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Strong High School Progress Reports still draw fire from UFT
Nov 26, 2009 4:45 PM
*UFT President Michael Mulgrew, while congratulating schools and teachers that earned bonuses for reaching their improvement targets, criticized the Department of Education’s grading system that accompanied the release of the High School Progress Reports.
“There’s a lot of good teaching going on in the schools that got A’s this year — but there’s a lot of good teaching at the schools that got D’s.” Mulgrew said. “The bottom line is that the DOE’s grading system is a flawed instrument. It doesn’t really measure the challenges that many of our schools face, and doesn’t really capture many of their successes.”
Among other concerns, Mulgrew pointed out the DOE’s decision to raise the test cut points, so that schools that improved their scores maintained the same letter grade or even got a lower grade. For example, Christopher Columbus HS in the Bronx received a D, down from a C in 2008, despite a gain of almost five points this year. This puts the school in line for possible closing.
What’s more, even though some schools have more students with a variety of learning challenges, the DOE did not alter its “peer indexes” to take this into account.
Progress and performance
High School Progress Reports combine four- and six-year graduation rates, student credit accumulation and Regents passing rates to produce each school’s grade.
Progress, especially by low-performing students, gets extra weight. But the formula is hard to understand and results are sometimes counterintuitive.
Still, the grades are a high-stakes data point in the DOE accountability system. Schools that get C’s, D’s or F’s face possible closure.
This year 75 percent of the schools got A’s or B’s, down from 83 percent last year. The percentages of C and D schools also increased. One school, Peace and Diversity Academy in the Bronx, created in 2004, received the dreaded F.
Different populations
Though the Progress Reports are supposed to account for challenging students, the grading system still favors schools with the less challenging students.
For example, the Progress Reports weight all special education students the same. However, in Columbus and the other 20 D schools this year, half their special education students on average require a more restrictive environment (MRE). But just one-tenth of A schools required that intensive level of support.
According to Christine Rowland, a UFT Teacher Center staffer at Columbus, the school also did not get full credit on its Progress Report for the large numbers of high-needs students it serves. The school takes in many students without prior test scores, she said. In these cases the DOE assigns them the “average” score for entering high school students when in reality they are often more challenging to educate.
The UFT found this year’s D and F schools served more English language learners, more special education students and more students overage for grade than they did last year.
The New York Times, in a Nov. 18 article, showed that over the last three years high schools that got the lowest marks have been the ones with the highest percentages of poor, black and Hispanic students.
Small schools
At his press conference, Chancellor Joel Klein touted the higher Progress Report grades for the small high schools opened since he became chancellor. The move angered Mulgrew.
“The chancellor has the nerve at his press conference to say his small schools are doing well — the ones he created,” he told the Delegate Assembly on Nov. 18. “They’re all his schools. He’s responsible for every school, and he’s had seven years to fix them all.”
The union promised to review any school targeted for closure to see if its Progress Report fairly took into account all the challenges it faces.
Peace and Diversity, for example, has been bounced around between floors at Lehman HS, then moved several miles to share a building with an elementary school, then put into trailers outside a school in Morrisania and finally moved inside that school this year, according to the Daily News. It still has little space and heavy student turnover.
