August 31, 2006

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It Takes More Than Schools…

Filed under: Education by Leo Casey @ 9:03 pm

When Diane Jean Schemo dedicated a recent New York Times education column, “It Takes More Than Schools To Close The Achievement Gap,” to the proposition that anti-poverty economic and social programs were as necessary for significantly narrowing the achievement gap as educational reform, she cited Richard Rothstein’s important work on that subject, Class and Schools. This led, in turn, to a number of uninformed summary judgments on Rothstein’s arguments.

Now, in a clinic on how to demolish an opposing argument, Rothstein provides first round knockouts of two critics — Checker Finn and Joel Klein. Read it all here.

Unfortunately, this is a classic case of an issue where logical argument goes only so far, because there are very real — and very powerful — interests with a stake in ignoring the need for battling poverty. They want to talk only about what schools can do, because they do not want to hold elected officials and the corporate world responsible for what they should be doing. But Rothstein’s piece will make it harder to pretend that this is a posture which cares about the best interests of children living in poverty.

August 30, 2006

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An Epiphany at the Daily News

Filed under: Labor by Kombiz Lavasany @ 12:50 pm

A refreshing editorial from the Daily News on yesterday’s census numbers.

New numbers from the Census Bureau show what a disaster the economic policies of the Bush administration have been for middle-class, working-class and poor Americans.When President Bush took office, 33 million Americans, or 11.7% of the population, were counted as living below the poverty line. By last year, the ranks of the poor had swollen to 37 million and the national poverty rate was stuck at 12.6%. Here in New York City, almost one in five struggles to get by on $20,000 - or less - for a family of four.

When Bush took office, 41 million Americans were without health coverage. Today, the count of the uninsured stands at 47 million. When Bush took office, the median income for men working full time, year-round was $42,209. As of 2005, that typical salary, when adjusted for inflation, had shrunk to $41,386. Although the real median household income crept up 1.1% - the first such uptick since 1999 - the wages of full-time, year-round workers continued their southward slide, down 1.8% for men and 1.3% for women.

These are the anemic results you’d expect to see in more difficult times. But the economy is cooking, with steady growth, moderate inflation, low unemployment and strong corporate profits. The rising tide should be lifting all boats. Instead, it’s working only for the yachts.

Many forces are eating at the paychecks of American workers, including global competition, rising health care costs and the declining clout of organized labor. Some factors are beyond the control of any presidential administration, but the White House and Congress do have an obligation to, at the very least, ease the blows.

Bush and Capitol Hill Republicans have focused instead on plumping the pillows of the well-off. Witness five years of tax cuts for those at the top. Witness the refusal to raise the minimum wage, whose purchasing power is at a half-century low. Witness the fact that the top 1% of earners pull in a larger share of income than they have in decades.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson recently acknowledged, “many Americans simply aren’t feeling the benefits” of a strong economy, but there’s little sign of a course correction from the White House. Democrats are seizing on the issue as they angle to take control of the House and Senate in the fall elections. We hope they make the most of it.

Bonddad provides a visual reference.

Adrianne Shropshire at the DMIBlog has more on the subject as does Harold Meyerson.

NYTimes Editorial.

Full Report available at the US Census Bureau.

August 29, 2006

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Test Your Labor Smarts

Filed under: Labor by Kombiz Lavasany @ 1:15 pm

The AFL-CIO is running a contest every day until Labor Day that tests the knowledge of their readers. The first correct answer sent to the AFL’s blog will garner the winner prizes.
While you’re at the AFL-CIO’s blog make sure to check out their Hurricane Katrina coverage.

August 28, 2006

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Rebutting Weighted Student Funding: The New Magic Bullet

Filed under: Education Funding by CitySue @ 5:29 pm

Weighted School Funding (WSF) is the new magic-bullet darling of the conservative education think tanks. First proposed earlier this summer in a report by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, and next week the subject of a Center for American Progress conference in Washington featuring Rod Paige, John Podesta and others, it cleverly cloaks an anti-teacher wolf in pro-child sheepskin with a new way to resolve all the inequities that plague education finance today.  

Under this intra-district school funding method, dollars would follow the student to whatever public school his/her family chooses. (Some WSF advocates would omit the “public” in that sentence.) The dollars would reflect that child’s educational needs, and ensure that whatever school s/he attended would have fair funding and equally qualified teachers.

