THE ATLANTIC

MAKING SCHOOLS POOR: THE CALIFORNIA RULING

N.Y. REVIEW OF BOOKS, DIANE RAVITCH

HOW CHARTER SCHOOLS HIJACKED DEBLASIO

Bryan Smith/ZUMA Press/Corbis 

DIANE RAVITCH, NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

 In his speech at Riverside Church last Sunday, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio tried to end weeks of attacks on his schools policies by striking a conciliatory tone toward the city’s privately managed charter schools....De Blasio decided he could not win this war. The other side had too much money and proved it could drive down his poll numbers. He said that the charter schools could help public schools, but in reality, charter schools could learn a few things from the public schools, like how to teach children with disabilities and second-language English learners. Contrary to popular myth, the charter schools are more racially segregated than public schools and have performed no better than the public schools on the most recent state tests. But what they have behind them is vast resources, and de Blasio capitulated. 

 The underlying question remains: How did a privately managed school franchise that serves a tiny portion of New York’s students manage to hijack the education reforms of a new mayor with a huge popular mandate?
When Bill de Blasio was running for mayor of New York City last year, he set out an ambitious plan for reforming education. After twelve years of Mayor Bloomberg’s obsession with testing, the public was eager for a fresh approach, one that was focused more on helping students than on closing their schools. Bloomberg’s haughty indifference to public opinion did not endear him to parents. He displaced tens of thousands of students from their public schools, with never a show of remorse, as he opened hundreds of new small public schools and nearly two hundred privately managed charter schools. Bloomberg’s preference for small public schools came at a price; they were unable to offer the full array of advanced courses in math and science, electives, and the choice of foreign languages that larger schools offered. He appointed three chancellors who were not professional educators, one of whom—a publisher—lasted all of ninety days before he removed her. He showed preferential treatment to the hundreds of small public schools that his administration opened, granting them extra resources and allowing them to exclude the neediest students. And he boasted about the explosion of privately managed charter schools, which now enroll 6 percent of the city’s children, on whose boards sit titans of Wall Street, the hedge fund managers who belong to Bloomberg’s social set.

 During the campaign, de Blasio wanted to change the subject from Bloomberg’s boutique ideas to a larger vision. He wanted to address the needs of the vast majority of New York City’s 1.1 million students. His big idea was to provide universal access to pre-kindergarten, a research-based program that would give a better start to the city’s neediest children, and after-school activities for adolescents in middle schools. During the campaign, the public widely supported de Blasio’s plans, while Bloomberg’s education policies usually registered about 25 percent approval.

 

 When asked about charter schools, de Blasio made clear that he felt they had gotten far too much media attention, considering that they serve a small fraction of the population. He pledged that he would charge them rent for use of public space and would not allow any more co-locations—the practice of inserting a new school into a building with an existing school—without community hearings. Co-location happens when a charter school is offered shared space in a building with a public school; it also happens when large schools are divided into four, five, or six small schools operating under the same roof. Public school parents strongly oppose these arrangements. The host public school is often forced to give up its art room, its dance room, its computer room, every room used for any purpose other than classroom instruction, to make way for the unwelcome newcomer. The co-located schools must negotiate over access to the library, the auditorium, the playground. Co-locations cause overcrowding, as well as a competition for space and resources among students and multiple administrators within a single building.

 De Blasio’s skeptical campaign comments about charter schools unleashed the wrath of New York City’s most outspoken charter school leader, Eva Moskowitz. Her Success Academy chain of twenty-two charter schools now enrolls 6,700 students. Because she doesn’t have to follow the public school regulations forbidding political activities on school time, she can turn her students and their parents out on short notice for political demonstrations and legislative hearings, dressed in matching t-shirts, carrying posters and banners....


After coming to office, the newly elected mayor focused his energies on trying to persuade Governor Cuomo and the legislature to enact a new tax in New York City to pay for his goal of universal pre-kindergarten. De Blasio called for a modest tax increase for those who earn over $500,000 a year. It would cost each of them, he said, about $1,000 a year, or less than a cup of soy latte every day at Starbucks. The billionaires were not amused. Nor was Governor Cuomo, who wants to be perceived as a conservative, pro-business Democrat who does not raise taxes.
While de Blasio was pressing for universal pre-kindergarten (or UPK, as it is known), he was faced with a decision about how to handle the dozens of proposals for co-locations and new charter schools that had been hurriedly endorsed by Bloomberg’s Panel on Education Policy in the last months of his term. The panel had approved forty-five new schools, seventeen of which were charters.....


