Latinos are the fastest growing ethnic group in New York City, accounting for 32.6% of the 16-24 population and 34.1% of the under 16 population in New York City. Yet:

• 13.7% of Latino youths ages 16-24 are neither enrolled in school nor employed, what sociologists call “disconnected.”
• 44.4% have less than a High School diploma.
• Only 4.8% have a BA or higher.

On September 27, 20/20 Vision for Schools executive director Jeremy Del Rio was asked to explore the Latino achievement gap in New York City at the Movement Day conference convened by the New York City Leadership Center. His assignment included reviewing recent studies documenting the scope and impacts of the gap, as well as proposing community supported strategies aimed at improving educational outcomes for Latino students.

He also introduced one of 20/20′s best practice partners, Broader Bridges, which equips community partners and schools to offer job readiness solutions for disconnected youth.

You can download the powerpoint of his talk here, as well as the research reports he cites (pdf files) by clicking the images below.

For more information on Broader Bridges, including their “Reconnect” training series happening throughout the five boroughs, visit them online. It’s not too late to register for Saturday’s Reconnect Queens event at The Legacy Center in Glendale.

The sound of bubbles bursting: Student gains on state test vanished into thin air

BY Diane Ravitch

Every year for the past four years, the New York State Education Department has announced dramatic test score gains. And every year, it turns out they were misrepresenting reality. This year, New Yorkers got an accurate accounting of student performance, and it was sobering.

Since 2006, scores have gone through the roof. Teachers and principals quietly told reporters that the tests were getting easier to pass, but no one listened. A few critics and testing experts warned that outsized annual gains were not credible, but no one listened.

At the same time that the state was announcing phenomenal annual gains, national tests administered by the federal government – exams considered the gold standard – told a different story. On those tests, the state’s scores in reading were flat from 2000 to 2009. Math scores were up in fourth grade, but not in eighth grade, where they were flat from 2005 to 2009.

New York Commissioner of Education David Steiner made a bold move. He decided to end the inflation – and administer some shock therapy. The sharp contrast between mostly flat scores on national tests and dramatic annual claims by the state made it necessary for him to act, and he did.

Now we know the painful truth. Last year, 86.4% of the state’s students in grades three to eight were deemed proficient in mathematics; today it is 61%. Last year, 77.4% of students in the same grades were deemed proficient in reading; today it is 53.2%.

When the scores were released, there was a sound of bursting bubbles across the state. What once were miracles turned into mirages.

Since 2005, Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein have trumpeted historic gains. But after the state’s adjustment, the pass rate on the state reading test among city students fell from an impressive 68.8% to an unimpressive 42.4%, and from an astonishing 81.8% to a disappointing 54% in mathematics. Overnight, the city’s historic gains disappeared.

Now, look at the achievement gap between the performance of white students and that of minorities. Last year, black students were 22 points behind white students in passing the state English exam. This year – after the state corrected its scoring – the gap increased to 30.4 points.

In math, the gap grew even more. Black students were 17 points behind whites last year. Now they’ve fallen 30 points behind.

Charter school advocates saw their bubble burst as well. The pass rates in the state’s charter schools, overall, dropped even faster than those in regular public schools. In third grade math, it plunged from 96.1% to 61.6%, and in eighth grade, from 84.5% to 50.4%. On the 2010 reading tests, the scores of charter students in New York City were nearly identical to those of district schools: 43% compared to 42%.

In math, 63% of the city’s charter students passed, compared to 54% in public schools, which was an advantage but nothing like the miraculous results previously claimed by charter promoters.

Among other bubbles that popped were the city’s school report cards, which based 85% of their grades on the state’s test scores, mostly on gains on the test now proven to be vastly overstated. Some schools were given an A for “progress” on dumbed-down tests, and others were closed because they didn’t make the grade. But the measure was a deeply flawed instrument.

The hundreds of millions of dollars that the city has spent on test preparation turned out to be a bad investment. Students were learning test-taking skills, not truly learning reading or mathematics.

As a result of the fiasco, we now know that the bonuses of more than $30 million handed out last year to teachers in schools that made “gains” on the state tests were a waste of precious money.

