Professional anti-teacher union blogger Michael Antonucci recently took his advocacy to the pages of the New York Daily News in an Op-Ed entitled “Fewer students divided by more teachers = very costly math.”

Antonucci’s claim is that from 2001 to 2006, New York City public schools lost 52,458 students, but added 5,647 teachers. On this basis, he concludes:

Over the long term, the trend is unsustainable. Revenues for public education are appropriately tied to student enrollment. It doesn’t take an economist, however, to see that shrinking revenues and increasing expenditures are a recipe for future budget deficits and fiscal meltdown… Shuttered schools, massive layoffs, early retirement buyouts and other attrition lead to dissatisfaction for everyone involved. It’s hard to tell an angry union rep or an overwrought parent that a laid-off teacher probably should not have been hired in the first place.

There is one little problem: Antonucci’s numbers are wrong. According the New York City’s Department of Education payroll records, the number of teachers actually decreased from 79,027 in March 2001 to 77,147 in April 2006. [Since 2006, in the period after that Antonucci cites, the number of teachers have risen modestly once again, so the overall figures for the decade are flat.] Further, according to the Mayor’s Management Report, the population of students declined 49,100 over Antonucci’s time period, not 54,458. This decline is a drop of approximately 4%.

Antonucci says that he obtained his figures from the U. S. Census, and has nothing more to say on the subject. It doesn’t take more than a minute or two on the Census web site to understand that it is an extraordinary warehouse of statistical information, such that identifying it in a general way as the source of a statistic is next to meaningless: finding the actual statistic is like searching for a needle in a haystack. Consequently, it is impossible to know if the statistics Antonucci cites are for all New York City schools [which appears to be the case for virtually all of the educational data compiled by the census] or if they distinguish public district schools from private schools and charter schools. Whatever their basis, the numbers he provides do not jive with the most authoritative data available. He has failed to do his homework, and bases his argument on claims that are not supported by the data.

The real story here, which Antonucci completely misses, is why the NYC Department of Education has not taken advantage of the opportunity posed by declining student enrollments to lower class sizes. Based on his numbers, Antonucci says there is a 14:1 teacher to student ratio in the NYC public schools. Even if Antonucci were using accurate figures to calculate the ratio, it would still be a misleading figure, since an overall ratio includes special education classes with mandated class sizes that are much lower than general education, as well as programs like universal pre-K with mandated lower class sizes — a statistician would say that in this case, there is a great deal of variation from the mean, so simply citing it is misleading. The general education class sizes, especially in the upper grades, remain all too high, and as we have shown here at Edwize in the past, the larger the school, the larger the class size. The bottom line is that with an opportunity to bring New York City class sizes closer to those in suburban schools, the NYC Department of Education has failed to act. It has not even spent the C4E funds it receives for lowering class size in this area. A commentary without an ideological axe to grind would have asked why the Department of Education has been wasting this opportunity.

There are times when one wonders whether the Fordham Foundation blog, Flypaper, is the work of an agent provocateur designed to discredit conservatives in the world of education.

How else do you explain posts designed to insult the maximum number of educators?

And what do you say when the defeat of France by Nazi Germany in the early stages of World War II is laid at the feet of… teacher unions? Are Checker and the boys in a competition to publish the ultimate reductio absurdum?

What follows is Sol Stern’s rejoinder to our response [below]. We are giving Stern the last word here. Our position was laid out in the original post, Is the educational right capable of debating Obama’s educational program? and in our response, and there is nothing new to add to the discussion at this point.

Let’s recall that you started this by charging that in my City Journal article of two months ago I “smeared” poor Barack by associating him with Bill Ayers’ Weatherman days. In my response I showed, point by point, that my article was all about Ayers’ current views, not his past, and I challenged you to cite a single sentence in the article that might substantiate your claim of a “smear.” You failed to meet that challenge. Instead of doing the honorable thing and admitting that you goofed, you are now obfuscating with a lot of nonsense about how my account of Ayers’ current education views and his role in a destructive movement that harms children is somehow illegitimate. You say that this has no place in any discussion about Obama’s virtues as a presidential candidate and that my position on this is “unreasonable.” But you yourself provide one good reason why Ayers’ activities are relevant when you point out that he served together with Obama on the Annenberg Challenge, one of the most important recent education ventures in Chicago. What if it was revealed that Senator McCain and Charles Murray sat together on the board of some conservative education group? Wouldn’t it then be legitimate to ask McCain what he thought about Murray’s education views? How is the Obama/Ayers education connection any different?

