Tag: New York City Department of Education


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A Considerable Legacy: Joel Klein


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Joel Klein wasn’t exactly the natural choice for chancellor of New York City’s gargantuan and stupendously dysfunctional traditional public school system when he got the job in 2002. After all,…

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Joel Klein wasn’t exactly the natural choice for chancellor of New York City’s gargantuan and stupendously dysfunctional traditional public school system when he got the job in 2002. After all, the former U.S. Assistant Attorney General was better-known for his successful antitrust case against Microsoft in the 1990s than for any forays into education. As it turned out, the school district — which was taken over by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg as one of the first major efforts to place school systems under mayoral control — needed someone who wasn’t fully ensconced in the  stale status quo of the traditional education establishment to set it on a course for the better.

Eight years later, as Klein steps down as head of the nation’s largest traditional public school system, one can say he has changed the district’s once-infamous culture of mediocrity, byzantine bureaucracy and shockingly banal corruption. Graduation rates for the district (based on eighth-grade enrollment) have increased from 56 percent for the Class of 2002 to 63 percent for the Class of 2008, according to Dropout Nation‘s analysis of federal and New York City data. Student achievement levels have progressed steadily even as New York State has revised its own state tests for greater rigor.  The district is still a work in progress; the city’s abysmally low graduation rates for black males (and the New York Post‘s report about the travails of Wayne Knowland (who graduated from Fannie Lou Hamer High School despite his functional illiteracy) shows that there is still more work to be done. But the city is still doing better for its kids than it did nearly a decade ago.

Meanwhile New York City has become the pioneer for concepts that are (sadly) still considered innovative for education. Its development of the ARIS system has given teachers and administrators a tool that can be used for identifying potential dropouts, improving instruction and fostering long-term connections between teachers and their students. The shutdown of the city’s worst dropout factories and their replacement with smaller high schools with new cultures and more-dynamic staff has also shown an alternative to the rather faulty model of school turnaround efforts being advocated by the Obama administration. And Klein’s relentless pursuit of teacher quality reform — including efforts to use student test data in evaluating newly-hired teachers (and keeping laggards from gaining near-lifetime employment through tenure), and the attempt last month to publicly release Value-Added performance data has helped galvanize school reformers and others around dealing with one of the most-crucial steps in stemming the nation’s dropout crisis.

But Klein’s tenure isn’t just notable for its results. It offers some lessons to school reformers everywhere: You can successfully overhaul a traditional school system — and take numerous tough steps — and still be amiable to allies and critics. Traditional districts can be top-notch authorizers of high-quality charter schools — and even play significant roles in fostering their development (and giving families escape hatches from the worst traditional public education offers). And he has proven that education should not be left to teachers, principals and traditional players alone. We will not revolutionize American public education until we create dynamic cultures that embrace the genius within all of our children.

Cathleen Black, who succeeds Klein as chancellor, will have to do as good a job as he has. She has no choice but to succeed. Our kids need her to follow upon Klein’s stellar work revamping the Big Apple’s school system.

Watch this Dropout Nation excerpt of Klein’s speech earlier this year about turning around New York City’s high schools


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What Race to the Top III Should Look Like


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As I have opined numerous times here and elsewhere, one of Race to the Top’s biggest flaws is that it isn’t ambitious enough. There aren’t enough players in education competing…

As I have opined numerous times here and elsewhere, one of Race to the Top’s biggest flaws is that it isn’t ambitious enough. There aren’t enough players in education competing for the $3.4 billion in remaining funding; it is only a nudge toward reform not a truly bold step; and it doesn’t take advantage of the clever competition approach that has succeeded so far in getting states to take on the reforms they should have been pursuing in the first place.

What are the five steps President Barack Obama and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan should undertake in future rounds? Here are some thoughts:

  • Allow school districts, charter school networks and grassroots organizations to compete in future rounds: Obama and Duncan have already said they want to allow districts to apply for Race to the Top funding. They should. Expanding the pool of Race to the Top applicants to include school districts—including reform-minded systems such as New York City and Los Angeles Unified—would force school districts to seriously change their own practices and restructure their relationships with teachers unions. Allowing districts, along with charter school organizations such as KIPP, grassroots activists and even PTAs, would also place pressure on states participating in the competition to embrace bolder reforms.
  • Increase the rewards for embracing reform: Temporary funding isn’t enough. School districts must also gain additional rewards from participating and winning funding. One possible reward: Allowing winning districts to become enterprise zones of sorts, freeing them from state laws governing collective bargaining agreements and teacher dismissals.
  • Parental engagement must factor into the equation: The fact that California’s Parent Trigger law, along with the expansion of charter schools, is the only tool for parental engagement emerging from Race to the Top is shameful. For the next round, the Department of Education should require applicants to enact policies and laws that place parents in their proper place as consumers and kings in education decision-making.
  • Use Race funding to scale up alternative teacher training programs: Teach For America and other alternative training programs have proven they can do as good job — and particularly, with TFA, even better — than university schools of education. But there aren’t enough of them to improve the quality of school district teacher corps. Encouraging districts and charter schools to work more-closely with alternative programs (and also focus on boosting the number of men and minorities in the teaching ranks)
  • Forget consensus: Contrary to proclamations from Jon Schnur and others, consensus among stakeholders is critical element of winning Race to the Top funding. It shouldn’t be. True leadership often involves breaking with those groups that refuse to move away from a crippling status quo. More importantly, school districts and state education leaders must take a more-assertive stance in their relationships with teachers unions, revamping an oft-servile relationship that yields little for students, schools and even individual teachers. Rewarding states such as Florida for taking aggressive reform measures — even if the state needs work on other elements of its application — is crucial to making Race to the Top a truly bold reform measure.

At this moment, Race to the Top is more of a nudge toward school reform that a bold leap. Considering the dropout crisis — and that 1.2 million children drop out every year into poverty and prison — nudges aren’t enough.

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Four Thoughts on Teacher Quality


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A few observations on improving teacher quality in the dropout nation: More reasons for focusing on improving teacher quality in urban school systems: As University of Pennsylvania researchers Richard Ingersoll…

A few observations on improving teacher quality in the dropout nation:

  • More reasons for focusing on improving teacher quality in urban school systems: As University of Pennsylvania researchers Richard Ingersoll and Lisa Merrill points out in Educational Leadership, 45 percent of teacher turnover takes place in just a quarter of public schools — mostly, the urban systems that help spur the dropout crisis. Certainly part of the problem is the environments in which those teachers must work — which, as Martin Haberman notes, are challenged by systemic bureaucratic decay and incompetence — and the fact that far too many teachers coming out of the nation’s university schools of education are ill-equipped to work in those schools. But as we have seen with layoffs that are occurring (or about to happen)  in New York City and elsewhere, as much of the problem lies with reverse seniority (or last hired-first fired) policies that make it difficult to retain young talented teachers. New York City, for example, will have to get rid of 13 percent of the 30,000 new teachers it has hired in the last decade.  Dealing with all of these issues is critical to improving teacher quality in urban schools.
  • Promoting their obsolescence? University schools of education often attempt to defend their woeful programs by arguing that alternative teacher training programs such as Teach For America are no more successful at training high-quality teachers. But you wonders if they realize that by making such a statement, they are also justifying the end of their existence. Given that aspiring teachers pay a high cost for attending ed schools — and attend TFA and other such programs for free — why wouldn’t they direct their attention away from ed schools? For school districts, especially urban systems plagued by low-quality teachers, TFA and other alternative preparation programs offer them sources of new high-quality teachers specially skilled for their needs.
  • Perhaps we shouldn’t let Baby Boomer teachers retire: As someone suggested at Reason‘s Hit and Run blog in response to my latest column in The American Spectator, it may be cheaper to make it difficult for teachers to retire. After all once a teacher retires, the costs don’t disappear; the costs are merely switched over to the pension system, which districts must pay into anyway. This wouldn’t exactly help children or improve teacher quality. But it would help alleviate the long-term costs of deals between districts, states and affiliates of the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers that have become too expensive for taxpayers to bear.
  • The next battleground in the teacher quality wars won’t be Colorado (where the battle is already being waged) or in Florida (where the tenure reform bill SB 6 was vetoed by the pusillanimous and ambition-oriented Charlie Crist), but in Texas, where the National Council on Teacher Quality took aim at the quality of the state’s ed schools with a recent report. With more than 30 school superintendents backing NCTQ’s conclusions, expect one of the gubernatorial candidates to eventually propose reforms that go beyond the changes already enacted in the Lone Star State and in Indiana last year. Tying student test score data to teacher performance evaluations would also go a long way towards measuring the quality of ed school curricula and shutting down schools that don’t deserve to exist.

Update: Speaking of my point about ed schools and TFA, NYU Professor Jonathan Zimmerman used the traditional argument in his (admittedly, moderately pro-TFA piece) in his Los Angeles Times op-ed.

