value added comes to Westchester

The Cohoes city school district, outside Albany, is considering a gifted program for elementary students and adding college-level courses after discovering that its top students improved less on standardized tests in the past two years than everyone else in the district.

In Ardsley, N.Y., a Westchester County suburb, administrators intend to place more special education students in regular classes after seeing their standardized test scores rise in the last year.

And as the New York City Department of Education begins grading each public school A to F for the first time this fall, more than half the evaluation will be based on how individual students progress on standardized tests.

All three changes resulted from an increasingly popular way of analyzing test scores, called a “growth model” because it tracks the progress of students as they move from grade to grade rather than comparing, say, this year’s fourth graders with last year’s, the traditional approach.

Concerned that the traditional way amounted to an apples-to-oranges comparison, schools in more than two dozen states have turned to growth models. Now a movement is mounting to amend the federal No Child Left Behind Act, which is up for reauthorization this year, to allow such alternative assessments of student progress.

money 'graph:

[M]any school officials in affluent suburbs favor growth models because they evaluate students at all levels rather than focusing on lifting those at the bottom, thereby helping to justify instruction costs to parents and school boards at a time of shrinking budgets.

Maybe, maybe not.

Some of these schools are going to be slide and glide. I think the Scarsdale school system is a candidate - though I'm not sure how the tutoring there factors in. (may have to hit refresh a couple of times)

In New York, education officials are developing a statewide growth model that will be in place by the 2008-9 school year, to be used as an additional way to measure student learning. Fifteen New York school districts, mainly in the Albany and Catskill regions, have experimented with growth models on their own through a voluntary program started by two regional support educational agencies in 2005. The districts typically pay these agencies from $1,000 to $6,000 to train administrators and staff, and an additional $2.50 a year for each student for the data analysis, which is partly reimbursed through state aid.

“There is absolutely a need for this kind of data,” said Timothy G. Kremer, executive director of the New York State School Boards Association, which represents about 700 districts. “It keeps the focus on student achievement, and not on whether you’re going to pave the parking lot or who’s going to get hired as next year’s coach.”

[snip]

Even some supporters of growth models have expressed concerns that they could shift attention and resources away from the neediest students. Kati Haycock, director of the Education Trust, an advocacy group for disadvantaged children, said she was worried about growth models’ focusing too much attention on students at the top. “It risks so broadening the federal government’s involvement that its historical role will be dissipated,” she said.

Thanks, Kati.


money 'graph, part 2:

"When you look at achievement, every single wealthy suburb has high test scores,” noted Theodore Hershberg, a professor of public policy and history at the University of Pennsylvania. “That’s a terrible way to measure the performance of a school or an individual teacher because what you’re really looking at is family background or family income.”

In the high-performing Ardsley schools, where more than 87 percent of the students passed state reading tests this spring, district officials have long mined scores on their own, compiling a thick data book for review and coining the saying: “In God we trust, everybody else bring data.” [Didn't Margaret Spellings coin that phrase? I certainly remember her using it.]

But this year, they employed a more sophisticated growth model, which showed, for instance, that seventh-grade special education students had benefited from learning in regular classes. So this fall the district will expand the mainstreaming to the elementary and high schools. “This gives us the ability to measure whether a program has any teeth or is all fluff,” said Richard Maurer, the superintendent. ^*

wow

Ardsley is next door to Irvington.

Has a major autism program.

So.... naturally we moved to Irvington, not Ardsley.

On the other hand, Ardsley also has TERC.

So it's probably just as well we're here.

Which raises a question.

Value-added compares each child to himself. Does he achieve at least one year's growth each year in school, one year's growth as one year's growth is defined for him?

That's fine, but if a school has always had TERC isn't your child's typical "one year growth" going to be pretty poor?

A kid has TERC for 5 years, then every year thereafter the school will be basing "data-driven" decisions in the revelation that your kid has once again achieved one year's growth....

So I'm thinking value-added isn't going to end the math wars.



This is amazing:

Cohoes school officials have spent more than $1 million on programs for their most struggling students in the past five years, and wanted to find out how much they had progressed. They learned that the lowest-level students were doing fine, while their high achievers were starting to fall behind.

