Brownsville parents and teachers outraged over students sharing PS 140
BY RACHEL MONAHAN DAILY NEWS WRITER
Tuesday, July 1st 2008, 10:56 PM
Brownsville parents and teachers are outraged over plans to put two transfer schools - for overage, undercredited students - into a building where middle schoolers attend classes.
They're also asking why Brownsville isn't slated for a high school for neighborhood teens.
"The parents are extremely angry," said Yolanda Hector, Kappa V Middle School PTA president. "[We] are not comfortable with the transfer high school because of the age difference."
"My feeling is that, yes, all students deserve an education, but it's inappropriate to put 16- to 20-year-olds in the same building as middle school [students]," said teachers union district representative Karen Blackwell-Alford.
The transfer schools, Brooklyn Democracy Academy and Metropolitan Diploma Plus High School, are slated to open this fall in the Rockaway Ave. building where Kappa V and Public School 140 are located.
"The question we have for the mayor,: Why two transfer high schools and not a regular high school?" said Ualin Smith, who teaches seventh-grade science at Kappa V. "We just want a decent high school that the kids of Brownsville can apply to."
Parents also expressed concerns about their childrens' safety with older students in the building.
"God forbid the system brings [the older students] there and they [hurt] my son," said Lafleur Edwards of Brownsville, whose son, Dylano, 11, will be a Kappa V seventh-grader. "When I'm done suing the [Department] of Ed, they'll be bankrupt."
"My school is District 75 students," said Robert Berger, who teaches at PS 140, of his special education students. "Many of them have emotional issues....It [isn't] a good idea."
Department of Education spokeswoman Melody Meyer said students will be kept separate, not even sharing time in the cafeteria and gym.
Agency officials have held at least two meetings with parents, Meyer added, and school officials have discussed combining resources to buy computer equipment or to renovate.
"We've been working very closely with the parent leaders of the schools," Meyer said. "That said, there is a need for transfer schools in Central Brooklyn."
But parents said the Department of Education was taking away their choices.
Frita Mendez, mother of sixth-grader Seremmay, 11, and eighth-grader Iseinie, 13, said she chose Kappa V over a sixth-through-12th grade school because she was concerned about her daughters being in school with older students.
"I didn't sign on for something like this," she said.
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
The New York Times
July 2, 2008
Students, Teachers and Parents Weigh In on State of the Schools
By JENNIFER MEDINA
For the second year in a row, a vast majority of New York City parents, teachers and students who responded to a Department of Education survey said they were satisfied with their schools, with more teachers saying their schools maintain order and make it a priority to help students achieve.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced on Tuesday that more than 800,000 people responded to this year’s survey, which cost $2 million to conduct. The results of the survey account for 10 percent of the letter grades the city assigns to individual schools, with test scores and attendance making up the rest.
“I think for the first time a major school system has really listened to the parents, listened to the teachers, listened to the principals, listened to the students and tried to find out what they really say, rather than have the arrogance to think we know, ” the mayor said.
This the second year the city has conducted the survey of nearly 1.5 million parents, teachers and students. One encouraging finding was that more students reported feeling safe in hallways, bathrooms, and locker rooms at their school: 72 percent this year compared with 68 percent last year.
There were some signs of trouble and dissatisfaction, however. More than a third of middle and high school students said getting good grades did not earn the respect of other students, and nearly a quarter of parents named smaller classes as the improvement they most wanted. Both findings echo the results of last year’s survey. But among teachers, 82 percent of those who responded to the voluntary survey said that their schools made it a priority to help students achieve their learning goals, up from 73 percent last year. And nearly three-quarters said that their schools maintained order and discipline, up from 64 percent last year.
Randi Weingarten, the president of the United Federation of Teachers, said in a statement that the survey results reinforced the idea that student-teacher interaction was the most important aspect of schools.
Ninety-four percent of the 347,829 parents who responded to the survey said they were “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with their child’s teacher, and 86 percent said the teachers gave “helpful comments on homework, class work and tests.”
“The fact that parents think so highly of their children’s teachers also indicates how selfless our educators are,” Ms. Weingarten said. “They give their all despite feeling that the central administration isn’t listening to their concerns.”