I can’t help concluding that the reason you launched this factually unsupported attack on me, is that the union is now shilling for Obama, as it previously shilled for Clinton. You still haven’t explained why you never said a word about the Clinton campaign’s overt efforts to link Obama with Ayers’ terrorist past, but then decided to dredge up an old article of mine which never even came close to making that link. I guess it’s all politics Leo, and politics makes for strange bedfellows. In that regard I see that one of your new boosters in this argument is none other than that good friend of the UFT, Mike Klonsky. Don’t you think Al would be turning over in his grave?

In his reply [below] to our post, Is the educational right capable of debating Obama’s educational program?, Sol Stern wants to have his rhetorical cake and eat it, too. He wants credit for saying that it is not fair to link Barack Obama to Ayers’ past as a leader of the Weather Underground, simply because Ayers supports Obama’s candidacy and the two had a casual acquaintance in the world of Chicago politics where Ayers is enough of a fixture to have the explicit approval of the current mayor. So far, so good. But then Stern goes on to raise the issue of Ayers’ current educational views, which he describes as “saying exactly the same thing as he did during his Weatherman days, except not punctuating his political points with bombs,” bringing us full circle back to Ayers’ past. What is more, Stern avers, Obama is ‘ducking’ the issue of Ayers’ educational views, which he has a responsibility to denounce. In sum, having announced that he shut the front door to an argument that links Obama to Ayers, he opens up the back door and invites it in in a different form.

What exactly is Obama’s relationship to Ayers, such that one could reasonably claim that he would need to take such a public stance? Ayers is not an educational advisor of Obama, and he participates in no body shaping Obama’s educational policy. He is a casual acquaintance from the world of politics, one of hundreds if not thousands Obama would know in his home town of Chicago. Obama sat on one or two of the same committees as Ayers, such as the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, of the sort where elected officials characteristically lend their names but not their time. Finally, Ayers is one academic on a very long list of Obama supporters in academia who have no connection to the Obama campaign.

The notion that Obama has a responsibility to know what Ayers’ educational views are, and to take a public position on them is thus most unreasonable. The readers of this blog are mostly drawn from the field of education: how many of us have read Ayers’ work, and have any direct knowledge of what his educational ideas are? Yet a presidential candidate is supposed to have such a command of this and untold numbers of analogous issues in other fields, and offer informed, judicious public pronouncements on them?

The sole piece of evidence Stern offers to support his conjecture that Obama is somehow engaged in subterfuge over Ayers’ educational views — that Obama incorrectly described him as a professor of English rather than a professor of Education — is completely consistent with Obama having only a passing acquaintance with Ayers. Moreover, it requires an extraordinary leap of logic to see such a misstatement as evidence of an attempt to ‘duck’ the question of Ayers’ educational views.

What this argument does is link the names of Obama and Ayers without justification, in guilt by association. No matter who makes the argument — and for the record, no one at the UFT or the AFT ever did — it is wrong.

Sol Stern replies to our post, Is the educational right capable of debating Obama’s educational program?, below.

I’m used to having my views criticized from both the left and the right, but I have never had one of my education articles so egregiously distorted as Leo Casey does on Edwize. Some school choice groups have attacked me for my second thoughts on vouchers and even called me a tool of the teachers unions, but at least they fairly accurately summarized my argument. Not so Casey. In his post, Casey accuses me of “taking the lead to smear Barack Obama with the 40-year-old political past of University of Illinois Professor Bill Ayers.” I challenge Casey to produce a single sentence in my City Journal article that justifies that claim. In fact, in my article, I specifically write that “Obama has a point ” when he says that he has been “unfairly attacked for a casual political and social relationship with with his neighbor, former Weatherman Bill Ayers.” I also wrote that if Chicago Mayor Richard Daley can hire Ayers to work in the public schools and forgive him for his sins of the 60s, “why should Obama’s less consequential contacts with Ayers be a political disqualification?”