Charles S. Dedrick, superintendent of the 2,200-student district, said that parents had complained that their children were scoring too low on the Advanced Placement exams to receive college credit, but he thought there was just a problem with the A.P. coursework. Now, after examining over time the state test scores of students in advanced classes, he sees a more systemic problem. So the district has made top-level students a priority, too, and is considering starting a gifted program, expanding A.P. and college-level courses, and adding an International Baccalaureate program to keep them challenged. [I am hoping that in addition to "challenging" these kids the school will actually teach them. My experience of "challenge" to date has meant top-down instruction at school, direct instruction at home.]

“The fact is we serve all students, and not just the lower-end students,” said Mr. Dedrick, who travels across the state to speak about growth models to school superintendents. “If you’re just concentrating on one group of kids, it’s not fair because both sets of parents pay taxes.”

source:
Schools Move Toward Following Students' Yearly Progress on Tests

I see many signs that our high-end kids are underachieving. First of all, I know for a fact that C. has not read a single book even close to his reading level this year. [scroll down]

Beyond this, though, the fact that the district is dedicated to keeping kids out of accelerated and Honors courses, as opposed to recruiting more kids into these courses tells me kids aren't reaching their potential.

I also suspect - haven't taken the time to look at this closely - that we're in the same boat as Cohoes when it comes to AP scores. I could be wrong, but I don't think our kids are getting the scores they could and should be getting.

I don't think our average kids are doing well, either (though I don't know about high-end SPED kids. From what a couple of parents have told me, they're in better shape than the regular, non-SPED, average-achieving kids). Still, the rhetoric around here is Kati Haycock. Last winter the middle school principal [scroll down to end] told a large group of parents at a school board meeting that he was going to implement the middle school model because it would help the low-end kids. paraphrasing: "I only care about the lower kids, because they're the ones who are struggling."

A parent was told the same thing by another administrator: "We don't care about the high-achieving kids. They're fine." Words to that effect.

These are direct statements made to the parents of high-achieving kids. "I don't care about your kids" - this is the sentiment expressed openly and unapologetically as taxes climb each and every year.

Our taxes when we moved here 9 years ago were around $12,000/year; we're up to $22,000 this year.

And the middle school principal, in his first year on the job, feels perfectly comfortable telling a group of parents that he "doesn't care about the high kids."

In general there is a constant undercurrent - sometimes not so "under" - of hostility towards pushy parents who think their kids are smarter than they are. "Don't push your kids" -- this is the advice given openly to parents of high school kids in this $21,000/per pupil district.

"Everyone has a place."

When I told the math chair, back in 6th grade, that "Christopher needs to be able to take math in college" she said, "he needs to take math to graduate from high school." Subject closed. She had zero interest in my concern that he be prepared for college math.

And then there was the middle school principal's Back to School night skit on school quality.

He'd just come to Irvington from Albany, where he was principal at a school attended by disadvantaged kids.

"I don't like NCLB," he said, "but it has one good idea, which is evaluating your school."

How does one evaluate one's school?

"There are four criteria," he said.

"Number one is the school. You can evaluate the quality of your school by evaluating your school. But if you're putting everything on the school, that's too much."

The next 3 criteria were:

• quality of the students
• quality of the parents
• quality of the community

Irvington, he said, had high-quality students, high-quality parents, and a high-quality community (which he knew because he'd been driving around town admiring the nice lawns).

ergo: the school is high quality

This was the first time any of us had ever laid eyes on the man, and he performed a skit - he had 4 middle school girls holding up big posters with the 4 school-quality criteria written on them - about How to evaluate your school that said nothing about the school, the teachers, the curriculum, or the students' achievement.

slide and glide


update from concerned parent:

I was talking to a friend whose daughter will be going to the middle school. They are only allowing something like 3% of the 7th graders to take algebra. Everyone else will be taught using Connected Math Program.

If that's not institutionalizing underachievement, I don't really know what is.

I think it's time for me to read Jay Mathews' book Class Struggle. I have the book, and have read the first chapter, but it's time to sit down and concentrate.

Mathews wrote the book, as I understand it, because he had the compare and contrast experience of having written a book on Jaime Escalante and then moving to Scarsdale where there was a notable absence of Jaime Escalantes.

Cheri Pierson Yecke writes about a similar phenomenon in The War against Excellence, a terrific book every parent with a middle school-aged child should read.



The War Against Excellence
value added assessment PDK
value added assessment FAQ page
interview with William Sanders
A new way of judging how well schools are doing

Jay Mathews on the class struggle
Jay Mathews column on wealthy schools, AP courses, SAT scores
are wealthy schools worse?
value added comes to Westchester


^* Can we apply value added to character ed?