests, even if the charter schools are virtually all non-profit entities.

“We know who the enemy is, and we must fight to our last breath to save our children and to save Newark public schools,” said Mildred Crump, a city councilwoman who was the first in the audience to speak at the meeting.

“For those of you willing to sell our children for profit, shame on you,” she said.

Added Junius Williams, a longtime civic activist in Newark: “This is a real estate scheme to put public property in private hands.”

Board members did not offer up much comment before voting. The only one to speak at length, member Shavar Jeffries called the deals a “win-win” for the district in providing additional income for the district and additional choices for the city’s schoolchildren.

“These charter schools are public schools,” Jeffries said. “We have heard a lot of rhetoric that is frankly ridiculous … But these are public schools regulated by the state of New Jersey, and they are educating Newark children.”

Well, if they are public schools, why don't we force them to take all students and keep them, regardless of whether they meet the schools' "codes of conduct"? Why don't we make them provide services to kids with severe learning disabilities, like the schools in Newark that get mocked for doing just that? Why aren't tenure laws applicable to all of them? Why do they have unelected boards of governance?

Charters are not public schools in any meaningful sense. It's not ridiculous to say so. And it's not ridiculous for the citizens of Newark to be highly skeptical of colocation plans that they've had no say in.

ADDING: We haven't really talked about Teachers Village in a while:

You want to talk about charters and real estate? Let's start here; more to come this summer...

The Patterns of Reforminess

The very reformy Deborah Kenny wants you to know that her charter schools are totally awesome simply because... well, they're just awesome, OK?

Critics claim that charter schools are successful only because they cherry-pick students, because they have smaller class sizes, or because motivated parents apply for charter lotteries and non-motivated parents do not. And even if charters are successful, they argue, there is no way to scale that success to reform a large district.

None of that is true. Charters succeed because of their two defining characteristics—accountability and freedom. In exchange for being held accountable for student achievement results, charter schools are generally free from bureaucratic and union rules that prevent principals from hiring, firing or evaluating their own teams.

Oh, snap! All you haters can just step off, 'cause Kenny's bringing the accountability and freedom! Her schools are the awesomest!

Er, right?

On their homepage, Harlem Village Academy shares their results, which include #1 school in Harlem for 8th grade reading and math, with 100% proficient in math for three straight years.  They also have a near perfect New York Regents passing rate.

Throughout the years, though, this school has been criticized for its high attrition rate of both students and teachers.  Two good posts from about two years ago are here and here.  With the release of the new book, I thought I’d check the most recent 2010-2011 data to see what is happening there.

I downloaded the recent state and city report cards from here and also the state report cards for New York City district 5 here, and found some interesting information.

In 2010-2011, HVA had 55% free lunch and 13% reduced lunch.  The district, that year, had 74% free with 5% reduced.

In 2010-2011, HVA had 3% LEP vs. 11% for the whole district.

In 2010-2011 38% of the students at HVA were suspended for at least one day while 7% were suspended for the whole district.

Student attrition at HVA is huge.  For example, the 66 5th graders in 2007-2008 have shrunk to just 16 9th graders in the 2010-2011 school year.  This is a 75% attrition.  In that same time, the district that the school is in went from 904 5th graders in 2007-2008 to 1313 9th graders in 2010-2011.  That is a 45% growth.

Though these are different cohorts, the graph below from The Charter Center show HVA’s enrollment by grade for 2010-2011.  This is not what this graph would look like in a regular school.

As far as their achievement, it is true that the students had a high passing rate on their state tests, particularly in math.  But when I looked at their Regents grades, I noticed that, according to their state report card, no students took the Geometry or the Algebra II / Trigonometry Regents.  So their 100% passing rate seems to come from all their students, through 12th grade, only taking the 9th grade level Algebra Regents.  When I asked the school, though a mutual acquaintance, why this was, they wrote back that the state didn’t include all the data and they actually had 90 students take Geometry (nothing about Algebra II), and that 82% passed.  But since they only had 80 students who could feasibly qualify to take that test, this seems unlikely.  I currently have a data request into the NYC DOE to clear this up, so I will update if I get new information.