Last week, the teachers’ union released the results of its own survey, which showed that 82 percent of those responding said they believed Mr. Klein did not have “confidence of the expertise of his educators.”
Education Department officials sharply criticized the union’s methodology, saying that the survey asked leading questions at a time when the union was also running advertisements criticizing the department.
The participation in the city’s survey increased significantly from last year, when 587,000 people responded, and included 48,002 teachers — a 61 percent response rate — and 410,708 students, a 78 percent response rate. Most students filled out the surveys in class, and principals across the city pushed to increase the parent participation, which was 40 percent this year, up from 26 percent last year.
Mary Ellen Kociszewski, principal of the High School for Applied Communication in Long Island City, Queens, where the survey results were released on Tuesday, said she asked parents to fill out surveys when they came to school for teacher conferences and to pick up report cards.
James S. Liebman, the Education Department’s chief accountability officer, who oversaw the survey, said that over all, parents of elementary school students had a higher response rate than those of older children, as they did last year. He said the response rate increased at so-called high-need schools, which have significant numbers of poor, minority and special education students.
Students, Teachers and Parents Weigh In on State of the Schools
By JENNIFER MEDINA
For the second year in a row, a vast majority of New York City parents, teachers and students who responded to a Department of Education survey said they were satisfied with their schools, with more teachers saying their schools maintain order and make it a priority to help students achieve.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced on Tuesday that more than 800,000 people responded to this year’s survey, which cost $2 million to conduct. The results of the survey account for 10 percent of the letter grades the city assigns to individual schools, with test scores and attendance making up the rest.
“I think for the first time a major school system has really listened to the parents, listened to the teachers, listened to the principals, listened to the students and tried to find out what they really say, rather than have the arrogance to think we know, ” the mayor said.
This the second year the city has conducted the survey of nearly 1.5 million parents, teachers and students. One encouraging finding was that more students reported feeling safe in hallways, bathrooms, and locker rooms at their school: 72 percent this year compared with 68 percent last year.
There were some signs of trouble and dissatisfaction, however. More than a third of middle and high school students said getting good grades did not earn the respect of other students, and nearly a quarter of parents named smaller classes as the improvement they most wanted. Both findings echo the results of last year’s survey. But among teachers, 82 percent of those who responded to the voluntary survey said that their schools made it a priority to help students achieve their learning goals, up from 73 percent last year. And nearly three-quarters said that their schools maintained order and discipline, up from 64 percent last year.
Randi Weingarten, the president of the United Federation of Teachers, said in a statement that the survey results reinforced the idea that student-teacher interaction was the most important aspect of schools.
Ninety-four percent of the 347,829 parents who responded to the survey said they were “satisfied” or “very satisfied” with their child’s teacher, and 86 percent said the teachers gave “helpful comments on homework, class work and tests.”
“The fact that parents think so highly of their children’s teachers also indicates how selfless our educators are,” Ms. Weingarten said. “They give their all despite feeling that the central administration isn’t listening to their concerns.”
Last week, the teachers’ union released the results of its own survey, which showed that 82 percent of those responding said they believed Mr. Klein did not have “confidence of the expertise of his educators.”
Education Department officials sharply criticized the union’s methodology, saying that the survey asked leading questions at a time when the union was also running advertisements criticizing the department.
The participation in the city’s survey increased significantly from last year, when 587,000 people responded, and included 48,002 teachers — a 61 percent response rate — and 410,708 students, a 78 percent response rate. Most students filled out the surveys in class, and principals across the city pushed to increase the parent participation, which was 40 percent this year, up from 26 percent last year.
Mary Ellen Kociszewski, principal of the High School for Applied Communication in Long Island City, Queens, where the survey results were released on Tuesday, said she asked parents to fill out surveys when they came to school for teacher conferences and to pick up report cards.
James S. Liebman, the Education Department’s chief accountability officer, who oversaw the survey, said that over all, parents of elementary school students had a higher response rate than those of older children, as they did last year. He said the response rate increased at so-called high-need schools, which have significant numbers of poor, minority and special education students.
