General News

UFT: Progress reports shouldn’t punish

by Michael Hirsch

Jan 17, 2008 3:47 PM

The school progress reports touted by the Bloomberg administration as the best way to demonstrate school outcomes remain controversial months after they were released.

At a Dec. 10 City Council Education Committee hearing, UFT Vice President Aminda Gentile called the reports “a good first step in making schools accountable” but a blunder when “their results [are used] to close schools and punish others after only one year of data.”

She said any school system “needs to nurture the schools that work and focus like a laser beam on those that don’t. The school progress reports fall short on both counts.”

Gentile described parents, teachers, students, administrators and the public in general as “confused, angered and fearful about these reports” and “lack[ing] clear information about how the DOE designed them and is using them. That is not what’s meant by accountability.

“A failing grade should be a signal for extra help to a school — not a death sentence.”

Part of the problem with the progress reports is that they are often misleading or inaccurate, she said.

“Staten Island’s PS 35, for example, got an F from the city even though 98 percent of its students met standards on the state math test,” Gentile said. “The problem was a drop in its reading scores. While 87 percent of its students met state standards last year (as measured on standardized reading test scores), this number was down from 93 percent the year before.

“Yes, the scores dropped, but this is still a high-performing school and it clearly doesn’t deserve an F.” Equally troublesome, she said, is that at least two schools the state finds in good standing — PS 79 in the Bronx and PS 183 in Brooklyn — are slated to be closed by the city.

The new system in effect punishes schools for not focusing exclusively on English and math, but on other subjects like art and music, Gentile said.

She also gave the example of Bard College HS, “one of the most successful and innovative in the system, [which] received a C because the progress reports don’t give credit for college level courses.”

Meanwhile, several schools deemed to be failing under the state and federal accountability systems got As or Bs from the city.

Gentile suggested that giving the public a better and more complete view of how schools were doing meant using more than one measure to evaluate schools.

“Basing 85 percent of the progress report on test scores — using a test that was not designed to measure school or student progress — greatly overemphasizes the tests’ importance,” she said.

She also called for taking such teaching and learning conditions as a school’s class size, school overcrowding, school safety, teacher retention and student turnover data into account while factoring in “the availability of educational opportunities, such as access to college-level and advanced-placement courses, music, art, physical education, community involvement opportunities, work readiness and apprenticeship and intern programs, as well as current technology” in order to offer a true picture of a school’s strengths and weaknesses.

The DOE also should give more weight to the school surveys, Gentile said. The surveys “are one of the few tools the department itself has made available by which parents and teachers can express their opinions. Because of this they are the best indicator of whether a school is a place that is collegial, welcoming and professional, the kind of environment in which students, parents and teachers thrive, or whether a school is an educationally toxic environment that fails these very same people.”

The text of Gentile’s Council testimony is available at www.uft.org.