Any fair minded person reading my article will see that it is not about Ayers past, but rather about his present day education views and activities. In that context, I write that the real issue that Obama ought to confront is Ayers’ position as one of the leaders within the Ed school professorate of the movement to “teach for social justice” in public school classrooms, including math and science classrooms. I also show how Obama has so far successfully ducked this issue (for example, saying in one of the TV debates that Ayers is merely “some English professor.”) So I conclude the article by writing that “it would be nice to hear what [Obama] thinks of his Hyde Park neighbor’s vision for turning the nation’s schools into left-wing indoctrination centers” and I suggest that we should hear from the other candidates about this issue as well. But Casey says not a word about the main thrust of my article.

I note with some bemusement that Casey decided to falsely accuse me of an Obama smear two months and a week after my City Journal article was published. Where has Leo been all this time? Well, for at least part of the time, he and his fellow union officers were still busy campaigning for their chosen candidate, Hillary Clinton. As has been well documented, Clinton not only did the Obama-Ayers smear in at least one TV debate, but she encouraged campaign aide Sidney Blumenthal to circulate articles about the Obama-Ayers connection to the reporters covering the campaign. I may have missed it, but I didn’t hear Casey or other UFT officials complaining to the Clinton campaign about these “smears.”

In his current writings and in his ed school courses, Professor Ayers is saying exactly the same thing as he did during his Weatherman days, except not punctuating his political points with bombs. Like many other Ed school professors he’s urging teachers to use the classroom for left wing propaganda. I find that abhorrent, and it’s not a smear to say so. (It’s just as abhorrent when teachers use their classrooms to disseminate right wing propaganda.) I would think that this would at least be an issue for the UFT, which calls itself a “union of professionals.” To ask a commonly asked question: What would Al Shanker have done?

A sure sign that the 2008 election is shaping up to be a realigning election, decisively ending three decades of conservative dominance of American politics, is the declining quality of argument put forward by the Right. This is particularly true in the field of education, where right-wing education pundits are reduced to complaining about the long-dead political pasts of two Chicago-based Obama education supporters.

First, there was the attempt, with the Manhattan Institute’s Sol Stern and The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation’s Mike Petrilli taking the lead, to smear Barack Obama with the 40-year-old political past of University of Illinois Professor Bill Ayers. And now comes the effort to vilify Obama by linking him with the political past of education blogger and director of Chicago’s Small School workshop Mike Klonsky.

All of this is a very sad excuse for substantive political discourse.

Obama was all of ten years old when most of the events in question took place, and there is absolutely nothing in the record to suggest that he has even the slightest sympathy or admiration for Ayers’ participation in the Weather Underground or Klonsky’s leadership of a Maoist sect. To the contrary, the record shows quite the opposite.

The issue is not what we should think of the Weather Underground or the Maoist October League, which soon became the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist); both organizations died a quick and well-deserved death decades ago, imploding from the internal contradictions of a mindless authoritarianism and (certainly in the case of the Weather Underground) a senseless glorification of violence.

Indeed, there is no danger of hyperbole in describing the politics of the Weather Underground as deranged.

Certainly Ayers’ recent apology for the Weather Underground’s descent into a nihilistic violence, which included homages to the Manson family — ‘the Vietnam War drove us to it’ — is entirely unpersuasive. The great preponderance of Americans opposing the war did so with non-violent action, and we remember the infantile calls of the Weathermen “to bring the war home” as a political godsend for many of those supporting the government’s war policies and opposing our efforts to reverse them. Nothing that is said here in criticism of the smears perpetrated on Obama should be read as an excuse for the Weather Underground or the self-styled Maoists.

The important point is a different one: the suggestion that Ayers’ and Klonsky’s distant pasts have anything to do with Obama’s educational program is entirely disingenuous. Rather than ferreting out dangerous radicals in Obama’s campaign, it’s a partisan effort to bolster the Republican cause. It’s tossing the kind of red herrings contained in e-mail chains repeating the falsehood that Obama is a Muslim — a base appeal to religious and ethnic prejudice.

This disingenuousness becomes apparent when one considers the selectivity employed in raising the political pasts of some, but not other, prominent educational supporters of presidential campaigns. One national figure who is far more influential in the field of education today than either Ayers or Klonsky, former Milwaukee Superintendent and outspoken voucher advocate Howard Fuller, was also a leader of a Stalinist sect in the 1970s. As Owusu Sadukai, Fuller led an outfit called the Revolutionary Workers League [Marxist-Leninist].

