Re: Test Scores Uber Alles

[aburke5054@aol.com]

Leave it to FariTest to trumpet the trivial and call it Handel's 
Messiah.

A NYT article said, "Mr. Clark is praised by students and parents for 
restoring order and instruction to a school once called a 'caldron of 
terror and violence.' "  Changing a school from a caldron of terror and 
violence where drug dealers duked it out in the halls to a school where 
teachers and kids felt safe had to improve kids' achievement.  How many 
schools has FairTest transformed from caldrons of terror and violence 
into safe and orderly schools?

The article goes on to say that, " ..   After six years of Mr. Clark's 
leadership, Eastside remains first of all a reflection of one of New 
Jersey's worst school systems, in one of its poorest cities."  Kids 
were arriving at Eastside after experiencing a horrible school system 
for eight years.  Is it any wonder test scores didn't skyrocket at 
Eastside under Joe Clark?

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DE3DA153DF937A25752C0A96E948260&n=Top/Reference/Times%20Topics/Subjects/P/Principals%20(School)

Art

-----Original Message-----
From: Bob Schaeffer <bobschaeffer@earthlink.net>
To: ARN Main List <arn-l@interversity.org>; arn2-strategy 
<arn2-strategy@yahoogroups.com>; ARN State <ARN-state@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Sun, 2 Dec 2007 8:08 am
Subject: [arn-l] Test Scores Uber Alles


Recall that Paterson, New Jersey was the former home of
drill-sargeant-turned-high-school-principal Joe Clark, whose
hyper-disciplinarian "tough love" approach to education gained national
fame/notoriety in the movie "Lean on Me" but did not significantly
improve academic performance in this low-income community.


STATISTICS PINPOINT PROBLEMS IN PATERSON SCHOOLS

New York Times -- Sunday, December 2, 1007

by Winnie Hu


Paterson, N.J. -- Assistant school superintendents here are routinely
summoned to a 10 a.m. Thursday meeting where they must answer for
missing test scores, overdue building repairs and other lapses, which
are presented in painful detail on PowerPoint slides. Excuses are not 
an
option.


It is the latest evolution of Compstat, a widely copied management
program pioneered by the New York Police Department in 1994. Paterson 
is
one of a half-dozen school districts around the country that have
embraced this confrontational approach, known here as SchoolStat, in an
effort to improve school performance and overhaul bureaucracies long
seen as bloated, wasteful and unresponsive to the public.


SchoolStat borrows the tactics of the Compstat program — regular,
intense meetings in which police officials famously pick apart crime
data and, just as often, their subordinates — to analyze police
performance and crime trends, and to deploy resources to trouble spots.
The school version taps into an ever-expanding universe of data about
standardized testing and school operations to establish a system of
accountability.


In Maryland, the process has been credited with reducing teacher
vacancies and increasing student immunization rates in Baltimore
schools. In Montgomery County, Md., it has pushed principals to come up
with strategies like encouraging students to take the Preliminary SAT 
by
offering a free pancake breakfast if they attend.


In Jackson, Miss., the state’s largest district has used it to increase
food sales in high school cafeterias by adding salads and hot breakfast
items, after the data showed that more than one-third of the students
were not buying meals. In Philadelphia, where as many as 42 SchoolStat
meetings are held each month at all levels in the district, officials
say it has helped develop strategies to reduce the number of
suspensions, increase attendance and raise standardized test scores.


SchoolStat has attracted the financial backing of influential
organizations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundatoin, which spent
$268,000 this year on consultants to start a version called EdStat in
the District of Columbia’s Office of the State Superintendent of
Education to monitor federal grant use, special education referrals and
programs for low-performing schools.


The Stupski Foundation, which has supported reform efforts in 17 urban
school districts around the country, spent $85,000 this year to bring
SchoolStat to Paterson.


Some critics say that SchoolStat relies too heavily on easily
quantifiable standardized test scores to gauge academic progress, only
adding to the pressure on schools that face sanctions under the federal
No Child Left Behind law.


“The result is classrooms that are little more than test-coaching
factories,” said Robert A. Schaeffer, public education director of
FairTest, an advocacy group that opposes the broad use of standardized
testing.


The SchoolStat approach has also alienated some school employees, who
say they feel that they are being unfairly attacked, and has put others
in embarrassing situations.


During a meeting in Paterson last month, Brenda Patterson, an assistant
superintendent, was chided for showing up a few minutes late because 
she
had stopped at the bathroom. Another assistant superintendent had to
explain why one elementary school’s test scores were missing. (There 
was
no one trained at the school to put in the data, prompting district
officials to send over help immediately.)


