July 15, 2008

Chris Cerf, Sol Stern and Truth

Filed under: Education Education Funding NYC DOE Testing by Jackie Bennett @ 1:58 pm

As The New York Sun reported, and Leo Casey highlighted in a recent Edwize post, the DoE has created its very own Ministry of Truth. If you’d like to catch a glimpse of its Orwellian tactics in action, take a look at Chris Cerf on Eduwonk, debating with Sol Stern. Stern’s point by point response to Cerf is posted in the comments under Cerf’s post but I have also pasted most of it in the second half of this post.

To Stern’s response, I add my own comments.

First, Cerf partly blames the increase in English Language Learners for the stagnation in New York City’s NAEP/TUDA scores. But if he wants to talk about changes in circumstance that might have led to a change in scores, perhaps (for truths’ sake), he ought also include the high rate of students who get extended time and other testing accommodations in NYC. According to The Sun, New York City gave more accommodations than any of the ten other major cities that participate in the national exam. Says The Sun, “On three of four tests the accommodation rate hovered around 20%. On the last — a fourth-grade math exam city officials are trumpeting as evidence the Bloomberg administration’s schools program is working — the rate was 25%.”

Second, Cerf says that the DoE has “created the most sophisticated accountability system in the country.” Well, that may be true, but only in the same sort of way that Tyrannosaurus Rex was perhaps the most sophisticated dinosaur. In the end, Rex was still just a dinosaur heading for extinction, and in the end Tweed’s accountability measures are still just souped up test scores that we’ll remember one day as monstrosities that have happily gone extinct. Truly sophisticated accountability would include holding Tweed accountable. And since accountability is really about encouraging good policy, then sophisticated accountability would encourage America to redress a full range of factors that impinge upon the education of children, including the state of their welfare beyond the schoolhouse walls. Finally, real accountability would encourage schools to implement broad and deep curricula, and to nurture the very best attitudes and behaviors in students so that they will be able to lead rich and thoughtful lives.

My only other comment is that Stern’s response to Cerf refutes the gains made by our schools. To me, however, there do seem to be gains, though I don’t know if we see them in the scores. This year, I felt a difference in the schools I know best, and I heard a difference when I talked to teachers and principals. The difference was the difference money makes. After a dozen years of courts and politics, significant funding reached New York City’s schools for the first time this past year. That money bought time for planning, professional discussion, and extra services to children. What’s more, as Cerf points out, teacher salaries have increased significantly, and that seems to have influenced hiring. Money is giving our schools their first glimpse of what might be possible. I don’t know if these financial gains are what we see reflected in the scores, or even if gains in scores are what we want to see. But I do think that once all the dinosaurs are dead, better funding –- the luxury of money, without which little else can happen in America –- is the thing that will ultimately make a difference in our schools.

Stern might disagree with me on that, perhaps, but I post his response to Cerf anyhow, because I liked it:

…You start out by once again shamelessly claiming credit for the outsized 2002-2003 test score gains. Neither you nor anyone else in the administration has offered a single plausible reason why you should get that credit, but you just keep repeating the canard over and over again. Later in your letter you say that the Mayor and Chancellor “instituted important changes during that [first] year,” but you neglect to tell us what those changes were and how they could have affected the tests given in January 2003. I am waiting with baited breath for more details, just as I have been waiting since I first raised this issue two years ago.

In your letter you also improperly lump together test scores on all six grades (3-8) from 2002 to the present. You know, of course, that the state education department has officially declared that the NCLB mandated tests for grades 3-8, first given in 2006, should not be compared to tests administered prior to that year. (Before 2006 the city gave its own tests in grades 3, 5, 6 and 7.) That you would nonetheless go ahead and compare these two completely different data sets is an even more brazen example of how far the education department is willing to go to make the mayor look good politically. Absent this inappropriate comparison, there is no basis for your claim that there has been a significant narrowing of the gap between the city and the rest of the state. It also nullifies all your statements about closing the black-white and Hispanic-white achievement gaps. Moreover, if you actually followed the state education department’s guidance on this and compared only the scores from 2006 to 2008 in grades 3-8 you would see that three out of four of the state’s other big city school districts made greater test score gains than New York City. Yet none of those districts have adopted the “sophisticated accountability system” that you boast about elsewhere in your letter.

…So far, no independent scholar or data agency has confirmed the administration’s claims [regarding graduation rates] and, given your record of fudging test score data for political gain, there is good reason for extreme suspicion. Even if I believed that thousands more were now graduating, as you assert, there is more reason than ever to question the value of the diploma the graduates are receiving. While the administration has eliminated social promotion in some elementary school grades (a policy I supported) it seems to have instituted a more pernicious form of social promotion in the 12th grade. It does this by giving more and more students an accommodation known as “seat time,” in which they are given credit for courses they flunked just by showing up for a few extra Saturday sessions…

…But this administration has been even more irresponsible in trying to muddy up the integrity of the NAEP tests –- and merely for the short term political gain of the mayor. The fact is that we never heard a peep out of the DOE about NAEP until the 2007 tests confirmed the lack of progress for city students in three out of four benchmark tests over four years. The only thing that got your attention was a front page article in the New York Times describing the flat NAEP scores and raising questions about the reliability of the state tests. This was a threat to the mayor’s political ambitions. Not liking the news brought by the messenger, the administration then launched its multi million dollar PR machine on a search and destroy mission against the only gold standard tests the nation’s schools have. You repeat all that silly stuff here, saying NAEP “is not ‘high stakes,’ not based on state standards, and given to a comparatively small sample.”…

…What our experience in New York proves is that politically ambitious mayors and school leaders will try to use their power as keepers of the data to advance their personal agendas at the expense of the public’s need to know the truth about student academic performance. Without NAEP as a monitor for every state’s test scores, such political exploitation of achievement data is even more likely to happen. As I said at the end of my original post, Chris, the trend being established in New York and which you have had such a prominent role in, will turn into a disaster for the nation’s education reform movements. If you don’t turn off the spin machine many will even conclude that education reform, like the blob itself, has become just another education industry racket.

3 Comments »

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  • Although I do not always agree with Sol Stern, the fact is undeniable that he is a person of huge intellectual integrity, courage, independence, and yes, flexibility and humor. He is a complex person who has evolved his positions over many years and will join forces with any individuals or group that represent the truth as he understands it, even if occasionally that might mean alienating erstwhile allies. He cannot be bought. He’s a positive and formidable proponent of quality education and, in my view, a friend of the union for the most part.

    Comment by redhog — July 15, 2008 @ 6:35 pm

  • [...] webmaster@algebra.com: [...]

    Pingback by History of Mathematics Blog » Blog Archive » Chris Cerf, Sol Stern and Truth — July 15, 2008 @ 6:52 pm

  • You gentlemen are right on the money, when you reinforce something that few, but all of the most perceptive, have been saying, these people are all politically interested and ambitious. They have little sense of good will for the children, which is clear in the inequality that can be seen by entering a building in a school like Bronx Science and then walking two or three blocks to the Walton High School campus and looking at their facilities: no food education in the lunch rooms, no serious health program, little emphasis on enriching the school environment, etc. And who gets stuck with exclusive blame for the inequality, for the lack of coherent and uniform policies for running our schools? We do.

    Comment by born_branded — July 16, 2008 @ 2:28 pm

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