For years, critics have blamed the unequal distribution of experienced teachers between schools in richer and poorer communities on labor contract provisions that give senior teachers preference in school placements and transfers. Now that NYC has eliminated seniority transfers, another culprit must be found.

WSF supporters say this inequitable teacher distribution is the result of the way school districts allocate funding to schools. They argue that measured in real dollars schools in poor communities actually get much less funding than schools in richer communities, even after factoring in poverty-related funds like Title 1, because of the relatively low pay of their teachers, and this is clearly discriminatory.

The WSF remedy is for districts to send dollars, weighted for student needs, to schools, instead of allocating positions. Then schools in poor communities would receive more money and be better able to recruit more experienced teachers. But they do not say how this would happen.

What will change the competitive disadvantage of schools in poorer neighborhoods with greater challenges and tougher working conditions? And what will reduce the greater teacher attrition rate in those schools?

Under the current system, funding for teachers is provided to schools irrespective of the cost of the teachers. When schools are allocated positions, principals are free to hire teachers at any level of experience/cost. The fact that they have trouble doing so is not a function of what they have to spend but of the more difficult working conditions in their schools.

If they have dollars and not positions, won’t many principals prefer less experienced, cheaper teachers and shun senior teachers, thus freeing up more money for other needs? Would this not lead to age discrimination in hiring? WSF supporters say that principals won’t do that because they are held accountable for results, and so will seek the best teachers. But principals may think that other uses of those funds, like hiring test-prep companies, might raise scores more than experienced teachers would.

With WSF, proponents argue, more affluent schools would receive less funding and could no longer afford to hire all-senior staffs. This would free up more senior teachers to be hired by poor schools. But in areas like NYC, surrounded by more affluent school districts, it may also cause more senior teachers to flee to the suburbs.

Finally. one argument put forth by a WSF advocate (Paul Hill in Harvard Educational Review, Summer 2006) is that “many quality teachers want to work in [“troubled”] schools but they know that doing so goes against the incentives created by the placement system and school budget. Fearing they could be the only experienced teacher in a difficult situation, most teachers choose to work elsewhere.”  That is a real stretch, not backed by any study of why teachers choose or reject schools in which to work that I know of. 

Hill concludes that under WSF, “schools in low-income neighborhoods would have more money than their current teachers earn and would be able to bid for some of the experienced teachers who came along.” Again, with the current system of neutral funding, those schools can “bid” for those teachers now, and if they succeed, they will have the money to pay for them because he district funds positions, regardless of their cost.

If WSF supporters want to enable schools in rough neighborhoods to attract and retain more experienced teachers, they might consider several potentially more effective alternatives, like decent facilities, smaller classes and enough books, materials and supplies so teachers can do their jobs. In addition, targeted strategies can help:

·      More support for new teachers in those schools, including lighter teaching loads and more time for training, preparing and observing other teachers.

·      Opportunities for advancement for mid-level teachers, including taking on more responsibilities (like mentoring, curriculum development, planning school-wide projects) for additional pay.

·      Extra pay for teachers who meet qualifications and volunteer to teach in hard-to-staff schools.  

Those are to-the-point solutions to help bring the best teachers to where they are most needed. But could the WSF advocates really have another objective in mind?  Read Hill’s explanation of why low-income children get the least experienced teachers. 

He calls it the result of “a deliberate policy of budgetary distortion.” And, he says, “Districts have adopted [this policy] for one reason only — to enable implementation of the seniority placement provisions of collective bargaining agreements.”

Of course, we should have known. It always comes back to the teacher unions.

Well, if seniority placements was the problem, then the elimination of the seniority transfer plan should be the dawn of a new day in equity for children in NYC. And if it turns out that, even after some 3,000 transfers under the new Open Market system, some schools still manage to attract the most highly qualified teachers while others don’t, perhaps the pundits will have to look for something else to blame.

Like maybe someone should look at those successful schools and see that they are professional communities where the conditions respect both the teachers and the students.  Maybe that’s the elusive magic bullet to bring all students better schools and the best teachers. 