“Who wants to sit among colleagues and not know the answer?” Ms.
Patterson said afterward, adding that she tried to anticipate what
questions would be asked and brought along thick binders of information
to keep at her fingertips.


“You may leave there feeling uncomfortable, but you also get a
direction,” she said.


In some school districts, there has been a backlash against SchoolStat.
Bryan Richardson, a former director of Baltimore’s program and now a
consultant who helps implement SchoolStat nationwide, said that after
Baltimore stepped up its efforts in 2005, the windows in his car were
broken on school grounds, and a school employee called him and his 
staff
derogatory names on a local radio show.


“Is it a dramatic shake-up of a school culture? It certainly can be,”
Mr. Richardson said. “When you start moving from a culture that rewards
relationships to one that rewards results, there are people who feel a
sense of diminished importance and loss, and that’s upsetting and makes
them angry.”


In New York City, where the Compstat model has been applied to the
Correction Department and the Human Resources Administration, Rudolph 
W.
Giuliani proposed a version for the school system, called LearnStat,
when he was mayor in 2001.


But the schools chancellor at the time, Harold O. Levy, rejected the
proposal, saying that it was too confrontational for the school culture
and not flexible or nuanced enough to take into account education
variables like truancy, disciplinary problems and the number of special
education students in a school.


Mr. Levy said recently that while the quality and analysis of education
data had become more sophisticated, he was concerned about how that 
data
would be used in a SchoolStat system. “The best use of data is when 
it’s
used collegially in an analytic way to improve the teaching practice,
and not when it’s used simply as a ‘gotcha’ game to cull the herd,” he 
said.


Some school districts, in response, have sought to adopt a version of
the process that avoids criticizing people or making it part of job
evaluations. Instead, these districts seek to provide help to failing
schools rather than assess penalties. Questions are typically addressed
to a group rather than to individuals.


Questioning administrators about their schools is hardly a new 
practice,
although it is often not as formalized as SchoolStat. Michael E.
Glascoe, the Paterson superintendent since 2005, recalled that as a
district official in Montgomery County, Md., he would be called to
meetings to explain test scores and disciplinary issues.


“We called it ‘hell’ because some of us would go in there and be there
for four or five hours,” Dr. Glascoe said.


In Paterson, an industrial city once known for its silk factories,
district officials rolled out SchoolStat last spring to help turn 
around
a school system that has been under state control since 1991 because of
fiscal mismanagement and poor academics. The district’s 27,222 students
are among the poorest in the state, with 75 percent qualifying for free
or reduced-cost lunches.


SchoolStat is directed by a panel of a half-dozen district officials 
who
decide what areas to focus on, and to follow up, in weekly meetings.
Data specialists compile statistical information on the topics, be they
test scores, staff assignments or repair orders.


While school officials have pored over data like test scores for
decades, in SchoolStat the information is broken down into unusual
detail, not just by school but also often by student, and presented in
elaborate charts and graphs so the SchoolStat panel can look for
problems or trends that are not evident in routine reports. The data is
updated every three to five weeks in “relentless follow-up,” said
Michael Kanarek, a district official who plans the meeting.


For instance, when the SchoolStat panel examined the backlog of work
orders in the district’s 52 schools last spring, the data specialists
created an electronic tracking system to find out when work orders were
being completed, and also kept a running tally of the results in weekly
and monthly charts. When SchoolStat looked at classroom instruction, it
started keeping tabs on the number of visits by instruction support
staff who are required to — but do not always — go to schools three
times a week.


Once the data has been analyzed, SchoolStat follows a predictable
pattern in which assistant superintendents and their staffs are called
into meetings to answer questions and explain problems.


The process of being “stat-ed” — as some participants have termed it —
begins promptly at 10 a.m. Thursdays and lasts for one hour; district
officials stick so closely to the agenda that they periodically call 
out
the time and even cut off conversations.


“When we ask a question, it’s not a gotcha; it’s not at you, it’s to 
try
to solve the problem,” the deputy superintendent, Michael Rush, said at
a November meeting.


Derrick Hoff, the principal of School 6, said he felt empowered by the
changes. Two years ago, it took more than three months to repair a 
chair
in the school auditorium that he had reported as broken — so long, in
fact, that a woman tried to sit on it during a parents’ meeting with 
the
superintendent and fell to the ground.


“There would be a lot of breakdowns in communication,” he said. “And
you’d never be quite sure when they’d come to your building.”


But this fall, Mr. Hoff reported a broken gym door, and it was fixed 
the
next day.


http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/nyregion/02stat.html



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