When a school is truly great, teachers want to keep teaching there year after year.  So it should be telling that in this school over the past three years the amount of staff turnover was 2007-2008 53%, for 2008-2009, 38%, and for 2009-2010, a whopping 61%.  By comparison, the teacher attrition for the entire district in 2009-2010 was just 19%.

Read the rest for the whole sordid tale. And don't pretend like you're surprised, because...

- Steve Perry blames the teachers unions for low student achievement, but his magnet school has a different student population than the neighboring public schools.

- Ben Chavis blames the teachers unions for low student achievement, but his charter schools have different student populations than they did prior to his arrival.

- Juan Williams blames the teacher unions for low student achievement, but the charter school he touted in a bit of propaganda masquerading as journalism has a different student population than the neighboring public schools.

- Shelley Skinner of B4K blamed labor agreements for low student achievement, but her charter school has a different student population than the neighboring public schools.

- Kathy Mone said her charter got great results even thought it "took the most difficult cases," but her charter schools has a different student population than the neighboring public schools.

- Bergen Arts & Sciences Charter School touts its "data driven" approach, but has a different student population than the neighboring public schools.

- New Orleans.

- New York.

- KIPP.

- HCZ.

Over and over and over again, we keep running into the same problem: the "successful" reformy schools either had different student populations to begin with, or changed their student populations to create "success."

Gosh, is anyone else seeing a pattern here?

The New "Bargaining": Take This and Shut Up!

Roy Roberts invents a new definition for the term "collective bargaining":

DETROIT — The state-appointed emergency manager running the Detroit Public Schools imposed a contract Sunday on the district's teachers, the district has announced.

Roy Roberts is empowered by Michigan's emergency manager law to impose work terms on employees.

"This new collective bargaining agreement with our teachers provides the flexibility needed for our schools to be successful and to meet the educational needs of the children and families who come to us," Roberts said in a statement. "It also produces the savings necessary for the district to ultimately return to financial solvency and remove the debt that erodes financial resources reaching the classroom."

District spokesman Steven Wasko declined to reveal terms of the contract, saying Roberts wants the Detroit Federation Teachers to inform its members first.

Gosh, that's very thoughtful of him: he's letting the teachers hear what he is forcing them to take through "bargaining" before the rest of the public. What a guy.

It looks like these guys are just following the playbook that reformyists are using in the rest of the country:

The June 20^th press conference at Detroit’s Renaissance High School offered many revelations and sweeping plans by Governor Rick Snyder, Emergency Manager Roy Roberts, Mike Flanagan, and private interests to completely overhaul the DPS and to go statewide in five years.  While having many exciting and even inspiring ideas and points of interest, the EAS plan itself uses the new PA4 law to create the state-run system, disenfranchise voters, sell public assets, abrogate contracts and privatize.  The plan may be successful in the five year time frame of raising test scores or increasing high school graduation and college acceptance rates, but at what cost to democracy?  How can any plan be considered successful if its foundation is based upon voter disenfranchisement and the complete violation of the right to democratically elect representatives?

It can't, but don't worry: it won't be successful in raising student achievement, either. Newark and Paterson - two cities that have a lot in common with Detroit - have disenfranchised their citizens for years, and it hasn't helped. Louisiana is disenfranchising its citizens through privatization, and it's not helping. Generalissimo Bloomberg has held the NYC schools in his iron fist for years, and it hasn't helped.

There is no correlation between student achievement and the loss of local control of schools. Because the people who inevitably take over have no idea what they are doing:

In the final moments of the Monday press conference Roy Roberts revealed a major flaw and the folly of attempting such a broad, sweeping, experimental takeover of publicly owned education when he was asked a simple and legitimate question from an audience member.  Such an undertaking is powerful and may have many far reaching and unintended negative consequences and legal challenges, which is why Roberts was asked  how the plan intends to get around the Headlee Amendment of  1978.  When asked this very important question as to how indeed the new, more powerful school system created under the new, more powerful law would get around our state’s constitution, Roy Roberts answered quickly and succinctly, “I don’t know.”   He didn’t know.

And yet he does somehow magically know what a fair wage for teachers should be, without any bargaining involved. Nice. Do he and Rahm Emanuel play golf together or something?