When Fuller endorsed George Bush’s presidential candidacy [described here in an interview in the far-right journal Human Events], there was not a peep from those who are now burning up their computer keyboards over Ayers’ and Klonsky’s support of Obama. Yet what is different, other than the presidential candidate and the fact that Fuller provides a public face for the vouchers movement, which allows it to pretend it has a community base — even as it funds itself with the money from the hard-right Bradley Foundation, which was founded by a supporter of the John Birch Society?

If we rightly dismiss as absurd the notion that Fuller’s distant past was remotely probative of George Bush’s educational agenda, what should we conclude about the attempts to smear Obama with the pasts of his supporters?

All three of these men — Ayers, Klonsky and Fuller — were prominent enough in their youth to leave a public record of the poorest political judgment. Yet their pasts have little bearing on their present educational philosophies, and no bearing on the Obama or McCain campaigns. If the educational right can’t take on Obama’s educational program on its merits, and substitutes this sort of smear for substantive debate, that reflects on it — not on Obama.

Over the years, and especially this past week, concern has risen about whether the New York State tests are reliable indicators of absolute student achievement. The arguments are familiar to all of us. Standardized tests do not test the full curriculum. They are subject to gaming; they show gains at odds with NAEP; and their calibration from year to year seems far less a science than an art. But regardless of whether or not these tests are accurate in terms of actual gains, they probably aren’t meaningless. At the very least, they probably allow us to glean relative gains across large populations. After all, if the tests are easier, then all the scores go up. But if scores go up more for some large groups than for others, it ought to make us pause.

In light of that, let’s look at two interesting facts:

Money: In the 2007-2008 school year, CFE finally brought significantly increased funding to New York State’s high needs districts. New York City, along with four other large urban areas (Rochester, Buffalo, Yonkers, and Syracuse) were the main beneficiaries of these funds.

Scores: In the 2007-2008 year, these same five cities (the Big Five) generally outpaced statewide gains on the annual tests in ELA and Math. Overall in grades 3-8:

• Math was up 8 points statewide, but 9-15 points in the Big Five. Buffalo, Rochester, and Yonkers gained 15, 15, and 12 points respectively

• ELA was up 5 points statewide, but 7-9 points in the Big Five

These bigger gains, like the additional CFE resources, are something new for the Big Five. Last year, score changes in the cities roughly paralleled the state, and the same is true for the three years before that. In those three years, in the instances where cities did depart from the state, half the time they did a little better, and half a little worse. (See here and here for state/city data)

One year of numbers is hardly conclusive, and standardized tests can never give us a very complete picture of what our kids are learning at school. Still, it is interesting that the first year of money also brought a better rate of gain.

The longitudinal scores in New York City are interesting as well. Joel Klein would like his fear and punishment policies to get the credit for this year’s increases, but the numbers don’t support that. We’ve been living with Joel Klein’s Children First reforms for five years now, but the passing rates didn’t generally increase much until this year. What is more, passing rates increased more in the three years before Children First (2000-2003) than they did in the four years after that. For example, ELA in grade 4 increased by 10 points from 2000 to 2003, but only 3.5 over the next four years (through 2007, and before CFE money). In Grade 8, the ELA passing rate did increase more quickly after Children First, but only as much as it did in the other four big cities, and not as much as the state. Overall, most of the gains for which Joel Klein would like to take the credit occurred before his programs started, or after the funding came in 2008, with CFE.

Points gained before reforms

2000-2003

(3 years)

Points gained

after reforms

2003-2007

(4 yrs)

Points gained

in year five

(2008)

(1 year)

Grade 4 ELA

10

3.5

5

Grade 8 ELA

0

9

1

Grade 4 Math

21

7

5.5

Grade 8 Math

12

11

14

The extent to which these gains will hold is anybody’s guess, but if they do, improvement is hard to tie to Klein’s reforms.

More likely, what mattered was the cash. Even before CFE, more competitive salaries strengthened the pool of new teachers whose skills then improved as they gained experience. Then came the first year of CFE. In schools, money translates into time and people. CFE meant schools could provide time for teachers to plan together, improve together, and discuss students and their needs.In places where classes got smaller, teachers could devote more time to each child, and throughout the system kids got to spend more time getting help in small groups, or after school, or on the weekend. And extra personnel not only provided the tutoring for these small groups; it also provided support on behavioral issues.

In other words money has changed the much-maligned “inputs.”

And maybe that’s the difference shadowed in the scores.

Score date can be found at the following links: here, here, here and here.

[Editor’s note: Peter Goodman blogs at Ed in the Apple, where this post originally appeared.]