The three charter proposals the mayor rejected were part of the Moskowitz charter chain. She had asked for eight new schools—more than any other single applicant—and de Blasio gave her five. Most school leaders would be thrilled to win five new schools. But Eva cried foul and publicly accused the mayor of “evicting” her students. This was despite the fact that two of the three rejected schools did not exist, so no students were affected. The third was Moskowitz’s request to expand her elementary school that was already co-located with P.S. 149 in Harlem; Moskowitz wanted to add a middle school. But adding a middle school meant kicking out students with disabilities in P.S. 149, which de Blasio refused to do.
Moskowitz was ready. Her friends on Wall Street and the far-right Walton Family Foundation paid out nearly $5 million for television ads attacking Mayor de Blasio as a heartless, ruthless, possibly racist politician who was at war with charter schools and their needy students. The ads showed the faces of adorable children, all of them being kicked out of “their” school by a vengeful Mayor who hates charter schools. The ads never acknowledged that the Mayor had approved fourteen out of seventeen charter proposals. Moskowitz, whose charter chain pays more than $500,000 a year for the services of for SDK Knickerbocker, a high-powered D.C. public relations firm, also made the rounds of television talk shows, where she got free air time to lash out at de Blasio for allegedly “evicting” her needy students from “the highest performing school in New York state.” Meanwhile, the Murdoch-owned media—not only The New York Post but also The Wall Street Journal and Fox News—kept up a steady barrage of hostile stories echoing Moskowitz’s claims against de Blasio.

 None of the talking heads checked the facts. None knew or acknowledged that approving the middle school Moskowitz was denied would have meant the actual eviction of the most needy students of all—students at P.S. 149 with special needs. Or that her own existing school in that building has no students with high levels of disability, in contrast with Harlem’s neighborhood public schools, where such students account for 14 percent of the school population. Or that Moskowitz’s school has half as many students who are English learners as the neighborhood public schools. Or that her school is not the highest performing school in the state or the city. (In English language arts, Moskowitz’s Harlem Success Academy 4 ranked eighty-first in the city, with 55 percent of its students passing the latest state test; in math, the school was thirteenth in the city, with 83 percent of students passing the state test.) Or that nearly half her students leave within a few years. Or that her schools spend $2,000 more per student than the neighboring schools. Or that Moskowitz is paid $485,000 a year to oversee fewer than seven thousand students.

 ll of these facts were known by the de Blasio administration. But the new mayor seemed helpless. Somehow this man who had run a brilliant campaign to change the city was left speechless by the charter lobby. His poll numbers took a steep dive. He never called a press conference to explain his criteria for approving or rejecting charter schools, each of which made sense: for example, he would not approve a charter if it displaced students with disabilities; if it placed elementary students in a building with high school students; if it required heavy construction; or if it had fewer than 250 students.....

 


Meanwhile, Moskowitz began using political leverage as well. On the same day that de Blasio organized a rally in Albany on behalf of raising taxes on the rich to pay for UPK, she closed her schools and bused thousands of students and parents to Albany for a pro-charter school rally. Governor Andrew Cuomo stood by her side, pledging to “save” charter schools and to protect them from paying rent; his ardent devotion to the charter cause may have been abetted by the $800,000 in campaign contributions he received from charter advocates in the financial industry.
For its part, the Republican-dominated State Senate demonstrated loyalty to Eva Moskowitz by passing a budget resolution with language forbidding the mayor from displacing a co-located charter school and forbidding him from charging rent to a private corporation (a charter school) using public space. Not only had Moskwitz cleverly portrayed herself as a victim; she had managed to make her narrow cause more important than universal pre-kindergarten and after-school programs for teens....


But Moskowitz unknowingly taught the public a different lesson, which may be important in the future. Her schools do not operate like public schools. They are owned and managed by a private corporation with a government contract. They make their own rules. They choose their own students, kick out those they don’t want, and answer to no one. No public school would be allowed to close its doors and take its students on a political march across the Brooklyn Bridge or bus them to Albany to lobby the statehouse; the principal would be fired instantly.
Consider the court battle initiated by Moskowitz that played out in the midst of the confrontation with the mayor: a judge in New York’s State Supreme Court ruled, as Moskowitz hoped, that the State Comptroller has no power to audit her schools, because they are “not a unit of the state.” Put another way, her schools are not public schools. And, as the public begins to understand what that means, that lesson may ultimately be the undoing of this stealth effort to transfer public funds to support a small number of privately managed schools, amply endowed by billionaires and foundations, that refuse to pay rent and are devoted to competing with, not helping, the general school population.
What will it mean for New York City to have two school systems, both supported with public money, with one free to choose and remove its students and the other required to accept all students? A recent study found that New York State has the most segregated schools in the nation, and that the charters are even more segregated than the public schools....

Like A Sneak In the Night, Cuomo Played Pivotal Role in Charter School Push

 



Photo by Nathaniel Brooks

 N.Y. TIMES

It was a frigid February day in Albany, and leaders of New York City’s charter school movement were anxious. They had gone to the capital to court lawmakers, but despite a boisterous showing by parents, there seemed to be little clarity about the future of their schools.