Why does test score inflation matter? Aside from the fact that the state misled the public, the inflated scores caused tens of thousands of students to be denied needed remediation. The inflated scores also help to explain why 75% of the city’s high school graduates require remediation when they enroll in community colleges at the City University.

Now we know that achievement in the city and state did not grow by historic proportions, as officials claimed.

The way to avoid similar messes in the future is to use test scores for information and diagnosis, not for rewards and punishments.

Two questions remain: Will Bloomberg and Klein accept this new reality or will they continue to deny the plain facts and refuse to be held accountable? And will the state education department find and fire the bureaucrats and private contractors responsible for this scandal? Unfortunately, the prospects for genuine accountability by the city and state are not promising.

- Ravitch is Research Professor of Education at New York University.

Original Article

[L]ast week, the federal government released scores for the nation and the states, and New York did not fare well. In fact, almost all of New York’s reported gains for the past seven years disappeared into thin air.

The federal test – the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP – is the gold standard of testing. Congress requires all states to take NAEP tests to audit state claims. The federal audit was an embarrassment for New York.

The reading scores released last week show that 36% of New York’s fourth-graders – not 77% – are proficient. And unlike the state scores, which have gone up every year without fail, the state scores on NAEP for fourth-graders have been flat since 2002. The federal test continues to show huge achievement gaps: 45% of white students are proficient, as are 52% of Asians. This contrasts with 18% of black students and 22% of Hispanic students.

In eighth grade, the picture is no better. On the NAEP test, 33% of our students are proficient in reading, not the 69% claimed by the state. The federal test shows zero improvement at this grade since 1998. And the racial achievement gap is shocking: 44% of whites are proficient, as are 49% of Asians, but only 13% of blacks and 16% of Hispanics.

In math, the state does slightly better, but not much. The federal tests show 40% of our fourth-grade students are proficient, while the state says it is 87%. Over time, the federal scores have improved for this grade, but not for eighth grade. There, only 34% are proficient, not the 80% claimed by the state. And, unlike the state, which has boasted of big improvements in the eighth grade, the federal tests reveal that there have been no gains in eighth grade since 2003.

If students in New York made no gains on the national tests, why did state tests report spectacular progress every year? The people of the state deserve an honest answer.

Fortunately, there is new leadership in Albany. Merryl Tisch, the new chancellor of the Board of Regents, and David Steiner, the new state commissioner of education, have pledged to review the entire testing program. Surely they will determine how standards dropped so low that the public was regularly misinformed about student progress.

Now is the time for honesty, integrity and transparency.

Article.

“We cannot continue to accept that barely half of the country’s black and Hispanic students are graduating from high school, or that white children can read at levels far exceeding those of minority children,” Chancellor Klein said. “These facts translate to diminished life opportunities for millions of students who are being denied their proper access to the American Dream.”

The event, held at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, was part of the Department of Education’s “Closing the Achievement Gap” series. The series of forums is designed to engage educators, parents, and other members of the New York City community in a dialogue about how to improve achievement.

Klein and Sharpton also co-authored a Wall Street Journal editorial calling on President Obama to nurture “a bipartisan coalition that challenges the entrenched education establishment…. [and] demonstrate an unflagging commitment to ‘what works’ to dramatically boost academic achievement — rather than clinging to reforms that we ‘wish would work.’”

Sign us at 20/20 up for that bipartisan coalition!

A similar call during the election last year resulted in Klein and Sharpton convening the Education Equality Project.  On eve of President-elect Obama’s historic inauguration, the EEP will host an Martin Luther King Day education rally in at Cardozo High School in Washington, DC, this Monday, January 19.

Reverend Sharpton and Chancellor Klein will lead the rally and will be joined by other civil rights, government, and education leaders including Mayors Booker (Newark) and Johnson (Sacramento), Martin Luther King III, Governor Romer, US Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, Dr. Michael Lomax (President, United Negro College Fund), Geoffrey Canada (President and Chief Executive Officer for Harlem Children’s Zone), and Senator McCain.