The State Ed Department released embargoed State ELA and Math scores to individual schools many weeks ago… and after a seemingly endless wait released the scores publicly.

Commissioner Mills and Chancellor Klein lauded the scores and everyone else was bemused.

How is it possible for so many school to have double digit gains?

Sol Stern, in the City Journal calls the results the Lake Wobegon Effect, where all students are above average, and points to some school districts where, in effect, every kid is “above average,” aka proficient.

Eduwonkette, the perceptive blogger at Education Week, crafts a careful analysis and points out the dramatic drop in numbers of kids at Level 4, and Andy Wolf, at The New York Sun speculates on the reasons.

Over at Eduwonk Andy Rotterdam likes Eduwonkette’s analysis and chides Sol Stern, maybe, he asks, kids just did better? however, he agrees the lack of transparency makes it difficult to properly assess the meaning of the results.

Rumors flitted about that Commissioner Mills has been expected to leave his post, and changed his mind. And, it’s really difficult to fire a commissioner with spectacular increases in test scores.

For five years Klein has confused, massaged, manipulated, dissembled, obscured and obfuscated test scores to make his administration, his policies, appear “successful.”

Aside from his acolytes, the Mayor, the NY Daily News and the New York Post editorial boards, experts have looked askance at his interpretation of the results.

Last fall the Department paid for every high school 10th and 11th grader to take the PSAT exam. A few months later schools received the results, and, they were appalling. No press conference, no comment at all. Anecdotally Tweeders bumbled, ” … the kids knew the test wasn’t important, there was no test prep …”

How is it possible for NAEP scores to be “flat,” PSAT scores to be abysmal, SED ELA/Math scores to leap?

The simplest way to resolve the contradictions would be a longitudinal study … tracking kids cohort by cohort throughout the Klein years … any takers?

There are no magic bullets. No programs, no tricks. If test scores in a particular school increase year after year we should ask: What are they doing right? If they are not: Why not?

If we are serious about improving student achievement we have to concentrate on the only place in which achievement can be improved: the classroom. As Dylan Wiliam shows us

Learning is driven by what teachers and pupils do in classrooms. Teachers have to manage complicated and demanding situations, channeling the personal, emotional, and social pressures of a group of 30 or more youngsters in order to help them learn immediately and become better learners in the future. Standards can be raised only if teachers can tackle this task more effectively. What is missing from the efforts alluded to above is any direct help with this task. This fact was recognized in the TIMSS video study: “A focus on standards and accountability that ignores the processes of teaching and learning in classrooms will not provide the direction that teachers need in their quest to improve.”1

The pastiche of Klein initiatives/programs/dreams/threats/progress reports and press releases all boils down to “empowering” principals, with a carrot and a stick, and hoping against hope that principals know what to do.

We will not make real progress until we realize that the only way to improve learning is to improve teaching, and, you can only do it the “hard way,” classroom by classroom.

This morning, the New York newspapers reported on the publication of the UFT’s survey on the leadership of Chancellor Joel Klein and the Department of Education. Read the New York Times, the Daily News and the Post. While the survey was offered in a constructive spirit of a full 360 degree system of accountability, the DoE spokespersons responded by calling the survey political and questioning its methodology.

But the overwhelming preponderance of questions on the UFT survey were taken verbatim from the DoE’s own Learning Environment Survey. The few exceptions were those questions which addressed subjects not covered on the DoE survey, such as the education of the whole child and the educational efficacy of the DoE’s regimen of testing. To show just how faithful this process was, consider the following side-by-side comparison of the wording from the DoE’s survey and the wording from the UFT’s survey. [For each statement, both the DoE survey and the UFT survey asked respondents to choose among the following answers: strongly agree, agree, disagree and strongly disagree.]

DoE Learning Environment Survey:
School leaders communicate a clear vision for this school.
UFT Survey:
Chancellor Klein communicates a clear vision for the NYC school system.

DoE Learning Environment Survey:
School leaders encourage open and honest communication on important school issues.
UFT Survey:
Chancellor Klein encourages open communication on important school decisions.

DoE Learning Environment Survey:
The principal places the learning needs of children ahead of other interests.
UFT Survey:
Chancellor Klein places the learning needs of children ahead of other interests.

DoE Learning Environment Survey:
The principal is an effective manager who makes the school run smoothly.
UFT Survey:
Chancellor Klein is an effective manager who makes the school system run smoothly.

