One of the most annoying phrases uttered in ed reform is some version of ‘poverty is not destiny.’  Occasionally they mix it up a little with something like ‘zip code is not destiny.’  The implication is that there are some people out there who think that every person born into poverty or born in a…

Geoffrey Canada recently did a TED talk entitled ‘Our failing schools.  Enough is enough.’  Canada is the president and CEO of The Harlem Children’s Zone and star of ‘Waiting For Superman.’ The premise of Harlem Children’s Zone is a good one.  It serves to provide school and complete wrap-around services (health, mental health, nutrition, etc.)…

When you ask the leader of an allegedly high performing charter school what makes them so successful, they generally say that they have more flexibility with hiring and firing since they are free from pesky union contracts.  This is why I found it quite odd that I received an announcement with job openings at a…

On a post I wrote last week called ‘The Status Quo Miracle District,” I got a bunch of angry comments from people who seemed to feel betrayed by my ‘debunking’ of the media inflated claims of a ‘public’ school district. This is the first comment: Very unhelpful. With friends like you, public education needs no…

Over the past two years I’ve spent a lot of time debunking ‘miracle’ schools and ‘miracle’ districts.  The way it works is that some politician or journalist tells a story about how this school or district has come up with a way to get their high poverty students to score as well in standardized tests…

In my last post, I showed how in the final report from the Gates Foundation MET project they produced a very misleading graph.  Though the implication of this graph — namely, that value-added measures are consistent from one year to the next — was not the only point of this study, I called it THE…

Last year I spent a lot of time making scatter plots of the released New York City teacher data reports to demonstrate how unreliable value-added measurements are.  Over a series of six posts which you can read here I showed that the same teacher can get completely different value-added rankings in two consecutive years, in…

My father, the occasionally high profile defense attorney Ronald Rubinstein, graduated from Samuel J. Tilden High School in Brooklyn in 1956.  Fifty years later, the NYC DOE began the process of phasing out the school and replacing it with three small school on what is now the Tilden Educational campus. The NYC DOE recently released…

  On my recent visit to KIPP NYC College Prep High School, I received one of their newsletters.  In it I found this graph demonstrating how their students rank in ‘college readiness’ compared to other Black, Latino, and NYC students in general.  According to this ‘college readiness’ metric, 72% of the KIPP students were ready…

For people following ed reform in this country, Washington D.C. is the most significant place to track.  Though New Orleans is the place where the most experimentation is going on, the people doing the reforms there also control the data so it is tough to get a realistic picture of what is going on down…

When I hear the mantras ‘Poverty Is Not Destiny,’ and ‘Poverty Is Not An Excuse,’ I can understand why they are so compelling.  The problem, though, is the ambiguity of the key words:  ‘Poverty,’ ‘Destiny,’ and ‘Excuse’. If ‘Poverty Is Not Destiny’ just means that it is ‘possible’ for someone who grows up poor to…

Now that ‘Won’t Back Down’ has become one of the biggest bombs in film history, we can forget about it and enjoy a new documentary called ‘Brooklyn Castle’ about the celebrated Chess team from Brooklyn Middle School I.S. 318.  I’ve only seen the preview so far, but already know that this is going to be…

In a bizarre statement, somewhat akin to Arne Duncan’s famous utterance about Katrina being the ‘best’ thing that ever happened to New Orleans schools, is something that NY city Chief Academic Officer, Shael Polakow-Suransky, said about the latest round of New York City school closings. Last year 116 elementary and middle schools had gotten an…

I almost feel bad for these guys.  My sense is that they so want to believe that their reforms are working that they view every score release through this lens and they don’t even realize how pathetic they are. In this latest press release they call their AP results a ‘surge’ because the number of…

New Orleans was the home of a very important battle in The War of 1812.  Exactly two hundred years later, 2012, New Orleans is again the focus of another type of battle, one of how to best help our schools. About a year ago I analyzed a press release by TFA alum and then Recovery…

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Less technical post about VAM:  What ‘value-added’ is and is not As if there weren’t enough already, I found yet another few flaws in ‘value-added,’ flaws which, I believe, makes it beyond salvation. ‘Value-Added’ is, once again, how much better or worse a…

There are certain pairs of verbs in the English language that by definition imply one another.  One example is ‘sell’ and ‘buy.’  If you sell something, someone else must be buying.  It would make no sense to say “I’m selling a lot, but nobody is buying.”  If nobody is buying, you might be ‘trying’ to…

I do not deny that some teachers are more talented than others.  My first year I was a very ineffective teacher who spent half of each class trying to maintain order.  My second through fifteenth years, I was much better.  But even within the very small sample size of myself, there is variation.  Some days…

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Less technical post about VAM: What ‘value-added’ is and is not It’s all about the ‘error rate’ — or so, even I, used to think. Nearly everything I’ve read that questions the validity of the value-added metric mentions the astronomical ‘error rates.’  When…

One year into the US Department Of Education’s 4 billion dollar School Improvement Grant (SIG) program, giving an average of half a million dollars to 800 ‘failing’ schools, the preliminary results are in.  Anyone who understands school reform should know that looking at ‘test scores’ after one year doesn’t really tell you much.  It is…

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Less technical post about VAM: What ‘value-added’ is and is not Value-added has been getting a lot of media attention lately but, unfortunately, most stories are missing the point.  In Gotham Schools I read about a teacher who got a low score but…

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Less technical post about VAM: What ‘value-added’ is and is not The inaccuracy of the New York City teacher evaluation data is taking a beating.  As I expected, this data would not stand up to the scrutiny of the public or even the…

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Less technical post about VAM: What ‘value-added’ is and is not In part 1 I demonstrated there was little correlation between how a teacher was rated in 2009 to how that same teacher was rated in 2010.  So what can be more crazy…