nominally high-performing

In the TIMES today, NYC schools get their first value-added report cards:

The grades released yesterday contained many surprises, with some schools with top-notch reputations receiving B’s, C’s, D’s — and even F’s, to the astonishment of some parents.

That is because unlike traditional methods of judging schools, this one involves a complex calculation that assigns the most weight to how individual students improve in a year’s time on standardized state tests. It also compares schools with similar populations, as judged by demographics and incoming students’ test scores, and assigns final grades based on a curve. More than 60 percent of the schools earned A’s or B’s.

[snip]

Mr. Bloomberg said that the reports were devised to give parents crucial insight into their schools, and that if the grades upended longstanding school reputations, well, that was precisely the point. “We should be asking ourselves why some of the schools we thought were doing well aren’t serving students as effectively as other similar schools,” he said. Still, some parents lashed out at the enterprise, saying it overemphasized standardized tests.

“The way you treat our educators is part and parcel of the way you treat our students — constantly barraging them with narrow, deadening tests and demoralizing them with meaningless scores,” Jan Carr, whose son attends the Salk School of Science, a coveted Manhattan middle school that received a C, wrote in a letter to the chancellor.

[snip]

Several esteemed elementary schools that middle-class parents often factor in to their real estate decisions — including Public School 6 on the Upper East Side, P.S. 87 on the Upper West Side, P.S. 234 in TriBeCa and P.S. 321 in Park Slope, Brooklyn, — received B’s. Other popular schools fared worse. P.S. 154 in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn, received a D, as did Central Park East I in Harlem.

Yes indeed.

P.S. 234 in TriBeCa.

Ground Zero in the NYC math wars.

A whole lotta tutors there at P.S. 234, and they still swing only a B.

The fact is in District 2 our kids are learning math like champs. Our scores are extraordinary,” said Daria Rigny, District 2 superintendent.

But the whispers in the schoolyards are that the high scores owe much to the widespread use of tutors.

“If you just studied TERC and took the test for Stuyvesant you wouldn’t be prepared. The only way is to be tutored,” said Jonathan Levine, the father of one current and two former P.S. 234 students. He says this makes two tracks, those who tutor and those who don’t.

One math tutor who works with many Downtown kids said most of her students are 4th and 5th graders whose parents worry that they will be unprepared for state tests and middle school. “They don’t even tell me what it is they want them to learn. They just say ‘could you teach them the math that I learned?”’ The tutor, who did not want to be identified, said some kids do struggle with TERC. “They try to show me how they solve problems in their classes and half the time they don’t understand it.”

I still don't see how value-added assessment adequately controls for tutors.



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