DoE Learning Environment Survey:
The principal has confidence in the expertise of the teachers.
UFT Survey:
Chancellor Klein has confidence in the expertise of his educators.

DoE Learning Environment Survey:
The principal invites teachers to play a meaningful role in setting goals and making important decisions for this school.
UFT Survey:
Chancellor Klein invites educators to play a meaningful role in setting goals and making important decisions in their schools.
and
Chancellor Klein invites parents and community members to play a meaningful role in setting goals and making important decisions about the education of their children.

DoE Learning Environment Survey:
School leaders encourage collaboration among teachers.
UFT Survey:
Chancellor Klein promotes collaboration between principals and teachers and among all educators.

DoE Learning Environment Survey:
To what extent do you feel supported by your principal?
UFT Survey:
Chancellor Klein works to provide the support I need as an educator.

DoE Learning Environment Survey:
Order and discipline are maintained at my school.
UFT Survey:
Chancellor Klein works to promote order and discipline at my school.

Accountability has been a watchword of the Klein-Bloomberg administration of the NYC Department of Education. It introduced the Progress Reports which graded the performance of New York City public schools, it started the school quality reviews, and it initiated the learning environment surveys in which teachers, parents and students are asked to evaluate their school and school leadership. Accountability, Tweed argues, is at the heart of their efforts to transform NYC schools.

Educators embrace genuine accountability for their work and for their schools’ performance, but have found that the DoE’s system often fell short of that mark. The UFT launched its own project this spring to demonstrate how genuine accountability could work. In contrast to the single grade of the progress reports, we advocated for grades on each of the four pillars of a successful school – academic performance, school safety and climate, teamwork for student achievement and DoE supports for the school. Rather than basing the grades almost entirely on the results of standardized tests, we called for broad-based use of many different forms of evidence, from the qualitative data of school reviews and quality surveys to the quantitative data of standardized tests and other ‘hard’ statistics. Accountability, we insisted, should be designed to fix schools, not fix blame.

Since we published our alternative accountability framework, the DoE has changed its progress reports, incorporating a number of our proposals. Most of these changes are steps in the right direction, but a great deal remains to be done. Perhaps most significantly, Tweed has indicated no desire to move toward a full 360 degree system of accountability, in which everyone in the DoE – and not just those who work in the schools – is held responsible for their performance.

Since the UFT believes strongly that full 360 degree accountability is essential for NYC public schools, we organized a survey, modeled after the DoE’s learning environment surveys, to allow educators who are our members to evaluate the leadership of the system. In order to be as fair as possible, we took the wording of our questions directly from the wording of the DoE’s survey. And to secure the confidentiality and accuracy of the results, we had members placed their completed surveys in secret ballot envelopes to be tabulated by the American Arbitration Association, the same organization that counts and verifies our union elections and contract ratifications.

Here are the results of our survey. They speak for themselves.

Three themes are worth noting here. First, educators in NYC public schools believe that the Chancellor has a way to go in providing the supports they need to do their work well. Second, they feel that the Chancellor needs to place a great deal more emphasis on educating the whole child. And third, they conclude that more must be done to give parents and community members a meaningful role to play in the decisions concerning the education of their children.

When I graduated from kindergarten, I wore a sundress and a mortarboard made from blue paper. I had my first brush with fame when I delivered the line “We welcome you to kindergarten graduation.”

Like many rites of passage, kindergarten graduation has come a long way since the late ’80s. As I gazed around in amazement this morning at my 6-year-olds transformed into 16-year-olds through the magic of polished shoes, poufy dresses and copious amounts of hairspray, Miss B read my mind: “It’s like a prom,” she said, and then she corrected herself: “It’s like a wedding and a prom.”

The boys wore 3-piece suits made by Calvin Klein (!), complete with vests, ties, and slippery shoes. Their hair was slicked within an inch of its life (”My mom says my hair can’t get messed up,” one reported). The girls had their hair curled, or blown out, or otherwise styled, and at least 75% of them were dressed like Princess Diana (if Princess Diana were about to become a kindergarten graduate, that is).

181 school days ago, on the very first day of school, my kindergarteners were the first students I taught at this school. Armed only with a copy of Miss Bindergarten Gets Ready for Kindergarten (and the all-important stickers, of course), I was scared to death. Now they are kindergarten graduates and I am very nearly a second-year teacher — we’ve all come a long way.