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Read: What is NAEP? Edition


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What is happening today in the dropout nation — or what has been happening while your editor has been on the road: Amid last week’s woeful responses to the reading…

The senseless deaths of youth must stop. It's just that simple.

What is happening today in the dropout nation — or what has been happening while your editor has been on the road:

  1. Amid last week’s woeful responses to the reading test results from the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress, Education Sector’s Chad Alderman offers a different perspective. He notes that if you break down the results — and realize that the underlying sampling now includes more blacks and Latinos (in order to better represent the nation), one will see some real progress. Black 4th-graders, for example, scored 23 points higher than fellow students in the same grade four years ago. This is all good. But a more-longitudinal assessment — showing progress among students between being in 4th and 8th grade — would certainly offer more perspective on the nation’s academic progress.
  2. Meanwhile the Bluegrass Institute’s Richard Innes notes that Kentucky’s NAEP performance may seem better than that of California, but appearances are deceiving. Especially when Kentucky’s education officials suppresses 46 percent of its English Language Learners and special ed students. Declares Innes: “only two other states in the entire country played the exclusion game harder.”
  3. Those two states, according to Dropout Nation‘s analysis: Maryland and Tennessee , which respectively excluded 57 percent and 55 percent of their ELL and Special Ed students. Which may explain why Maryland, in particular, is among the most-stubborn in resisting school reform efforts (and always seem to be the best-performing state in the union). New Jersey, which excludes 42 percent of ELL and Special Ed students, is no better, and neither is Delaware (it excludes 42 percent of ELL and Special Ed students); North Dakota excluded 44 percent of students while Ohio excluded 40 percent of its ELL and Special Ed students from NAEP. Certainly this dishonor role deserves much in the way of scorn; it also offers more ammunition to opponents of Common Core State Standards and other attempts at putting the nation under one national curricula standard.
  4. Speaking of scorn, two more deserving of it are the American Federation of Teachers’ New York City local and the Big Apple branch of the NAACP. They succeeded in convincing one judge to halt the shutdown of 19 of the city’s worst-performing schools and their replacement with higher-quality options. As Chancellor Joel Klein rightly notes: ““My view is that you don’t send students to failing schools, schools that can’t provide them what they need. The sad thing is that the union would bring a lawsuit to resign kids to failing schools in order to save jobs. And ultimately, that is what this is about.” Exactly. Shame on the two groups and those who support their position.
  5. Tom Vander Ark offers some thoughts on how to develop high-quality urban schools through a portfolio approach.
  6. Meanwhile in Chicago, the Black Star Project is looking for 1,000 men to help mentor the city’s children and keep them out of violence. Given that 143 Chicago Public School students have been shot during the 2009-2010 school year (and 20 slain), the need for adults to take to the schools and take action is greater than ever. Do your part.

Check out this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, this time a part two of my focus steps needed to improve teacher quality. More will be coming down the pipe later this week.

And finally, to start off your Monday, here’s a little Tower of Power. Enjoy.


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The Dropout Nation Podcast: The Next Steps for Race to the Top


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On this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, I look at the efforts by the Obama administration to bring districts into Race to the Top and offer some steps that could make…

Dropout Nation Podcast Cover

On this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, I look at the efforts by the Obama administration to bring districts into Race to the Top and offer some steps that could make the reform work even more effective. This includes turning school districts pioneering school reform efforts into enterprise zones of sorts, freeing them from restrictive state laws and collective bargaining rules.

You can listen to the Podcast at RiShawn Biddle’s radio page or download directly to your iPod or MP3 player. Also, subscribe to the podcast series. It is also available on iTunes, Blubrry, Podcast Alley, the Education Podcast Network and Zune Marketplace.

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The Dropout Nation Podcast: Why Civil Rights Activists Should Embrace School Reform


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On this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, I explain why the NAACP, the Civil Rights Project at UCLA and New Jersey’s Education Law Center should abandon their tried and truly counterproductive…

Dropout Nation Podcast Cover

On this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, I explain why the NAACP, the Civil Rights Project at UCLA and New Jersey’s Education Law Center should abandon their tried and truly counterproductive approaches to improving equity and equality for the nation’s poor black and Latino children and embrace approaches offered by the school reform movement.

You can listen to the Podcast at RiShawn Biddle’s radio page or download directly to your iPod or MP3 player. Also, subscribe to get the podcasts every week. It is also available on iTunes, Blubrry, Podcast Alley and the Education Podcast Network.

Update: You can now download the Podcast from Zune Marketplace.

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