August 24, 2006

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The Other Shoe: The US DOE Studies Public and Charter School Performance

Filed under: Charter School Testing by Leo Casey @ 8:23 pm

The second shoe of the study the US Department of Education wishes desperately it had never commissioned fell earlier this week, with the publication of the section comparing the performance of public district schools and charter schools. One knew well in advance what it would say, since the Department has been madly leaking the results to its allies among charter school advocates — some of whom spent the better part of August launching pre-emptive missles. But for those who don’t live and die on reading the tea leaves of edu-blogs, the bottom line of the report is this: when controlled for demographic categories such as poverty, race and ethnicity, gender and English language learners, students in public district schools significantly outperformed students in charter schools on NAEP English Language Arts and Mathematics assessments. A bit anti-climatic, after all of the pre-release prognostication, but no less significant for it.

If you wonder why folks like Eduwonk are spinning like there is no tomorrow about this study, it is because they asked for it. To understand how this came to be, one needs to go back to the infamous ‘charter school dust up,’ when the AFT released the raw NAEP data the US DOE had been hiding, which showed that public district school students were doing better on the NAEP assessments than charter school students. At that time, the charter partisans argued that it was an unfair comparison, since in their opinion, charter schools served a student population which was poorer, with more students of color and English Language Learners, than that of the public district schools. While the underlying premise — that charter schools served more student living in poverty, more students of color and more English Language Leaders — was highly questionable, the argument that we should be comparing student apples with student apples and student oranges with student oranges was valid. In fact, it was the same argument that public school advocates had often made when public schools were unfairly compared to private schools, a practice not unknown among charter school partisans like Checker Finn and Jeannie Allen. So it was largely because of the urging of charter school partisans that the US DOE commissioned this study — this is one of those classic “be careful what you ask for, because you might actually get it” moments.

Some might take schadenfreude in these events, and in the mad spinning, but it is really a sad development. This is a critical moment in the emergence of charter schools. The movement is desperately in need of voices that eshew the escalation of rhetoric, the name calling and the circling of the wagons, voices that refuse the transparent arguments of diversion, voices that say it is time for self-reflection, and for a focus on improving the quality of charter schools. Now, more than ever, we need to figure out why a movement established to provide more good public schools, especially for students in poor communities, has fallen far short of that promise. And we need to set it right.

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Single Test Admissions

Filed under: Testing by Jackie Bennett @ 4:32 pm

It’s a little difficult to understand what Andres Alonso finds so “extraordinarily surprising” about the decline in minority enrollment in the city’s top high schools. This is bad news, surely, but not extraordinarily surprising to anyone who understands the pitfalls of relying on a single standardized test in assessing student achievement. Those of us who have spent our careers in classrooms understand that. Those who us who have not, like Mr. Alonso, don’t.

Using data supplied by the DoE, the NY Times reports that black and Hispanic enrollment has declined at Stuyvesant, Brooklyn Tech., and Bronx High School of Science. These declines parallel the Department’s change to a an admission policy that ignored student achievement as assessed by the teachers (i.e., student grades). And since standards on these tests are believed to be more rigorous than standards held by teachers, the inevitable conclusion seems to be that the test-only policy employed by the DoE was simply too rigorous for some minorities. Ironically, however, a test-only policy relaxes (rather than raises) admission standards, and cheats our best students, including some blacks and Hispanics.

In other words, the problem may not be that the test-only policy is too rigorous for blacks, Hispanics, or other students who do not make the cut. Rather, the policy is not rigorous enough.

This is not, of course, immediately apparent. The truth will come out on tests, the knee-jerk thinking goes; either the student can do the work, or he cannot. Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute typifies this kind of thinking perfectly when she equates a single standardized admissions test with “maintaining legitimately high standards”. But like Andres Alonso, Ms. MacDonald is a non-practicing lawyer, and she has never taught in secondary schools. Ask a teacher about an admission policy that ignores classroom success and failure and you are likely to get a different answer.

That’s because teachers know that success on a test does not always translate into real academic achievement. Some top scorers, just like students at any level, may avoid new challenges, neglect to do assignments, and generally shut themselves off to academic experiences that could broaden and deepen their understanding of the world. And since this is the case, then how rigorous are admission standards that reward a student who can ace the test but who rarely writes a thoughtful essay or asks a thought-provoking question while in class? Does the high scorer who squeaks by with a 75 in middle school Social Studies deserve a seat at Stuyvesant? What kind of rigor is that?