I oohed and ahhed over how handsome and beautiful they all looked — “Miss Brave, do you like my tie?” “My grandma bought me these shoes!” “My titi did my hair!” — and then I patiently zipped up gown after gown, admonishing them not to touch their tassels (”Miss Brave, what’s a tassel?”) or fuss with their hats. When the boys began to complain that their ties were too tight and the girls began to complain that their bobby pins were sticking them, I introduced them to a painful truth: Fashion hurts.

But then again, so does growing up. And that’s what this year has been all about.

The test scores were unquestionably good news this week, but they had their light and dark sides.

The reduction in Level 1s to single digits in almost every grade in ELA and math was amazing. Not long ago, people called Level 1students “unteachable.” But teachers used every trick in the backpack–small-groups, one-on-one tutoring, differentiated instruction, grouping and pairing and dozens of others–and these students really moved.

The UFT, fortified with new data-analysis resources, looked at where all the new Level 3 kids came from this year.

What we found was that in math, Level 1s and Level 2s both moved up. So this year’s gains did not appear to reflect a “bubble kids” strategy of focusing only on the high Level 2s. Instead, students across the spectrum moved up. In addition, there were small but welcome gains in Level 4s (with the exception of grade 3, which went down). In the elementary grades for the most part a quarter of kids scored at Level 4. In the upper grades that falls off a little but not too much.

The math chart here [PDF] shows the increases and decreases at each level over the last two years.

ELA was a different story. Yes, the gains were good and occurred in every grade. Again, there were reductions in Level 1s and Level 2s. BUT there were also drops in Level 4s. Part of the increase in Level 3s recently has come from decreases in Level 4s, especially in the middle schools. In fact, as Eduwonkette showed in two different blog posts this week, 4th grade Level 4s have declined by 10 percentage points since 2003, and Level 4s decreased in all grades 5-7 this year.

One harrowing little anecdote from around the schools this week: the valedictorian of a large District 26 middle school this year is a Level 3. The staff there says this has never happened before.

Here is the chart for ELA [PDF], showing the good news and the bad.

Spend a few minutes with these charts and you can learn a lot about the scores.

JD2718 has put together an interesting Internet collection of performances of the old union anthem, Which Side Are You On?

Recently, someone posted the following comment on my blog:

“What is wrong with your students’ families that they are not teaching these basic skills long before the kids show up in your classroom? Are they just so dysfunctional that they don’t know how to raise their children up right?”

My first reaction was to rush to their defense. After all, only I’m allowed to badmouth my students; no one else gets that privilege! My second reaction was to think about the rather wide cultural divide that separates me from my students. The majority of them — I think the figure hovers somewhere around 80% — are from Spanish-speaking backgrounds. And an even greater majority of them are from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds. When their families encourage them to fight back, to hit someone who hits them, I believe that their intent is not to raise their children to be dysfunctional; their intent is to raise their children to be survivors.

It is true, though, that a lot of my students come from troubled backgrounds. I have students whose fathers are not around because they’re in jail for molesting family members or dealing drugs. I have students whose fathers are not around because they’re abusive and have restraining orders against them. I have students whose parents fail to bring them to school on time — or at all — because they can’t get themselves out of bed in the morning, let alone their children. I have students whose parents are on drugs, or drink too much. I have 10-year-old students whose mothers are 23, or whose mothers are dead at the hands of their fathers, or whose mothers have boyfriends that neglect or, worse, abuse them. I have students whose parents work more than one job and students whose parents have more children than they can probably take care of.

So yes, I have students whose families are dysfunctional. And I’m constantly having to remind myself that when my students do something that I consider outrageously offensive and then stare at me blankly like they have no idea what they’ve done wrong, the great majority of the time they really do have no idea what they’ve done wrong. I have students who genuinely do not grasp the difference between positive and negative attention. I have students who hit back because that’s what they’ve been taught to do. I have students who behave inappropriately because that’s all they know.

So it’s my job, not just to teach them how to diagram a sentence, but how to get along with each other in a world full of people. Because most of all — even on the days when it seems hopeless — maybe especially those days — I have students who are full of possibility.

Alisa Miller, head of Public Radio International, provides some insight into the challenge faced by American teachers of Global Studies. Hat tip: Ezra Klein.

“Patriotism,” Samuel Johnson famously said, “is the last refuge of scoundrels.”