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
The NY Sun - Mayor Sees a Test Scores Triumph
Mayor Sees a Test Scores Triumph
Or is it a case of inflation of results?
By ELIZABETH GREEN, Staff Reporter of the Sun
June 23, 2008
http://www.nysun.com/new-york/mayor-sees-a-test-scores-triumph/80476/
Mayor Bloomberg will announce an education victory today: Test scores are up across the city, by double digits at some schools. But a cloud is already gathering, as education experts are raising the possibility that these gains and others across the country could suggest score inflation and not real learning gains.
The scores being released today show a nine-percentage-point gain in math citywide versus last year, and a seven-point gain on the reading test. The gains are even more remarkable when viewed over the six-year timeline since Mr. Bloomberg took office: Three-quarters of city students now score proficient at math, up from 37% in 2002.
This year's gains were larger than the increases statewide, though smaller than in other cities, such as Buffalo, Rochester, and Yonkers.
Mr. Bloomberg is scheduled to announce the results at a press conference at P.S. 175 in Harlem this afternoon.
The mayor has often greeted test-score increases as evidence that he is fulfilling his promise to improve public schools. "I'm happy, thrilled, ecstatic," he said last year, announcing gains on the state math test.
Since then, concerns have grown that rises in state test scores in New York and elsewhere do not reflect real improvement, but rather "inflations" — either due to easier tests, deliberate cheating, or more subtle "gaming" that helps students perform better without actually having to learn more material.
Local education experts last September called for an audit of the state test after a respected national test showed the city posting significant gains in only one academic area, despite reports from the state test showing larger gains across the board.
A report grading state tests recently delivered New York State a C+. And a study by the teachers union found that a reading test dropped in difficulty by as many as six grade levels between 2004 and 2005.
The concern in New York follows a pattern around the country.
"Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us," a new book by a testing expert and Harvard Graduate School of Education professor, Daniel Koretz, calls score inflation the "dirty secret" of high-stakes testing.
Although some test-score gains represent the real, hard work of teachers and students, others "are entirely illusory," Mr. Koretz writes.
A recent study of Texas schools is the latest in a string of academic observations on the effects of high-stakes testing. The study concludes that educators are "gaming" their state tests by preventing low-achieving students from taking them and teaching only material they expect to appear on the test, rather than the wider span of material tests are supposed to represent.
A study by a pscyhometrician and professor at the University of Iowa, Andrew Ho, found that two-thirds of state tests are publishing higher gains than a national test.
New York is not immune from the phenomenon, according to another researcher studying state tests, Bruce Fuller, a professor of education and public policy at the University of California at Berkeley.
"We've got great rhetoric and great pressure on teachers to teach to the test, but at the end of the day when Albany reports out the share of kids that are proficient, we can't really trust their claims, especially when put up against the federal definition of proficiency," Mr. Fuller said.
The State Education Department defended its tests.
"All of New York's tests are checked many times to be sure that a score this year means the same next year," a spokesman, Tom Dunn, said in a statement. "The only way for a student to improve performance is by learning the curriculum — reading, writing, and math."
At the city Department of Education, where scores are used to help determine school closures, teacher and principal salaries, and promotion decisions from one grade to another, a senior official who oversees testing, Jennifer Bell-Ellwanger, said she has confidence that state tests are reliable.
Ms. Bell-Ellwanger said the department takes into account the potential errors of testing by looking at trends rather than individual data points.
Shown the results, the education historian Diane Ravitch noted that scores were up statewide, and that some cities had even larger gains than New York City.
"What this suggests to me is that the state lowered the bar and it is easier to pass the exams," Ms. Ravitch said.
She said the lesson of the results should be that the state "needs an independent agency to conduct the state tests and report on results."
The results will have an effect on schools. Teachers who signed up for a pilot project on merit-based performance bonuses could become eligible to receive them. Schools teetering on the edge of a failing report card grade could be pushed to another side.
Students will also be affected.
Yesterday, the principal at I.S. 349 in Bushwick section of Brooklyn, Roy Parris, said that his school's high test scores — he said they shot up about 10 points in both math and reading — mean that only one seventh-grader of 155 total is eligible to be held back this year, down from about 15 seventh-graders last year.