Then, as they were preparing to head home, an intermediary called with a message: Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo wanted to meet.

To their surprise, Mr. Cuomo offered them 45 minutes of his time, in a private conference room. He told them he shared their concern about Mayor Bill de Blasio’s ambivalence toward charter schools and offered to help, according to a person who attended but did not want to be identified as having compromised the privacy of the meeting.

 

In the days that followed, the governor’s interest seemed to intensify. He instructed charter advocates to organize a large rally in Albany, the person said. The advocates delivered, bringing thousands of parents and students, many of them black, Hispanic, and from low-income communities, to the capital in early March, and eclipsing a pivotal rally for Mr. de Blasio taking place at virtually the same time.

 


Mayor Bill de Blasio talked about prekindergarten at another rally that same day, with Sheldon Silver, the Assembly speaker. Credit Mike Groll/Associated Press 

The moment proved to be a turning point, laying the groundwork for a deal reached last weekend that gave New York City charter schools some of the most sweeping protections in the nation, including a right to space inside public buildings. And interviews with state and city officials as well as education leaders make it clear that far from being a mere cheerleader, the governor was a potent force at every turn, seizing on missteps by the mayor, a fellow Democrat, and driving legislation from start to finish.

As the governor worked to solidify support in Albany, his efforts were amplified by an aggressive public relations and lobbying effort financed by a group of charter school backers from the worlds of hedge funds and Wall Street, some of whom have also poured substantial sums into Mr. Cuomo’s campaign (he is up for re-election this fall). The push included a campaign-style advertising blitz that cost more than $5 million and attacked Mr. de Blasio for denying space to three charter schools.

 

Eva S. Moskowitz, left, founder of Success Academy Charter Schools, led a rally Tuesday in Albany, while Mayor Bill de Blasio, who differs with her, led a separate demonstration. Credit Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times        

 

Charter school leaders had built a formidable political operation over the course of a decade, hiring top-flight lobbyists and consultants. They had an ally in former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, but Mr. de Blasio promised a sea change, saying that he would charge rent to charter schools that had large financial backing, and that he would temporarily forbid new schools from using public space.

In public, the mayor largely ignored the outcry. At his prekindergarten rally, before a smaller crowd at the Washington Avenue Armory in Albany, Mr. de Blasio spoke about the value of early education. Not far away, a much larger crowd of charter school supporters was gathered on the steps of the State Capitol. In an act that his aides later said was spontaneous, Mr. Cuomo joined the mass of parents and students.

“You are not alone,” he told the roaring crowd. “We will save charter schools.”

Charter schools — privately run, but with taxpayers paying the tuition — have become popular nationwide among Democratic and Republican leaders, as well as with tens of thousands of low-income parents who submit to kindergarten lotteries every year. They are also popular among Wall Street leaders who see charter schools, which often do not have unions to bargain with and have relative freedom from regulation, as a successful alternative to traditional public schools. But many Democrats, including the mayor, have sought to slow their spread, contending that they are taking dollars and space from other public schools. Pro-charter advocacy groups, including Families for Excellent Schools, StudentsFirstNY and the New York City Charter School Center, met regularly to plot strategy. Increasingly, they turned to state officials.

 

A lot was riding on the debate for Mr. Cuomo. A number of his largest financial backers, some of the biggest names on Wall Street, also happened to be staunch supporters of charter schools. According to campaign finance records, Mr. Cuomo’s re-election campaign has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from charter school supporters, including William A. Ackman, Carl C. Icahn, Bruce Kovner and Daniel Nir.

Kenneth G. Langone, a founder of Home Depot who sits on a prominent charter school board, gave $50,000 to Mr. Cuomo’s campaign last year. He said that when the governor asked him to lead a group of Republicans supporting his re-election, he agreed because of Mr. Cuomo’s support for charter schools.

“Every time I am with the governor, I talk to him about charter schools,” Mr. Langone said in an interview. “He gets it.”

It was not until late February, shortly before the rally on the steps of the Capitol, that a full-fledged battle broke out.

Mr. de Blasio, reviewing plans for school space, had decided to deny it to three schools run by Success Academy Charter Schools, a high-performing network founded by Eva S. Moskowitz, a former city councilwoman. While he allowed the vast majority of charter schools to continue using public space, many supporters of Ms. Moskowitz’s schools were outraged.

Daniel S. Loeb, the founder of the hedge fund Third Point and the chairman of Success Academy’s board, began leaning on Wall Street executives for donations. Later this month, he will host a fund-raiser for Success Academy at Cipriani in Midtown Manhattan; tickets run as high as $100,000 a table.