Oh, and of course, you know who has been stoking this fire:

At the press conference Snyder announced his initiative to remove more than three dozen of Detroit’s lowest performing schools and place them under the authority of a pilot school district, which will function as an independent entity.  Seeking to model the new system after Kalamazoo’s Promise program which offers a four year scholarship to qualifying students, Snyder told the press that a second initiative will be to raise funds and resources from businesses and  philanthropic entities and foundations such as the Eli Broad Foundation and Kellogg Foundation to provide funding for students to qualify for at least two years of college or training after graduation.  The takeover involves a partnership between Eastern Michigan University (EMU)and DPS and will have an 11 member authority to oversee its five year plan to go statewide.

Broadies, Broadies, everywhere. Eli Broad is a Michigan State alum and deeply involved with Michigan's educational system. The parallels to New Jersey are, frankly, a little creepy; about $400K is all it takes, apparently, to buy any state's school system.

How long, I wonder, before New Jersey "bargains" with Newark's teachers the way Michigan has "bargained" with Detroit's?

ADDING: Diane Ravitch has more about this nasty trend of disenfranchisement rearing its head in Chicago.

ADDING MORE: Jon Pelto shows how well state takeovers are working in Connecticut. It's a freaking epidemic.

Teacher Evaluations: A Race To Nowhere

New York is rushing to change teacher evaluation, even if they're not ready for it:

An important deadline in the state’s ongoing teacher evaluation process occurs Sunday, but most schools will be missing it.  

July 1 was set as the day for schools around the state to submit plans for their new teacher evaluations to the State Education Department. The evaluations are required in order to qualify for federal grant money that New York State won under the Race to the Top program.

But only around 65 of the states more than 700 school districts will be ready, says New York State School Boards Association’s executive director Tim Kremer.

“Not going to make that deadline, for most districts,” Kremer said.

The major reason for the delay is that schools were waiting for Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the legislature to finalize a plan to limit disclosure of teacher evaluations to the public. On June 21, the last day of the legislative session, they agreed on legislation to keep the results private, except to parents who actually have a child in the teacher’s class. Teachers and administrators were hesitant to work on deals on evaluation plans until then.

The School Boards Association backed Cuomo’s bill,  Kremer said, largely because there are too many unknowns in the unfinished teacher evaluation process to expose the very first results to wide public scrutiny.

“We’re not quite ready for primetime,” said Kremer, who said it’s a “work in progress.” [emphasis mine]

Connecticut is rushing as well:

Education Commissioner Stefan Pryor said during Wednesday's day-long meeting at the state Capitol complex that while he is "proud" that the state has made it to this point, "profound disagreements" and questions remain among key stakeholders.

Some of those questions include whether these evaluations will actually improve education. What happens when there's a dispute in how much weight to give standardized tests in a teacher's grade? And, finally, who will pay for all these new requirements?

"We don't have enough administrative personnel to carry this out [statewide]. We are going to be laying off teachers to carry out these evaluations," said Joe Cirasuolo, executive director of the state's superintendents association, who is supportive of these new evaluations but cited cost concerns after the meeting of the panel that forwarded these recommended guidelines to the state board.

[...]

The state has arranged for the University of Connecticut's Center for Education Policy Analysis to evaluate the pilot program.

Casey D. Cobb, the director of UConn's center, said his team intends to report on the rollout of the evaluations, but not whether the system is improving student outcomes.

"The pilot could be a spot-on system for evaluating teachers. Most likely it's not and will need to be fine-tuned. That's where we come in," Cobb said. "A validity study cannot be done in a year. That's a much longer study." [emphasis mine]

New Jersey rushed to change evaluations, until they realized they wouldn't have time to evaluate their "pilot" program before the final program was rolled out. But they're still rolling out a new system based on growth measures that are completely inappropriate to the task.

You would think everyone would want to review the evidence before rushing to implement schemes that haven't been shown to work. But when folks like Michelle Rhee control the debate - a woman who crows about her changes to the Washington DC evaluation system when they had no discernible effect on student learning - politicians must feel they have to follow her lead. They need to urgently do something - anything! - to prove how much they care about kids.

Maybe it's just me, but I don't think running around like a chicken with your head cut off does a lot for students.

"We may be lost, but we're making great time!"

Getting Teacher Evaluation Basics Right - Or Not

Oh, Laura...

Here's four challenges that face New Jersey's public school system as it implements new procedures under a harsh spotlight. None of these challenges are insurmountable, but all will require careful oversight and strong leadership.

