Insight
Growing an independent voice
Oct 18, 2007 5:04 PM
Research Partnership forms to examine NYC schools
One aspect of mayoral control of schools is the sad fact that city schools have become what’s called in the news business a “single-source story.” Information on both what the schools are doing and how they are doing emanates from City Hall now. The schools’ story line and even school system history become City Hall’s to tell — and spin — as the mayor and his chancellor see them.
The mayor repeats a set of “facts” to build his story: When he took over, the schools were failing poor children and the system was dysfunctional. Bureaucracy was bloated, and bad teachers overran the low-performing schools. Since he won control, bureaucracy has been trimmed, test scores have soared, the performance gap has narrowed and the city eliminated uncertified teachers from the schools.
Is this account true? Some of it is, some of it is not, but that’s not the point. The point is that City Hall and Tweed should not be the only storytellers in the school system. Other, more disinterested, people should have a voice, and their versions of how schools are doing should serve as a check on the mayor’s and chancellor’s declarations. Do others count fewer administrators at Tweed? Is there credible evidence that students are learning more? Is it true the weakest teachers are (or were) in the poorest schools?
8 million stories
Many people in this once-naked city, not just educators but parents, academics and advocates, have called for an independent research group that would filter the mountains of data Tweed now both generates and interprets — and offer perhaps a different but more dispassionate view of what it all really means.
Thus there was a good turnout and high-level buzz surrounding the formal launch of a new Research Partnership for New York City Schools, even the Friday afternoon before Columbus Day weekend. This new partnership, two years in the making, is being guided by the Social Science Research Council and includes researchers from New York University, Brown University’s Annenberg Institute, Columbia, Fordham and City Universities, to mention a few. UFT President Randi Weingarten is on the governing board as is Chancellor Joel Klein, New York City Business Partnership CEO Kathryn Wylde, former Princeton University. President William Bowen, and Bob Hughes, president of New Visions, the sponsor of many new schools.
The foundation-funded research group is modeled on the Consortium on Chicago School Research (CCSR), a 17-year-old organization that has supplied high-quality research, evaluation and help with data to the Chicago schools through its various waves of decentralized school governance and mayoral control.
Consortium speakers at the event talked about how they had walked a delicate line in Chicago by being involved enough to know the schools well and make reforms work, yet removed enough to offer objective findings. The consortium has often delivered “bad news” to the district, they said, but its reputation as a force for improvement, not a group arguing a particular point of view, has kept it viable.
Getting past ‘fad’ reforms
Speaking at the event, Weingarten warned, “School systems still do the ‘fad’ of the year, or the month, or the day. There is an ‘in with the new, out with the old’ mindset that can actually mask bad practice. What we need to do in schools is capacity-building. We need to see what really works and what doesn’t. Data has to be our ally, not our enemy.”
The partnership will house DOE data and open it (stripped of identifying confidential information) to its own researchers and others as well. This is a major advance. The DOE has in the past controlled access to data and selected what it wanted to highlight for presentation. Making this vast database accessible will bring much-needed transparency and public scrutiny.
The partnership’s first research papers, presented at the conference, suggested that city-specific research could truly change school policies. Researchers at SUNY Albany and Stanford found that elementary teachers and middle school math teachers who leave teaching in New York within their first two years on average are less effective than their colleagues who remain. Some natural sorting has occurred before new teachers come up for tenure in year three, which could be why a large percentage of those who teach and are rated satisfactory for a full three years get tenure.
A paper presented by NYU researchers looked at the distribution of education funding across poor and less-poor schools in the city, concluding that the Fair Student Funding effort may be too mild a policy. Adjusting funding to drive substantial extra resources to schools with concentrations of hard-to-educate students could have a larger effect, one of its authors said. A third paper found that new high schools and high school choice under Children First have not changed the reality that a handful of city high schools are far more popular than all the rest.
Affecting actual practice
The Chicago Consortium’s Melissa Roderick told the gathering that the key to the consortium’s work was to explicitly build capacity in the schools for “the use of research in practice.”
She recounted the consortium’s role in efforts to improve Chicago’s graduation rates, an effort sure to resonate with New York City educators.
CCSR developed a system to measure instead whether high school freshmen were “on-track” to graduate (an indicator that is now being used in some of the New Visions high schools in New York). They knew that the chances of graduating were closely connected to whether freshmen successfully completed their first year on track, and they demonstrated that to principals.
Schools found this measure helpful. It was not another standardized test but instead an indicator that they could work with. The result was widespread changes in freshmen-year programs.
“The role of research was to bring measurement to bear to help educators identify a focus for their efforts,” Roderick and her co-author wrote. “The answers were not apparent and were intended to come from the practitioners and not from the researchers or from the central office.”
Questions remain
There are still questions about how independent the research partnership will be, especially with the Department of Education as a founding member. The DOE has to be on board because, first, it has the data, which it will make accessible to partnership researchers and others. Second, according to founders, the participation of the key education players makes the group more than just another academic committee.
But the DOE’s participation will be closely watched. In his welcoming remarks, Chancellor Klein warned against bias and called for high-quality research. “There is too much mythology in public education,” he told the audience.
Indeed there is.