The governor and his staff worked with Republicans in the State Senate and others to come up with a package of protections for charter schools in the city. He was already said to be displeased with Mr. de Blasio for rejecting his compromise offer on prekindergarten funding.

Mr. Cuomo did not mention charter schools in his State of the State address, but now, with Mr. de Blasio under assault and charter advocates behind him, he pushed for a sweeping deal.

The proposed legislation included provisions to reverse Mr. de Blasio’s decisions on school space, and it required the city to provide public classrooms to new and expanding charter schools or contribute to the cost of renting private buildings. It also suggested increasing per-pupil funding for charter schools and allowing them to operate prekindergarten programs.

At the same time, Mr. de Blasio was struggling to move beyond the controversy. He began reaching out to supporters of charter schools on Wall Street. And at the urging of Hillary Rodham Clinton, former President Bill Clinton phoned Mr. de Blasio to offer his advice.

In Albany, the forces that typically mobilized against charter schools were unusually subdued. The teachers’ unions and Sheldon Silver, the State Assembly speaker, were focused on winning more school aid, and Mr. de Blasio was in the midst of recalibrating his message, leaving little incentive for charter opponents to speak out.

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State Budget Deal Reached; $300 Million for New York City Pre-K (W/No Add'l Taxes)

Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times

N.Y. TIMES

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and legislative leaders announced on Saturday an agreement on a state budget that would provide $300 million for prekindergarten in New York City, but also undercuts other educational policies of Mayor Bill de Blasio, who has championed prekindergarten while trying to slow the spread of charter schools.

At the same time, lawmakers rejected most of the governor’s proposals to strengthen New York’s campaign fund-raising laws. But surprisingly, Mr. Cuomo said that if concessions that he had received passed with the budget, he would disband a powerful commission he had assembled to investigate corruption in the state’s scandal-plagued government.

Reporters with Dean G. Skelos, Republican leader of the State Senate, on his way to a budget meeting on Friday. Lawmakers rushed to finish the budget before the next fiscal year begins. Credit Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times 

 

 The agreement also includes several tax changes, including a new property tax rebate for homeowners outside of New York City and a higher threshold for when estate taxes are owed. Lawmakers also moved to reduce the burden on students from tests aligned with the more rigorous set of curricular standards known as the Common Core. 

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The agreement on prekindergarten offered a conclusion to months of high-stakes maneuvering between Mr. Cuomo and Mr. de Blasio, who are both Democrats. The governor rejected the mayor’s efforts to pass a tax increase on high-earning city residents, but in the end, Mr. de Blasio emerged with most of the money he says he needs to expand preschool.

The mayor had sought about $340 million for the prekindergarten expansion, which would offer free full-day classes to 4-year-olds; the budget pact allocates that much money for the entire state, with most of it designated for the city. At a news conference in the Rockaways in Queens on Saturday, Mr. de Blasio called the budget agreement “an extraordinary and historic step forward for New York City.” 

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New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is shown with Senator Charles Schumer on Saturday, March 29, 2014 in Queens. (Credit: Howard Schnapp)

 While Mr. de Blasio expressed happiness over the prekindergarten financing, the budget also provided a major victory for charter schools, many aspects of which the mayor has long criticized.

Most significantly, the legislation would require the city to find space for charter schools inside public school buildings or pay much of the cost to house them in private space. The legislation would also prohibit the city from charging rent to charter schools, an idea Mr. de Blasio had championed as a candidate for mayor.

 Mr. de Blasio had resisted the idea that he should be required to accommodate charter schools, which are publicly financed but are typically managed by nonprofit groups. While he approved the majority of requests for space from charter schools in February, he canceled plans for three schools affiliated with a high-performing network known as Success Academy Charter Schools, arguing that they would crowd out traditional school programs.

But advocates of charter schools organized a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign and flooded the capital with protesters.

 With his popularity sagging in polls, Mr. de Blasio worked aggressively to ease tensions with charter school advocates. But his efforts came too late; Mr. Cuomo and Republicans in the State Senate were already working in private to provide a lifeline to charter schools, seizing on what they saw as the mayor’s political weakness.

Under the budget agreement, charter schools would receive more money per student. The schools, previously barred from operating early education programs, would also be eligible for grants for prekindergarten.

 Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers, the union of the city’s teachers, said the proposed changes amounted to favoritism for charter schools at the expense of students in traditional public schools.

Charter schools in New York City will now enjoy some of the greatest protections in the country. And Mr. de Blasio’s control of city schools was unmistakably questioned, more than a decade after the state granted his predecessor, Michael R. Bloomberg, authority over education.

“This is a land grab, a power grab,” said Diane Ravitch, an education historian who endorsed Mr. de Blasio during his campaign. “They loved mayoral control when it was Mayor Bloomberg, but now it’s a progressive mayor, and they’re gutting it.”