To be sure, many high scorers are also excellent students. Nonetheless, smart students with indifferent attitudes toward academics are more common than one might think. And, since acceptance based on a single test must involve a cut-off score (let’s pretend a 93), then the student with the 92 who welcomes every opportunity to learn is pushed aside so that his less enthusiastic classmate can have the much-sought high school seat.

Thus, the problem with the test-only admissions policy is not that it discriminates minorities, but that it discriminates against all those students who have truly passed the “rigor” test by doing very well on standard tests and meeting the daily demands required for sustained academic excellence. What is more, however, once we consider both parts of the equation as factors in admission, then we may very well find that our most academic schools are not only able to maintain “legitimately high standards” (to quote MacDonald) but are also more racially diverse.

Of course, this is only one woman’s opinion (mine), and I am not personally familiar with any of these schools. Ultimately Klein and the DoE must seek the input of the school communities before any decisions are made about how, if at all, to change the policies in the specialized schools. Unfortunately, however, the chancellor has recently done precisely the opposite by imposing on one of the city’s best-performing schools (Staten Island Tech.) the testing system that his own statistics now show does not work.

Until this year, Tech employed a rigorous admission policy that accepted students based on a “power score” comprised of both standardized test scores and middle school grades. The result? Tech’s is one of the very best schools in the city, with scores and statistics that are in every way comparable or superior to those of Stuyvesant, Brooklyn Tech, or Bronx High School of Science. But what is perhaps more interesting is that in a predominantly white borough with almost 50 percent fewer black students than Manhattan, and 66 percent fewer Hispanics, Tech. has the about same percentage of blacks and Hispanics as can be found at Stuyvesant.

The numbers are small, and Tech. is still not as diverse as the borough’s general student population. Nonetheless, by using both grades and tests, Tech seems to have been more successful at creating a truly rigorous standard that gave an enriched opportunity to a diverse population.

Unfortunately, Klein and Bloomberg have brought that admission policy to an end. In January of 2005 these two made a pit-stop at Tech to inform the school that it would have to switch to a test-only admission. When some school community members protested, Klein replied that the new policy would make the school more diverse. Thus we see the DoE at its most typical: imposing a policy without looking at the facts.

In the end, in a pro-forma meeting that would later give the DoE the opportunity of claiming it had been collaborative, students, parents, and school staff were given a choice. Accept the test-only admissions or see your funding cut. Accept it or eliminate any admission policy. Accept it or you will no longer exist.

So, Staten Island Tech accepted the test. And this September, for the first time since it opened its doors, those doors will only be open to students who scored well on a single test. It will be closed, however, to those who scored only slightly less well, but showed their teachers that they have what it takes to be great students every single day of the year.

August 22, 2006

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Public Education News

Filed under: Education by Kombiz Lavasany @ 4:08 pm

There were two important pieces of public education news that will be hitting various papers, and news outlets over the next few days. John at the AFT has a rundown of both pieces of news.

First the annual Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll on the public’s attitudes towards public schools was release. John at the AFT summarizes:

NCLB Ain’t Helping: 37% say NCLB has made no difference in the performance of schools in the community, and 21% say it has hurt those schools. (Just 26% say it has helped.) Update: Eduwonk correctly calls me out on the use of the word “just” in the previous sentence. Mea culpa.

College Isn’t for Everyone: But college prep is for most people. 56% said all high school students should take courses that prepare them to enter a four-year college; 42% said no.

More than the Basics 78% are concerned that NCLB’s current testing requirements – English and math only – will mean “less emphasis on art, music, history and other subjects.”

No Transfers Asked what they would want if their child attended a school put on NCLB’s “needs improvement” list, 4 out of 5 respondents said they preferred improving the child’s present school rather than being allowed to transfer the child to another school.

The Bush Administration’s Department of Education also released the results of a charter school/public school study of NAEP scores. Again, John at the AFT:

The U.S. Department of Education (ED) today released a report showing, as expected, that charter school student performance on fourth-grade NAEP reading and math tests lags behind that of students in regular public schools when student background characteristics are taken into account.

Findings

The big-picture numbers: charter school students were 4.2 points lower on the reading tests, 4.7 points lower in math. (A rule of thumb for NAEP scores is that 10 points equals one year of learning, so it could be said that students in charter schools are nearly a half-year behind students with similar backgrounds who attend regular public schools.)

Students at charter schools “affiliated with a public school district” outperformed students at charter schools that were not affiliated with a public school district.