Johnson was not an opponent of patriotism. James Boswell, Johnson’s friend and biographer who passed on his comment, made it clear that what Johnson opposed was the cynical use of patriotism to defend the indefensible and the practice of imputing a lack of love of one’s country to those with whom one disagrees, rather than addressing the substance of the disagreement in a honest and forthright manner.

The political discourse of American education is now beset by the rhetorical equivalent of what Johnson condemned. It takes the form of “we — and not our opponents — care about children.” Here’s Fordham’s Mike Petrilli in one of the more recent versions of this sophistry, commenting on a New York Times letter to the editor of AFT President Ed McElroy: “I’m happy to concede that teachers (if not always their unions) want what’s best for children.”

Just as attacks on the patriotism of one side or the other of foreign policy debates only raises the level of acrimony and diminishes the substantive discussion, the level of educational policy debate is debased by claims that one or another position does not care about children. It’s time to put it to an end.

Today’s New York Times reports that the NYC Department of Education’s changes in the Gifted and Talented Program actual diminished access of children of color and poor children. Given that the rationale for the move toward determining admissions to the program with the results of a single standardized test was to increase what is clearly now unequal access, one would think that these results would be sufficient to rethink the policy. But unnamed DoE officials told the Times that it was likely the new policy of using a standardized test to determine eligibility would remain in effect, with the most significant change being “broadening the applicant pool” — that is, making more students take the test.

James Borland, a Teachers College professor who is an expert of gifted and talented programs, told that Times that “the idea that somehow making this totally reliant on tests would be an improvement, it’s mind-boggling.” Unless, you happen to be from the educational twilight zone at Tweed, where empirical evidence that your ideology is wrong results in redoubling the policy built on that ideology.

Thousands of educators, parents, students and community activists from the Keep the Promises coalition in a Hands Across New York City rally at City Hall on June 16. The crowd endured thunder, lightning and rain to hear from City Council members, labor leaders and outraged parents. Also speaking was City Comptroller William Thompson, who said Chancellor’s Klein’s budget math “doesn’t add up.” After the rally, Weingarten joined protesters, chanting: “Keep the Promises,” in marching around City Hall Park and past the Department of Education headquarters on Chambers Street.

The Zimbabwean Congress of Trade Unions [ZCTU] is in the forefront of the non-violent movement struggling to restore democratic government and human rights to a nation that has long suffered under the violent and despotic rule of Robert Mugabe and his ZANU-PF party. As a consequence, the leaders of ZCTU have been the victims of the latest wave of bloody repression. ZCTU President Lovemore Matombo and General Secretary Wellington Chibebe have been detained under charges of “spreading falsehoods prejudicial to the state” — Orwellian language for publicizing the violence now taking place in Zimbabwe — and are scheduled to go on trial next Monday.

The British Trade Union Congress is planning a demonstration of solidarity with the ZCTU leaders, which includes the production of a mural with pictures of supportive trade unionists from around the world. The project is described here. It is one small action each of us can take.

The case of Zimbabwe points to one of the pivotal lessons about the democratization of nations under authoritarian rule over the last half century: it is the emergence of free and independent trade unions as part of a vibrant civil society — and not the introduction of markets — which is decisive. The trade union movement was pivotal in the fall of Communism in Poland, in the fall of a fascist military regime in Chile and in the fall of apartheid in South Africa. The leaders of authoritarian regimes in the world today, from Burma to Cuba and from Iran to Zimbabwe, are quite cognizant of this reality.

One of the more unsettling economic development models of the post-1989 era is found in China, where an authoritarian government which brooks no political dissent is combined with an economy that is as close to laissez-faire capitalism as any in today’s world. It is not an uncommon sight to see in the courtyard of Chinese schools blackboards on which the “merit pay” of individual teachers is calculated, based on such measures as student attendance and student test scores.

It now appears that post-Fidel Cuba is headed down the same road. Far from being a harbinger of the future of global education, with American public schools lagging behind, Cuba’s experiments with such systems of pay would be better understood as a telling illustration of how easily authoritarian, ostensibly Communist regimes make their peace with privatization and unfettered markets. Not so organizing free and independent unions, which have been the bulwark of democratization from Poland’s Solidarnösc to South Africa’s COSATU, and thus continue to be the surest road to prison in the newest emerging laissez-faire market paradise of Cuba.