Testing and Choice Are Destructive
Diane Ravitch is the author of the forthcoming "Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools."
SEPTEMBER 5, 2013
In 2002, two events had a deep impact on education: President George W. Bush signed No Child Left Behind, and Mayor Michael Bloomberg gained control of the New York City public schools. Both relied on testing, choice and accountability. Neither was successful.
What should the new mayor do?
The new mayor’s goal should be a great education for all students, one that meets their needs and strengthens their families and communities.
The new mayor needs to abandon the cramped vision of the past decade. Testing, choice and accountability are a strategy to close schools and privatize them. Testing has become the be-all and end-all of schooling. Too much testing crushes creativity and imagination and obliterates the joy of learning. Tests should be used diagnostically, to help students and teachers, not to punish or reward teachers and close schools.
The new mayor should ask, “How can I make sure that there is a good public school in every neighborhood? What can I do to make sure that all children have access to the kind of education I would want for my own child?”
Asking those questions shifts the conversation away from testing and measurement. It means that the mayor must identify the elements of a good education and do what is necessary to provide it.
A good education means that all students have the opportunity to study the arts, history, civics, mathematics, foreign languages, the sciences and literature. It means that students have physical education every day. It means that the school has access to a medical clinic for children who are ill or who need to be checked for dental care or eyeglasses. It means that the school has the guidance counselors and social workers for children and families who need them
The new mayor’s goal should be a great education for all students, one that meets their needs and strengthens their families and communities.
Let’s Have More Accountability
Geoffrey Canada is the president and chief executive officer of the Harlem Children’s Zone and president of the Harlem Children’s Zone Promise Academy Charter Schools.
SEPTEMBER 5, 2013
Mayoral control means the next mayor has to continue to take full and unambiguous responsibility for how the city’s schools are working, as Mayor Michael Bloomberg has done. He or she will need to double-down on the reforms that resulted in New York City significantly outperforming other large cities in the state on the Common Core tests (in math, New York City had 29.6 percent proficiency while Rochester had 5 percent and Syracuse had 6.9 percent) and ensure these reforms continue and we do not go back in the wrong direction. We need to strengthen our evaluation tools and isolate what’s moving the needle for our kids.
The next mayor must not be afraid to continue controversial measures like closing failing schools, supporting charters and evaluating teachers.
In advocating actions to improve our schools, the next mayor must not be afraid of the reaction from the public or vested interests, in particular in regard to controversial measures such as closing failing schools, continuing to support charter schools and the meaningful evaluation of teachers.
The new mayor must close the terrible college-readiness gap among our students. To compete in the high-skills job market, our kids — especially those in high-poverty schools — need to successfully get through college, not just squeak through high school.
Mayor Bloomberg had the courage to support the exposure of how unprepared many of our students are for college. For all of us in education, these new Common Core exam results are a wake-up call — and the thing about a wake-up call is you have to wake up. The next mayor must put together an action plan so principals and teachers have the materials and the authority to create a rigorous educational experience for our kids.
The next mayor will find that improving the education of our students will be the toughest job he or she will take on. It will call for real courage and real accountability, but it must be job No. 1.
Focus on Schools in Poor Communities
Pedro Noguera, a sociologist, is the Peter L. Agnew professor of education at New York University and the executive director of the Metropolitan Center for Urban Education.
SEPTEMBER 5, 2013
Mayor Michael Bloomberg deserves credit for providing leadership that has led to significant improvement in New York’s public schools. Graduation rates have risen, there are more good schools available for New York parents to choose from, and there is a greater sense of accountability present in schools throughout the city.
Yet, despite the progress, serious challenges remain and the next mayor will inherit an array of complex issues that will require a different approach than the one utilized by Bloomberg and the Department of Education.
There needs to be greater coordination among city services, nonprofits, hospitals and universities to develop support systems for schools.
First, as poverty rates have risen during the Bloomberg years, schools in New York’s poorest communities have been overwhelmed by a variety of social and economic issues that affect child development and limit school performance. Mayoral control never led to greater coordination among city departments so that social services could be provided to children and families in our most disadvantaged neighborhoods. The next mayor will need to coordinate city services — health, recreation, safety, child welfare — and work more closely with nonprofits, hospitals, universities and other institutions to develop systems of support for schools.
Second, the organizations that were created to support schools have never been evaluated. Given the large numbers of schools that continue to struggle, it is clear that a new school support system will need to be devised. The Department of Education will need to do more than merely judge schools. It must also help schools to improve. Closing schools should be treated as a last resort — not the primary strategy used to deal with struggling schools.
Finally, in a city where over half the children come from homes where English is not spoken, shockingly little has been done to provide support to schools to meet the needs of English-language learners. These students have the highest dropout rates in the city and most schools are completely unprepared to teach the new Common Core standards to them. The next mayor will need to recognize that serving the needs of English-language learners cannot be treated as a minor issue. The future of New York hinges on how well we serve these students.
Stop the Teacher Evaluations
Sol Stern is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor to City Journal. He is the author of "Breaking Free: Public School Lessons and the Imperative of School Choice."
SEPTEMBER 5, 2013
The biggest education challenge our next mayor faces is the flawed teacher evaluation system that has been imposed on the schools by the Bloomberg administration. This so-called accountability reform is demoralizing for teachers and bad for children.
Bloomberg's "accountability reform" is demoralizing for teachers and bad for children.
The current metric for evaluating teacher quality is based on a complicated algorithm that ranks each teacher based on growth (or “added value”) in his or her students’ test scores, adjusted for students’ socioeconomic status. The problem is that leading testing experts have raised serious questions about the reliability of the value-added methodology. Education researchers who still support the evaluations concede they are unstable and there is a substantial margin of error.
Far worse are the undesirable side effects created in the classroom. Even when principals and teachers don’t resort to the illegal practice of “scrubbing” students’ answer sheets, as they were discovered to have done in Atlanta, the pressure to raise test scores leads to other distortions in the classroom. Teachers waste valuable time on test prep instead of broadening the curriculum and expanding students’ knowledge.
Moreover, test-based rankings for teachers will surely undermine the promising Common Core curriculum changes now being implemented in the schools. Under the Common Core, schools must broaden the curriculum to include “history/social studies science, and other disciplines." But test-based accountability leads teachers (particularly in elementary schools) to devote too much classroom time to getting students up to speed for the narrow math and reading topics covered on the state’s multiple choice tests. Under the current accountability system teachers tend to narrow the curriculum.
Therefore the next mayor should suspend the test-based teacher rankings in order to focus the education department’s full attention on successful implementation of the Common Core and new classroom curricula.
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