Or is it a case of inflation of results?
By ELIZABETH GREEN, Staff Reporter of the Sun
June 23, 2008
http://www.nysun.com/new-york/mayor-sees-a-test-scores-triumph/80476/
Mayor Bloomberg will announce an education victory today: Test scores are up across the city, by double digits at some schools. But a cloud is already gathering, as education experts are raising the possibility that these gains and others across the country could suggest score inflation and not real learning gains.
The scores being released today show a nine-percentage-point gain in math citywide versus last year, and a seven-point gain on the reading test. The gains are even more remarkable when viewed over the six-year timeline since Mr. Bloomberg took office: Three-quarters of city students now score proficient at math, up from 37% in 2002.
This year's gains were larger than the increases statewide, though smaller than in other cities, such as Buffalo, Rochester, and Yonkers.
Mr. Bloomberg is scheduled to announce the results at a press conference at P.S. 175 in Harlem this afternoon.
The mayor has often greeted test-score increases as evidence that he is fulfilling his promise to improve public schools. "I'm happy, thrilled, ecstatic," he said last year, announcing gains on the state math test.
Since then, concerns have grown that rises in state test scores in New York and elsewhere do not reflect real improvement, but rather "inflations" — either due to easier tests, deliberate cheating, or more subtle "gaming" that helps students perform better without actually having to learn more material.
Local education experts last September called for an audit of the state test after a respected national test showed the city posting significant gains in only one academic area, despite reports from the state test showing larger gains across the board.
A report grading state tests recently delivered New York State a C+. And a study by the teachers union found that a reading test dropped in difficulty by as many as six grade levels between 2004 and 2005.
The concern in New York follows a pattern around the country.
"Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us," a new book by a testing expert and Harvard Graduate School of Education professor, Daniel Koretz, calls score inflation the "dirty secret" of high-stakes testing.
Although some test-score gains represent the real, hard work of teachers and students, others "are entirely illusory," Mr. Koretz writes.
A recent study of Texas schools is the latest in a string of academic observations on the effects of high-stakes testing. The study concludes that educators are "gaming" their state tests by preventing low-achieving students from taking them and teaching only material they expect to appear on the test, rather than the wider span of material tests are supposed to represent.
A study by a pscyhometrician and professor at the University of Iowa, Andrew Ho, found that two-thirds of state tests are publishing higher gains than a national test.
New York is not immune from the phenomenon, according to another researcher studying state tests, Bruce Fuller, a professor of education and public policy at the University of California at Berkeley.
"We've got great rhetoric and great pressure on teachers to teach to the test, but at the end of the day when Albany reports out the share of kids that are proficient, we can't really trust their claims, especially when put up against the federal definition of proficiency," Mr. Fuller said.
The State Education Department defended its tests.
"All of New York's tests are checked many times to be sure that a score this year means the same next year," a spokesman, Tom Dunn, said in a statement. "The only way for a student to improve performance is by learning the curriculum — reading, writing, and math."
At the city Department of Education, where scores are used to help determine school closures, teacher and principal salaries, and promotion decisions from one grade to another, a senior official who oversees testing, Jennifer Bell-Ellwanger, said she has confidence that state tests are reliable.
Ms. Bell-Ellwanger said the department takes into account the potential errors of testing by looking at trends rather than individual data points.
Shown the results, the education historian Diane Ravitch noted that scores were up statewide, and that some cities had even larger gains than New York City.
"What this suggests to me is that the state lowered the bar and it is easier to pass the exams," Ms. Ravitch said.
She said the lesson of the results should be that the state "needs an independent agency to conduct the state tests and report on results."
The results will have an effect on schools. Teachers who signed up for a pilot project on merit-based performance bonuses could become eligible to receive them. Schools teetering on the edge of a failing report card grade could be pushed to another side.
Students will also be affected.
Yesterday, the principal at I.S. 349 in Bushwick section of Brooklyn, Roy Parris, said that his school's high test scores — he said they shot up about 10 points in both math and reading — mean that only one seventh-grader of 155 total is eligible to be held back this year, down from about 15 seventh-graders last year.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)