For central city schools serving a high-minority population, students at regular schools outperformed students in charter schools on the NAEP math test.

Coverage

AP’s first pass on the report — there may be another one later — includes this hopeful tidbit:

“The report offered some good news for charter schools: Reading scores at charter schools in central cities serving mostly minority students were comparable to scores at traditional public schools. However, math scores at such charter schools still lagged behind those at traditional schools.”

So, what’s the good news for charter schools? Oh, I see — in one subject, but not the other, they are doing as well as the most maligned schools in the country: urban schools with large numbers of minority students.

And Bloomberg’s write-up seems designed to knock down the study. It quotes two people — a Bush appointee and a charter school advocate — criticizing the study, not a one saying it was any good.
The Response

The National Association for Charter School Authorizers says this report is “old news” using “old data.” Well, maybe. But if the facts don’t influence policies, then they need to be repeated.

While you’re at the AFT’s NCLBlog don’t miss this post.

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Decoding Grammar

Filed under: Teaching by syntacticgymnastics @ 11:14 am

Is there a better way to teach Standard English grammar to students who speak African American English (AAE) or other English varieties?

As I prepare for my second year of teaching in NYC public high schools, I have been pondering this question. Last year, I became quite frustrated with teaching grammar in my regular ELA class. I saw that my students desperately needed to learn Standard English for their upcoming Regents exam, yet I was frustrated with both their resistance and seeming inability to grasp the concepts. My students kept making the same mistakes over and over again, as if they didn’t even realize they were making them. I started noticing the same patterns over and over in many of my student’s writing – particularly problems with subject-verb agreement, plurals, and possession. I would dutifully point these errors out in their papers, and sometimes even mention them in class, to no avail. Many wanted to learn, but it just didn’t seem to come to them the way it did for me, and I couldn’t understand why my corrections didn’t seem to help. In fact, the more I corrected, the more they resisted.

Teaching grammar explicitly has gone out of fashion. No more diagramming sentences, rote memorization, or decontextualized exercises. However, simply correcting student papers, offering support during the writing process, and teaching the occasional mini-lesson (the way I’d been taught to teach in grad school ala Constance Weaver and her book, Teaching Grammar in Context) is clearly not enough or maybe just not the right framework from which to teach my population of students. After all, my students are not going to learn Standard English by osmosis, and it’s unfair to penalize them for what I’m not really teaching.

According to Code-switching: Teaching Standard English in Urban Classrooms by Rebecca S. Wheeler and Rachel Swords, my students are not chronically making errors in grammar or speaking “lazy” English. Rather, they are following the patterns of their language variety or dialect. What if I taught them from a similar framework as I would teach Standard English to English Language Learners? What if I use their dialect, their existing knowledge, as a “springboard” to Standard English (SE)? Many of my students have been speaking a dialect of English their whole lives, so it’s clearly not the same thing as learning a second language, but there are many parallels. Wheeler and Swords tell us we can expect to see a “grammatical echo” of the first language in the student’s expression of another language or of another dialect (Wheeler and Swords 9). We see grammatical echoes whether the student’s home language is Thai, Spanish, or Hindi; whether their home dialect is South Asian English, South African English, or African American English (AAE). Wheeler and Swords urge us to first, collect observations and data on our students’ home dialects, and then use “contrastive analysis”, rather than the traditional “correctionist approach,” which has clearly failed with students of color (Wheeler and Swords 61).

Contrastive analysis teaches students to code-switch from one variety to another, depending on what is appropriate and effective for the situation (Wheeler and Swords 57). They use the example of a student who says, “Mama jeep need gas.” Rather than correct the student’s “error”, a contrastive approach would, in one lesson, look at the differences between the rules of possession according to AAE and the rules according to SE. In a subsequent lesson, students would look at differences in subject-verb agreement. These rules and examples would be listed side by side on a chart that would remain up for students’ reference. Sometimes students will be required to write in SE, for example in formal writing, and at other times students may choose to write in dialect. The idea is that students will be conscious of the choices they are making and understand what situations call for speaking and writing in SE.