[...]

Refine Teacher Evaluation Rubric: Last year, the DOE rolled out a pilot program of value-added teacher evaluations under the heading of Excellent Educators for New Jersey. Participation was limited to 11 districts (including Newark), plus 20 low-performing schools that received federal grants. Original plans called for statewide roll-out in 2012-2013; that's been pushed back a year until the kinks are worked out, although all districts will tiptoe towards the new system in September. Districts are also allowed to use their own templates, as long as they conform to the minimum standards in the bill, which include evaluating teachers based on "multiple objective measures of student learning." [second emphasis mine]

Yeah, uh, no. The DOE rolled out a pilot program not of Value Added Modeling (VAM), but of Student Growth Percentiles (SGP):

Q: How does New Jersey measure student growth? 

A: New Jersey measures growth for an individual student by comparing the change in his or her NJ ASK achievement from one year to the next to that of all other students in the state who had similar historical results (the student’s "academic peers"). This change in achievement is reported as a student growth percentile (abbreviated SGP) and indicates how high or low that student’s growth was as compared to that of his/her academic peers. For a school or district, the growth percentiles for all students are aggregated to create a median SGP for the school or district. The median SGP is a representation of “typical” growth for students in the school or district. [emphasis mine]

Why does this matter? Bruce Baker explains:

But what about those STUDENT GROWTH PERCENTILES being pitched for similar use in states like New Jersey?  While on the one hand the arguments might take a similar approach of questioning the reliability or validity of the method for determining teacher effectiveness (the supposed basis for dismissal), the arguments regarding SGPs might take a much simpler approach. In really simple terms SGPs aren’t even designed to identify the teacher’s effect on student growth. VAMs are designed to do this, but fail.

When VAMs are challenged in court, one must show that they have failed in their intended objective. But it’s much, much easier to explain in court that SGPs make no attempt whatsoever to estimate that portion of student growth that is under the control of, therefore attributable to, the teacher (see here for more explanation of this).  As such, it is, on its face, inappropriate to dismiss the teacher on the basis of a low classroom (or teacher) aggregate student growth metric like SGP. Note also that even if integrated into a “multiple measures” evaluation model, if the SGP data becomes the tipping point or significant basis for such decisions, the entire system becomes vulnerable to challenge.* [emphasis mine]

Yes, that's right: the NJDOE is proposing to use a method of evaluating teachers - SGPs - that does not even attempt to estimate how much influence the teacher has on student growth!

This is critically important to understand in the days ahead: the NJDOE is not proposing to use an inaccurate method like VAM to evaluate teachers; they are proposing to use SGP, a method that is completely inappropriate to the task!

Let's hope Laura Waters figures out the difference before her next column.

$100 MIllion Just Don't Buy What It Used To

Remember when Zuck's bucks were going to completely change everything in Newark? How's that going?

When Anderson unveiled the plan last February, however, she was heckled at public meetings by residents who accused her of trying to rob them of their neighborhood schools. “Cami Anderson, I have not seen such trickery since the devil took over the Garden of Eden,” one of her detractors told her at a budget hearing [ed note: Man, that's funny!]. Naturally, the teachers’ union has happily stoked the outrage. “I’m all for school reform,” Del Grosso chuckles. “But this is the Dr. Kevorkian approach.”

The budget crunch has also forced Anderson to cut arts and music programs at some schools. Residents find this bizarre at a time when so many philanthropic dollars are flowing into Newark. “I don’t understand why you are doing this,” a frustrated Newarker asked at the budget meeting. “Where’s the Facebook money?” Good question. The money pledged to the Foundation for Newark’s Future is supposed to be spent on “high-impact innovations” rather than plugging holes in the district’s operating budget. Anderson also notes: “The large investments haven’t happened yet. Those require additional matching funds.” Booker has raised $54 million to date. So far, the Foundation for Newark’s Future has committed only $16 million to a variety of small bore projects like $600,000 in small grants for teachers who come up with interesting projects, and $176,000 for elementary school students so they can treat themselves to some books.