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 In addition to the rebates for homeowners outside of New York City, the budget includes a modest tax credit for some homeowners and renters in all five boroughs. It also reduces the state’s corporate income tax rate, overhauls how the state taxes the banking industry and decreases taxes for manufacturers.

 And Mr. Cuomo and Mr. de Blasio managed to settle their latest dispute, which emerged only in the past week. The governor agreed to change budget language that city officials said would have hindered their efforts to start a rent-subsidy program to help homeless families stay out of shelters.

EDUCATION: The Fatal Flaw of the Common Core Standards

DIANE RAVITCH, HUFFINGTON POST

Cat in Albany Is Outfoxing New York City’s Mouse

MICHAEL SMITH, N.Y. TIMES

Maybe the problem was with the metaphor.

Mayor Bill de Blasio took office and talked “progressive,” with ambitious plans for an income tax on the wealthy and an increase in the minimum wage. He rallied unions and activists and parents, and the sense was of a dog howling, and putting on notice the bigger dog in Albany.

Two months later, it turns out that the more apt metaphor was of cat-and-mouse.

Mr. de Blasio has taken the role of the impulsive mouse, demanding this cheese and that, and not quite knowing how to end his game. And Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has taken the role of the big cat who can treat the mouse kindly — and, with a whack, send it tumbling back into its hole.

Evidence of the mayor’s diminished state came on Tuesday, when he took his crusade for a tax to fund universal prekindergarten to an armory in Albany a few blocks north of the Capitol. The turnout was not much to boast of, and it was made up mostly of union members who were in town to lobby for various causes.

 

A far more boisterous and photogenic rally took place at the same hour on the snow-covered steps of the Capitol, where Mr. Cuomo spoke before Eva S. Moskowitz and her fellow charter school crusaders.

Ms. Moskowitz is the founder of the Success Academy charter chain.

Those at the rally, mostly black and Latino families who rolled into Albany on bus after bus, had been stoked to a fury by the mayor’s decisions to freeze the expansion of charters into public school buildings and pull back a $210 million pot of money to build new charter schools. Mr. de Blasio also vowed to make the better financed charter schools pay rent for their use of public schools.

Alfred Giancarli for New York Daily News                                                                                                                      Eva Moskowitz will continue to fight for her Success Academy network — even if it means taking the mayor to court.

Although her schools are quite successful judged by the metrics, Ms. Moskowitz does not strike a naturally sympathetic figure. She served on the City Council, and collegial politics remained a dance whose footwork eluded her. She was smart and wearyingly relentless, and flaunted her connections to the previous mayor. She has made no secret of her desire to push the teachers’ union into New York Harbor.

Mr. de Blasio matched her disdain with his own, making a piñata of her during his mayoral campaign. He decided last week to let most plans for charter expansion go forward — save for three schools run by Ms. Moskowitz. As a result, many dozens of children are without schools for next fall.

 

 Credit is due the mayor. With this decision, he succeeded at the devilishly difficult task of making a martyr of Ms. Moskowitz.

And that led Monday to this scene: Seven thousand charter families standing in 18-degree weather, holding signs reading “De Blasio: No Roll Backs” and chanting: “Charters! Work!”

“Our school is safe, my son is learning, and I have no worries,” one of the parents, Ebony Judge, said in a tone that suggested she took none of this for granted.

“I voted for de Blasio,” she added. “I made a mistake.”

 That is the sound of a mayoral education message gone badly awry.

Then Governor Cuomo came bounding down the Capitol steps. “Education is not about the districts and not about the pensions and not about the unions and not about the lobbyists,” he said to loud cheers. “Education is about the students, and the students come first.”

Mr. Cuomo’s staff says his appearance was spontaneous. As his understanding of political power is exquisite, it feels wise to bet otherwise. In early January, he punched defensively as the mayor began his prekindergarten offensive. Then the governor doubled down on his own plan to pay for statewide prekindergarten out of a budget surplus that may or may not exist.

Messages from upstate mayors began to reach reporters, hailing the governor’s plan. And Mr. Cuomo began to retail his own tale of two states, with New York City in the plutocrat’s seat.

The end game is not difficult to discern. The governor could pump a little more money into his proposal, and the mayor could declare victory. Or not. “Power drains away as you get diminished,” a rather senior state official noted. “It’s not enough to be on the side of the angels.”

Then Mr. de Blasio faces his next challenge. Can he ramp up a citywide prekindergarten program? His governance muscle remains untested.

Better Colleges Failing to Lure Talented Poor

NY TIMES

Most low-income students who have top test scores and grades do not even apply to the nation’s best colleges, according to a new analysis of every high school student who took the SAT in a recent year.