Lisa J. Green, who wrote African American English: A Linguistic Introduction, agrees. She also advises teachers to teach grammar explicitly, and that teachers “offer direct instruction in pointing out and teaching the correspondences between AAE and mainstream English” (Green 236). Furthermore, she advises teachers to become familiar with students’ dialect patterns because “teachers who know something about the children’s native linguistic system are less likely to misclassify their grammatical linguistic patterns as mainstream English errors or disorders and are more likely to understand them as differences” (Green 240). Additionally, she asks us to think about literary giants such as Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Toni Morrison, all of whom exhibit not only a mastery of SE but also of AAE and are able to move between them for a powerful literary effect. Our students can strive for the same mastery of language, but only if we teach them in a way that respects AAE and makes the similarities and differences explicit.

Code-switching is not about getting rid of Standard English. On the contrary, code-switching recognizes the absolute necessity of speaking and writing Standard English in our society. In Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom, Lisa Delpit argues that students benefit from being taught explicitly the rules and “codes of power” of the middle class, including speaking and writing Standard English. She says, “If you are not already a participant in the culture of power, being told explicitly the rules of that culture makes acquiring that power easier” (Delpit 25). She goes on to argue that “if such explicitness is not provided to students, what it feels like to people who are old enough to judge is that there are secrets being kept, that time is being wasted, that the teacher is abdicating his or her duty to teach” (Delpit 31). If my students just aren’t learning it the way I’m teaching it, don’t I have an obligation to find a better way? To help them bridge the gaps, so they do understand? Speaking and writing Standard English is so crucial for their success in college and the professional world, so crucial for their access to real power in society, that I consider it one of my primary obligations to find a way to teach it so they will learn. Code-switching, quite simply, seems to be a more effective way to teach Standard English to students of color.

There is more at stake than simple pedagogical debates about the teaching of grammar. It is about our prejudices and our expectations of certain students.

Whether Black or White, a teacher is likely to consider a child speaking African American English as slower, less able, and less intelligent that the child who speaks Standard English. We call this dialect prejudice. Nieto (2000) explains that as teacher expectations are reduced, so the child’s classroom performance diminishes. We have found that as teachers understand more about the integrity of vernacular dialects and the structure and regularity of student language, they step away from dialect prejudice in the classroom. Teachers come to see students as fully intelligent, capable, and worthy. Their expectations for student performance rise, bringing to the classroom a self-fulfilling prophecy for success as their students work to master Standard English. (Wheeler and Swords 14)

It seems clear that teaching grammar through a “correctionist lens”, without acknowledging that vernacular dialects like African American English have their own rules and grammar, is not only unhelpful and bound to fail, but in fact detrimental to students’ school experiences and eventual success. However, respecting students’ cultures and language varieties, building and adding to their knowledge, and providing access to the “codes of power,” can be tremendously empowering for students. With this approach, hopefully my students will be better prepared for their bright futures.

The writer is a second year teacher in New York City. She writes about this subject and others at her blog, Syntactic Gymnastics. The views expressed here are her own, and meant to foster dialogue.

August 18, 2006

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Edgeutech

Filed under: Other Topics by Kombiz Lavasany @ 2:06 pm

Nancy from Se Hace Camino Al Andar is co-writing Edgeutech, a blog on the intersection between technology and education.

August 16, 2006

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Help Wanted [UPDATED]

Filed under: NYC DOE by Leo Casey @ 8:59 pm

Can’t meet all of the requirements for your teaching license?

No problem, says the Department of Education. Go to the Leadership Academy, and become a principal.

Don’t take our word for it. Read Sam Freedman’s education column in today’s New York Times, Inexperienced but Trained. It tells the story of the new principal of P.S. 7 in the Bronx, trained by the Leadership Academy. After four years as a teacher, with the time window allowed for obtaining the Masters Degree required for permanent licensure about to close, the new principal entered the Leadership Academy. She will now be a principal, with a new clock for the Masters Degree, without ever having completed that requirement for a teacher’s license.

Perhaps when this clock runs out, she can move on to a superintendent’s position. With a little bit of luck and good timing, Tweed can ensure she can retire with a healthy pension — and complete her Masters Degree in retirement.

Update by Kombiz: THIS JUST IN: The DOE faxed over a letter from Baruch College saying that new principal Renee Cloutier does, in fact, have a Master’s Degree, effective May 31, 2006. We’re glad they cleared that up … and we’re glad Sam Freedman of the New York Times continues to focus on the importance of having qualified administrators, as well as qualified teachers.

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