The district’s financial troubles will likely deepen. The number of teachers in the excess pool is expected to hit 200 in the coming school year, and the superintendent is reluctant to resort to layoffs. New Jersey’s tenure law has a strict seniority clause that forces districts to let go of new hires first. That means Anderson would lose many of her new recruits before she could dismiss any of the veterans in the pools. That’s the last thing Booker wants. He has talked to Zuckerberg and Christie about using philanthropic dollars for buyouts of teachers in the excess pool. But it might very well exhaust much of the funds he has raised for school reform, and it is sobering to imagine Zuckerberg’s pledge going to pay off the least desirable teachers in the Newark school system. On April 30 the three of them had a conference call to discuss this. “What can I do to help?” Christie recalls Zuckerberg saying.

Christie assured him that he’d done all that he could: “The rest is up to us.”

As of June 2012, no teachers have been fired, and the administrative staff remains the same size. [emphasis mine]

First thing: let's find out more about these excess pool teachers, shall we? I'm talking to you, Lisa Fleisher, or Jessica Calefati, or Bob Braun: it would be a great story if you went out and told us who these teachers are. All we know is that their current  administrators didn't want them - but does that mean they're bad teachers?

I'm serious about this: let's find out if these "bad" teachers are really the problem Anderson says they are. All it would take are a few phone calls, right?

Next: hey, I have a crazy idea! Instead of having billionaires come in and drop money wherever they decide to put it...

... let's tax them! And turn control of the schools over to... get ready for a shocker... the people who actually live in Newark!

Why, it's just so crazy, it actually might work!

Democracy for Newark? Yeah, we don't think so...

Do They REALLY Care About Parents?

Regular readers will recall that Chris Christie's favorite local superintendent these days is a young fellow by the name of Steve Engravalle, INTERIM Superintendent in Fort Lee. The fresh-faced Engravalle was happy to accept the accolades of the governor; in exchange, he trashed the teachers union on national TV. Engravalle has been further rewarded with a position on a state school aid task force, despite his relative lack of experience in these matters.

Keep all that in mind as we check in on the latest news from Fort Lee:     

Four educators found themselves without jobs on June 18 after the Board of Education decided to uphold the interim superintendent's decision to not renew their contracts.

Lewis F. Cole Middle School teachers Christina Martelo and Ian Zellman, School No. 1 Principal Kristine Cecere and an aide from School No. 4 were let go despite vehement opposition from parents, students and colleagues who pleaded with the board to keep the educators in the district.

[...]

Many parents emphasized the "life-changing" nature of the decision the board was faced with — for all involved.

"Why lose these good teachers to another school district?" asked one woman. "This isn't about Mr. Zellman and Ms. Martelo. This is about our school district. This is about our children."

Interim Superintendent Steven Engravalle deflected criticism of his contract review process, which did not include personal observation of the two teachers in question, and stood firm in his decision. [emphasis mine]

Contrast this story to Chris Christie's words from 2011:

I mean, let me as the question: Do-- You know, you talk to any parent who has children in a school. Within weeks, they know if they have a good teacher or a bad teacher. Within weeks. And the rumor mill in the school tells them, too. "Oh, you got Mrs. Smith for third grade, uh-oh, not good. Yeah, 'cause she's not good, you know. Stay away from her." Or, "You got Mrs. Jones. She's fabulous. You're kid's gonna have a great year." 

We know how to do it. It shouldn't just be about test scores, but student performance has to play a part in it. And then teaching, I still believe, is a craft, and so you have to also have teachers reviewing other teachers to say, "Are you staying up on your craft of being a person in front of the classroom who children are listening to and learning from? 

"It's not a science, it's an art, as well. And both things should be part of the evaluation. But don't tell me that this is the only profession in the world where we can't effectively evaluate people. It's just impossible for me to believe that, especially because I've had four children in the schools. And I know when he has, when my children have a good teacher or a bad teacher. And, you know, so does everybody else who's listening to this. They know. We can figure it out. [emphasis mine]

So they love parental input... except when the parents say things they don't like.

I have no idea why Engravalle dismissed teachers who had good evaluations; maybe he has good reasons for doing so. But let's take away a few things from this story:

- Teacher evaluation is not as simple as Chris Christie makes it out to be; even his favorite super will tell you that.

- The notion that good teachers have nothing to worry about if they lose their tenure is absurd.

- These folks love to say they are on the side of parents. But are they?