The pattern contributes to widening economic inequality and low levels of mobility in this country, economists say, because college graduates earn so much more on average than nongraduates do. Low-income students who excel in high school often do not graduate from the less selective colleges they attend.

Only 34 percent of high-achieving high school seniors in the bottom fourth of income distribution attended any one of the country’s 238 most selective colleges, according to the analysis, conducted by Caroline M. Hoxby of Stanford and Christopher Avery of Harvard, two longtime education researchers. Among top students in the highest income quartile, that figure was 78 percent.

The findings underscore that elite public and private colleges, despite a stated desire to recruit an economically diverse group of students, have largely failed to do so.

 

Many top low-income students instead attend community colleges or four-year institutions closer to their homes, the study found. The students often are unaware of the amount of financial aid available or simply do not consider a top college because they have never met someone who attended one, according to the study’s authors, other experts and high school guidance counselors.

“A lot of low-income and middle-income students have the inclination to stay local, at known colleges, which is understandable when you think about it,” said George Moran, a guidance counselor at Central Magnet High School in Bridgeport, Conn. “They didn’t have any other examples, any models — who’s ever heard of Bowdoin College?”

Whatever the reasons, the choice frequently has major consequences. The colleges that most low-income students attend have fewer resources and lower graduation rates than selective colleges, and many students who attend a local college do not graduate. Those who do graduate can miss out on the career opportunities that top colleges offer.

 

The new study is beginning to receive attention among scholars and college officials because it is more comprehensive than other research on college choices. The study suggests that the problems, and the opportunities, for low-income students are larger than previously thought.

“It’s pretty close to unimpeachable — they’re drawing on a national sample,” said Tom Parker, the dean of admissions at Amherst College, which has aggressively recruited poor and middle-class students in recent years. That so many high-achieving, lower-income students exist “is a very important realization,” Mr. Parker said, and he suggested that colleges should become more creative in persuading them to apply.

Top low-income students in the nation’s 15 largest metropolitan areas do often apply to selective colleges, according to the study, which was based on test scores, self-reported data, and census and other data for the high school class of 2008. But such students from smaller metropolitan areas — like Bridgeport; Memphis; Sacramento; Toledo, Ohio; and Tulsa, Okla. — and rural areas typically do not.

These students, Ms. Hoxby said, “lack exposure to people who say there is a difference among colleges.”

 

 

Elite colleges may soon face more pressure to recruit poor and middle-class students, if the Supreme Court restricts race-based affirmative action. A ruling in the case, involving the University of Texas, is expected sometime before late June.

Colleges currently give little or no advantage in the admissions process to low-income students, compared with more affluent students of the same race, other research has found. A broad ruling against the University of Texas affirmative action program could cause colleges to take into account various socioeconomic measures, including income, neighborhood and family composition. Such a step would require an increase in these colleges’ financial aid spending but would help them enroll significant numbers of minority students.

Among high-achieving, low-income students, 6 percent were black, 8 percent Latino, 15 percent Asian-American and 69 percent white, the study found.

“If there are changes to how we define diversity,” said Greg W. Roberts, the dean of admission at the University of Virginia, referring to the court case, “then I expect schools will really work hard at identifying low-income students.”

 

Ms. Hoxby and Mr. Avery, both economists, compared the current approach of colleges to looking under a streetlight for a lost key. The institutions continue to focus their recruiting efforts on a small subset of high schools in cities like Boston, New York and Los Angeles that have strong low-income students.

The researchers defined high-achieving students as those very likely to gain admission to a selective college, which translated into roughly the top 4 percent nationwide. Students needed to have at least an A-minus average and a score in the top 10 percent among students who took the SAT or the ACT.

Of these high achievers, 34 percent came from families in the top fourth of earners, 27 percent from the second fourth, 22 percent from the third fourth and 17 percent from the bottom fourth. (The researchers based the income cutoffs on the population of families with a high school senior living at home, with $41,472 being the dividing line for the bottom quartile and $120,776 for the top.)

 

On average, private colleges and top state universities are substantially more expensive than community colleges, even with financial aid. But some colleges, especially the most selective, offer enough aid to close or eliminate the gap for low-income students.

If they make it to top colleges, high-achieving, low-income students tend to thrive there, the paper found. Based on the most recent data, 89 percent of such students at selective colleges had graduated or were on pace to do so, compared with only 50 percent of top low-income students at nonselective colleges.

