“They want to close Freedom.”

The words made my insides cringe.

Close Freedom? Freedom cost too much to simply shut it down.

And yet that’s what Ronald Tomlinson, the PTA President of Freedom Academy, was reporting. After dropping from a “B” school in 2010 to an “F” one year later on the October 2011 School Progress Report, the city was threatening to shut down the Brooklyn school, despite a spike in high-risk transfer students along with a decline in necessary supports.

The Department of Education had issued a public “Report to the Community on the Performance of Freedom Academy High School (13K509),” available online here, and the DOE investigator who visited the school left the impression that a shutdown was inevitable.  When given the opportunity to meet with students to hear how the decision would impact its most vested stakeholders, the she reportedly declined, saying: “I don’t need to hear from the students.

Now the PTA was reaching out to 20/20.  Could we help empower students to tell their story and architect a turn around plan?

Mr. Tomlinson arranged a meeting with the principal and School Leadership Team the day before Thanksgiving.  A consensus quickly emerged: the SLT overwhelmingly shared the DOE’s commitment to improving student and school performance at Freedom Academy.  Our counsel: get the DOE’s attention by telling the Freedom story.  Then keep their attention by proposing a meaningful action plan sanctioned by DOE:

Action Plan #1: Developing a targeted action plan for the school that will focus support in areas where intensive assistance is required to improve student performance. The plan will be implemented over the course of the 2011-2012 school year with oversight from the DOE. The plan may include a wide variety of supports, such as:

• Leadership coaching;
• Professional development on instructional strategies for struggling students;
• Identifying grants aimed at specific needs of the school;
• Introducing new programs;
• Supporting the development of a smaller learning environment by decreasing incoming enrollment; and
• Staff and/or leadership changes.

In the ten days since that initial conversation, we have met with school administrators, teachers, student leaders, conducted two student assemblies, facilitated an assessment and preliminary planning time with the PTA, and initiated conversations with potential community partners. The students and teachers organized a first Freedom March which was reported in the media. Students launched a Facebook community, teachers designed a petition, and stakeholders have begun sharing their story through an intentional campaign.

It’s premature to predict an outcome, but hope has returned to Freedom.

Join the Fight for Freedom.  Visit the SOS Freedom blog for all the latest on the effort to save the school, sign their online petition, and like them on FB.

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

Mayor Bloomberg and NYC Schools Chancellor Joel Klein announced the results of the largest ever school satisfaction survey yesterday. More than 800,000 stakeholders, including students, parents, and teachers responded, a remarkable achievement. As the Dept. of Education noted, 800,000 people represents 1 in 10 New Yorkers, and over 200,000 more people than the entire populations of Boston, Washington DC, and Denver. But City Hall praised the survey results as evidence of dramatic improvements citywide, and exposes itself to criticism as a result.

Most misleading is the bold, italicized headline: “More than 90 Percent of Parents Satisfied with the Quality of Education their Children Received.” Deeper into the announcement, that number is significantly qualified, as only 40% of the eligible parents actually completed the survey. Ninety percent of the 40% who completed the survey is a lot less than 90% of parents overall.

I’m by no means a qualified statistician, but my introductory stats class taught that a scientifically selected random sampling would produce more reliable results than voluntary returns from every parent, student and teacher. Without reviewing the actual survey, it’s a fairly safe assumption that the response rates were significantly higher in well performing schools, where parents, students, and teachers have greater incentives to comply with school requests, than in chronically underperforming schools.

In fairness, school performance metrics have trended upwards the past few years — so much so that the NYC DOE received the Broad Prize for improvement last year.

Critics say the metrics have improved, at least in part, because of funny math that has fundamentally changed what the metrics measure and ignore entire student populations in some cases. For example, literacy metrics used to include ESL (English as Second Language) students’ test results, and now they don’t. Removing their scores artificially inflates the numbers; as a result touting any “improvements” by comparing those data sets is fundamentally misleading.

Another example: In the wake of No Child Left Behind, when schools were threatened with diminished funding after successive years of underperformance, the city began restructuring suspect schools. Specifically, they would take a building that housed a threatened school, “close” the poor performing school and reopen multiple smaller schools within the same building. Often these “new” schools had fundamentally the same students, teachers, and administration, plus an additional layer of bureaucracy to manage the new schools. But because they were technically new schools, their funding was safe as they had no history against which to hold them accountable.

All that said, Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein deserve credit for staking much of the legacy of his administration on the success, or lack thereof, of their education reform initiatives. The results remain mixed, but efforts to give voice to stakeholders — like this survey, flawed though it may have been — give us reason for hope.

20/20 Vision anyone?