Ten reasons to distrust the new accountability system

... now appearing on the NYC Public School Parents Blog

Compiled by Leonie Haimson who also sent along the following back to school greeting to her NYC Education News Listserv:

Welcome back to all of you! I hope you had a great summer and enjoyed the break. I wish I had great news for you, but we are still waiting for a word from the State Education Dept. about whether NYC’s class size reduction proposal will be approved or rejected, even though the final decision was supposed to be announced by Aug. 15.

But the news is not all bad. As mentioned in yesterday’s Times, the state is still arguing with the city over the adequacy of its submission, which failed on at least two grounds: the so-called “Fair student funding” system by which the city allocated the additional state funds did not properly distribute resources to our lowest-performing and overcrowded schools, as the law required; and when it came to class size, there was no “there” there – no real class size reduction plan in the numerous pieces of paper submitted by the city .

Instead, in an exceedingly clumsy fashion, the DOE merely attempted to shoe-horn its existing initiatives– including interim assessments, radical decentralization, and the so-called “fair student funding” system -- into its “Contract for Excellence” proposal.

To their credit, State Education officials heeded the criticisms made by many of you -- the 900 plus parents, teachers, and stakeholders who came out to testify in the middle of the summer – with less than two weeks notice – as well as the letter we faxed to SED with over 200 signatures of parent leaders and advocates, asking them to withhold funding until and unless DOE came up with a real class size plan.

Rather than significantly smaller classes, then, the new school year begins with the DOE’s main priorities intact: a seriously flawed accountability system that is likely to unfairly punish our lowest-performing and most overcrowded schools and put our neediest students at even more risk. (For more on this, see below.)

There will also be a new series of interim standardized tests at all schools, given five to six times a year, which are supposed to help lead to “differentiated instruction” but which will simply take more valuable time – and joy -- out of learning.

If the administration were really interested in creating conditions that would lead to differentiated instruction, they would of course reduce class size – which is a precondition to making individualized learning and teaching possible. Instead, the DOE insists on stubbornly ignoring the research, the priorities of parents and teachers, and now, even the new state law that required them to come up with an actual class size reduction plan, and our classes remain the largest in the state by far.

Rather than bend to the will of the state, the city appears to be stubbornly putting at risk $250 million of valuable CFE funds by refusing to revamp its proposal. Let’s hope the State stands firm.

2. Meanwhile, please let me know as soon what your child’s class sizes are this year – and especially if they are unusually large and/or went up since last year. You should also let me know if your child has a smaller class size – as DOE claims many schools have done with the extra state funds, without disclosing in which schools smaller classes are supposed to occur and what actual reductions are supposed to result.

Also, please let me know if a new school in your building has caused class sizes to swell – as the DOE explicitly promised that it would not allow this to occur in any school this year, as opposed to years past.

Since schools are now free to do pretty much whatever they want in terms of class size – and everything else – except for exceeding the union contractual limits, we need to keep an even closer eye on them than ever before. (Already, I have heard of several cases of schools that are using this new freedom to close at lunch on Wed. for more professional development – which may or may not be legal.)

In case you need to refresh yourself as to the UFT limits and other class size rules, see my website here:

http://www.classsizematters.org/classsizerulesfunding2007-8.html

3. Finally, check out Erin Einhorn’s scoop in the Daily News today about how the 2005 test scores were inflated – just in time for Mayor Bloomberg’s re-election. With 85% of every school’s grade based purely on test scores, and every principal in jeopardy of losing his or her job based on these grades, we need to remind ourselves what an in imperfect instrument test scores are, in providing a complete picture of a school’s quality.

Please remember to let me know what your child’s class size was today – whether good or bad -- and please forward this message to every parent who cares.