 

Read more at NY TIMES

DEPT OF ED AND BLOOMBERG HOLD SCHOOL CHILDREN HOSTAGE

NY REVIEW OF BOOKS       Diane Ravitch

For weeks, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the United Federation of Teachers have been battling over the issue of teacher evaluation. Governor Andrew Cuomo set a deadline for them to reach an agreement, but they failed to do so, potentially costing the city schools hundreds of millions of dollars. The state education commissioner, John King, jumped into the fray by threatening to withhold over a billion dollars in state and federal aid if there was no settlement between the parties. Now, Governor Cuomo says that he may intervene and take charge of the stalemated negotiations.
What’s going on here? Why can’t the mayor and the union reach an agreement? Why does Commissioner King intend to punish the city’s children if the grown-ups don’t agree?
The imbroglio began with the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program. Immediately after Barack Obama’s inauguration in January 2009, with the economy in free fall, Congress passed the huge economic stimulus package, which included $100 billion to aid schools: $95 billion to be disbursed to states to avoid massive layoffs of teachers and the remaining $5 billion to be given to the US Department of Education to promote education reforms.

The new Secretary of Education Arne Duncan huddled with his advisors and decided to create the so-called Race to the Top, a competition among states for the new funds. Instead of asking states to come up with their own best ideas for education reform, Duncan laid out a laundry list of policies states must put in place to be eligible to win millions of dollars. Among them was a requirement that state governments base teacher evaluations to a significant degree on the test scores of their students. The assumption was that good teachers produce higher test scores every year, while ineffective teachers do not.
In a time of fiscal stringency, New York, like almost every other state, wanted a share of the federal windfall. New York promptly repealed a law that explicitly prohibited using test courses to assess teacher performance. New York applied for Race to the Top funds and was a finalist. In order to win, the state needed the cooperation of the teachers union. Michael Mulgrew, head of the union, joined city and state officials in applying for the funding. In return, the union received a promise that test scores would count for no more than 20 percent of any teacher’s evaluation. The state won $700 million, and was expected to do what Secretary Duncan wanted: evaluate teachers by test scores, open more charter schools, adopt “college-and-career ready” standards, and undertake a variety of other measures intended to produce rewards for successful schools and punishment for schools with low scores.
Implementation of these measures has been slow. Governor Cuomo jumped into the act by demanding that test scores count for 40 percent of teachers’ evaluations, not 20 percent. (The federal government did not set a specific percentage; the most conservative states have made it as high as 50 percent.)

The New York State Regents hired a new state commissioner, John King, who has only a few years of experience as a teacher or administrator, gained in the charter sector. King is an accountability hawk who has pressed hard to get a top-down, test-based system in place quickly. He pressed so hard and moved so quickly, brooking no dissent, that more than a third of the principals in the state signed a petition opposing the state’s new—and itself untested—evaluation system.
Despite their qualms, most school districts reached agreements with their local unions, but New York City did not. Mayor Bloomberg believes that teachers can be measured by the rise or fall of their students’ test scores. He believes it so ardently that last year he released the names and rankings of 18,000 teachers to the media. The information was released in response to a Freedom of Information lawsuit filed by the New York Post. Although the city had promised the union that it would fight such a request, it did not, and the teachers’ names were made public.
The list contained many inaccuracies. The city admitted that the margin of error in the rankings was so large that the numbers were essentially meaningless. Bill Gates published an opinion piece in The New York Times opposing the public release of teachers’ names and rankings. Governor Cuomo agreed. Only Mayor Bloomberg remains adamant that “the public has a right to know,” even if the rankings are inaccurate and needlessly humiliating.



This is the background for today’s bad blood between the mayor and the union. But there is more to it than a personal vendetta. The recent negotiations collapsed because the union wanted the agreement to have a one-year sunset clause, at which time the process would be reviewed and fine-tuned. Most districts in the state have done this. Mayor Bloomberg objected to the sunset, fearing that it would make the agreement moot. He has a point. The process might take three to five years to show results, for good or ill.
Many researchers and testing experts have cautioned that evaluating teachers by the test scores of their students—called value-added assessment—is fraught with problems. Linda Darling-Hammond, a prominent scholar at Stanford University and one of the nation’s leading authorities on issues of teacher quality, has written that the measures say more about which students are in the classroom than about the competence of the teacher.
The National Academy of Education and the American Educational Research Association issued a joint statement saying the same thing. Those who teach students with disabilities, English-language learners, and low-performing students are likely to get smaller gains in test scores than those who teach students from affluent homes in well-funded schools. Using test scores to rate teachers will penalize those who teach the students in greatest need. Over time, teachers will avoid the students who jeopardize their jobs and their reputations. This will be harmful to the students who need talented and experienced teachers most urgently.

Across the nation, as districts put into effect the “reform” that Secretary Duncan wants, the consequences have been counterproductive. Houston fired its teacher of the year. Other districts are discovering that their best teachers are getting low ratings. A teacher in Florida was recently photographed in front of her elementary school, whose billboard honored her as teacher of the month, as she held up a placard saying she had just been rated “ineffective.”
So what we have here is an effort by politicians to devise a metric to rate professionals. The measure makes no sense. No other nation—unless it is following our own bad example—is rating teachers in so crude a fashion. Even researchers at the company that designed New York’s evaluation system warned that it was too soon to use it to make high-stakes decisions about teachers.
It is simply wrong to devise a measure of teacher quality based on standardized tests. The tests are not yardsticks. They are not scientific instruments. They are social constructions, and quite apart from how contingent their results are on the social and economic background of the students being tested, they are also subject to human error, sampling error, random error, and other errors. It is true that the cleanliness of restaurants can be given a letter grade (another of Bloomberg’s test-oriented innovations in New York City), and agribusiness can be measured by crop yields, and corporations can be measured by their profits. But to apply a letter grade or a numerical ranking to a professional is to radically misunderstand the complex set of qualities that make someone good at what they do. It is an effort by economists and statisticians to quantify activities that are at heart matters of judgment, not productivity. Professionals must be judged by other professionals, by their peers. Nowhere is this more true than among educators, whose success at teaching character, wisdom, and judgment cannot be measured by standardized tests.




MICHAEL POWELL NY TIMES

Our mayor being true to himself, Michael R. Bloomberg journeyed to Albany last week to lecture state legislators on his decision to blow up negotiations with our teachers union and so lose $240 million for New York City schools.

In his telling, his was a courageous act of self-destruction.

If only school officials throughout the state were as principled as he, he suggested, they would admit that teachers unions are fundamentally incapable of agreeing to measure their members honestly. And they too would blow up their negotiations and forfeit many hundreds of millions of dollars in state aid.

“Everybody is just interested in getting money and committing what I would call a fraud,” he told legislators.

Assemblywoman Catherine Nolan of Queens is a ferocious advocate for the city’s schools. She leaned forward and squinted at the mayor, as though convinced either that he was daft or that she was deaf. “Maybe I’m losing my hearing a little,” she said. “Don’t you feel some responsibility for this disaster? And it is a disaster.”

The mayor pursed his lips and wagged his head. “Money,” he explained a bit later, “is not the answer to everything.”

 

As it is relatively rare for a mayor to lose $240 million in one sitting, the past few weeks have been consumed by competing explanations of how Mr. Bloomberg and the union, the United Federation of Teachers, could have allowed that to happen. Listening to their accounts, it’s as though the Education Department and the union sat not in a single negotiating room, but on far sides of the moon from each other. (The Council of School Supervisors and Administrators also saw the mayor dissolve their seemingly successful negotiations in a late-night puff of smoke, although it might be seen as collateral damage in his feud with the teachers.)

In the mayor’s telling, the union — which in truth has crafty and tough negotiators — tossed down one barrier after another, much as a movie villain tosses darts in the path of pursuing police cars. He has drawn huzzahs from the editorial pages of The Daily News and The New York Post, where the perceived duplicity of the teachers union passes for religious conviction.

In particular, the mayor insisted that a deal on an evaluation system must extend for perpetuity. The teachers union, he says, pushed a two-year agreement, in hopes of sabotaging reform.

 

This narrative, however, falls on harder times as you cast around. John B. King Jr., state education commissioner, who was once a middle school principal and perhaps as a result seems preternaturally calm in dealing with the feuding parties, said that city negotiators had signaled that they had intended to sign off on a short-term plan.

Dr. King also gave city officials a failing grade in homework. They had failed to properly train principals and teachers in the event that a new evaluation system was put in place.

There is also the matter of handshakes. Michael Mulgrew, the union president, has described shaking on a deal with education officials at an early morning hour. Ernest Logan, president of the Council of School Supervisors and Administrators, has described a similar scene in his negotiation.

A little later, in these accounts, Dennis M. Walcott, schools chancellor, called back and said: The boss, which is to say the mayor, says no deal.

Mediation, too, was tried. One of the more experienced mediators in New York talked with the union, and the city’s lawyers and labor commissioner.

This mediator, those on both sides say, saw a proposed path to a settlement, in which teachers rated unsatisfactory could be let go under the expired agreement. The day of the mediation, Bloomberg officials canceled.

 

The mayor likes to note he gave teachers a generous contract in 2005. He neglects to note that the same union generously declined to endorse his mayoral opponent that year. And his bedside manner is lacking. If you want to persuade tenured, unionized teachers to accept a rigorous new evaluation system, you might frame those efforts in terms of helping teachers to improve. The mayor prefers to oil his guillotine.

THE mayor, finally, makes for a diffident diplomat. His journeys to Albany feature elbow shots at the governor and legislators. Last week, he offered a seminar in how to turn off friends and fail to influence enemies. At one point, State Senator John A. DeFrancisco of Syracuse cast him a wry look. Our districts have negotiated agreements, often with lots of work. Yet you make insulting statements.