National lessons from New York City’s Cathie Black

Cathie Black meets with then-Chancellor Joel Klein and deputy chancellor Santiago Taveras. (Photo by Gotham Schools)

Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s surprise announcement this morning that Cathie Black is resigning as New York City Schools Chancellor reveals some of the challenges inherent in hiring a non-educator to lead a large public-school district and inspire the confidence of teachers, parents and the public.

In another shocker, New York State Education Commissioner David Steiner resigned today, though he said his and Black’s resignations were a “bizarre coincidence.”

Black, who was named as Joel Klein’s successor last November, stepped down from the post today after just over three months on the job – and with a 17-percent approval rating from New Yorkers. Bloomberg, who vigorously defended Black in the backlash following her appointment (calling her “eminently qualified”), urged her to resign, The New York Times reported.

“I take full responsibility for the fact that this has not worked out as either of us had hoped or expected,” Bloomberg said in a press conference today.

He’s not being noble by taking the heat: Bloomberg alone was responsible for appointing Black. In a city with mayoral control of schools, Bloomberg is in charge of hiring and firing school chiefs.

Mayoral control has proven contentious, and last year one of its inherent instabilities – unpredictable turnover – was made clear when superintendents in Chicago and Washington, D.C., departed with their respective mayors.

The Black case, as some will argue, offers up another lesson about the dangers of mayoral control: the person calling the shots – especially if it’s someone not likely running for re-election – doesn’t necessarily have to seek or listen to feedback, whether it’s from people in his or her administration or members of the public.

Many took issue with Black’s appointment before she even stepped into the role; parents, teachers and politicians began protesting the choice as soon as it was announced. Before she ever formally took office, the odds were stacked against Black. Mike Petrilli of the Fordham Institute went so far as to predict that she’d be gone by Easter 2011. How prescient Petrilli was.

This points to another important lesson that educators and reformers across the country are learning: public buy-in and communication are important.

In a December 2010 op-ed in Newsweek, former D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee said she had no regrets about moving quickly with her reforms. “Still, I could have done a better job of communicating,” she wrote, noting that in particular she should have been clearer to “good” teachers and parents about what she aimed to do and why unpopular decisions were being made.

Black was never able to gain the public’s respect, though, failing at the politics of the job and earning even more criticism with various gaffes and confrontations.

Even if she had been a stellar politician, however, Bloomberg might never have been able to make the public as confident as he professed to be in her appointment. The primary concern from many critics was that, given her background in business and publishing, Black had no education experience to speak of.

Steiner had agonized for weeks last fall over whether to grant Black a waiver since she lacked the requisite qualifications — no advanced degree, no teaching experience and no administrative credential. He’ll have to make another decision about granting a waiver, as Bloomberg has chosen Dennis Walcott as Black’s replacement. Walcott doesn’t have the required three years of teaching experience. Bloomberg is now three for three — Joel Klein, Cathie Black and Dennis Walcott — in appointing chancellors who don’t have the credentials required by New York state law.

Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott addresses the crowd of students, elected officials and education administrators as Bread & Roses Educational Complex is renamed after businessman and social activist Percy Sutton. (Photo by Elbert Garcia)

Bloomberg – and others – see non-educational experience as a boon, not a hindrance. He argued when first announcing her appointment that she could learn what she needed to about education on the job and that she’d have a staff of experts to help her. The ability to manage, which she already had, was key, Bloomberg said.

School districts all over the country have hired superintendents with non-educational backgrounds based on this logic.

Black’s abrupt resignation may be a sign that this doesn’t play out as well in practice as the theory suggests, though. Education policy is a complex area, one to which many people devote their entire lives, and crash-courses on different topics likely cannot replace years of learning the nuances.

And the team of experts who were supposed to support Black have been departing rapidly, highlighting the problem of relying on others to make up for her shortcomings. John White, who will become superintendent of the Recovery School District in New Orleans this fall, is the fourth of Black’s top deputies to leave since she started in January.

That’s not to say management skills aren’t important. But Black’s inability to manage her way out of her problems suggests that other knowledge and experience may be more important than Bloomberg thought.

The job is also perhaps tougher than Bloomberg realizes. It’s worth recalling one former New York City superintendent’s caution about mayoral control back in 2000, when then-mayor Rudy Giuliani had sought to run the schools. Ramon Cortines, serving at the time as interim superintendent in Los Angeles, famously said: “Mayors will find out that they cannot dictate policy from City Hall. You can have Jesus Christ as mayor and he could not run the school system. You have to have teachers, parents, administrators. Any mayor will learn that.”

Cathie Black out as New York City schools chief

The big news today is that Cathie Black is out as New York City schools chancellor. The former magazine executive had taken over just three months ago, filling the spot of departing chancellor Joel Klein.

The New York Times is reporting she resigned at the request of Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Her replacement will be Deputy Mayor Dennis M. Walcott.

The news caps a string of top departures for the department. Four high ranking officials left the department since Black took over, two in this week alone.

More links:

• New Yorker editor Amy Davidson shares an anecdote that might explain Black’s 17 percent approval rating.

• Dropout Nation predicts cackles from reform critics and excuses from reformers themselves.

• Gotham Schools live-blogged the announcement.
• The Associated Press calls Black one of the “deepest embarrassments of (Bloomberg’s) administration.”

• New York Observer says one borough president likened Black’s tenure to the Titanic, saying “this ship has been sinking with more than one million school children on board.”

• Jeff Bercovici at Forbes has thoughts on why Black didn’t do well in her position, harkening back to her days as a magazine exec.

• Portfolio.com considers why Bloomberg likes people from the business world around him and why that didn’t work out this time.

• Gothamist says Walcott, a former teacher and NYC schools grad, appears to be the “anti-Black,” saying “I’m just a guy from Queens.”

• Union president says Black doesn’t get a grade because “she wasn’t in the class for a semester…”

• DNAinfo.com has a profile of Walcott up already.

• Bloomberg (the news outfit) has a pretty dry piece up. They do point out Walcott will need a waiver like Black (and Klein) did because he doesn’t have school admin experience.

Found an interesting link we don’t have up? Email it to mchenry@tc.edu.

Teacher merit-pay study doesn’t get a gold star — yet

The U.S. Department of Education’s “What Works Clearinghouse” issued a note of caution today about a much-ballyhooed study of teacher merit pay in Tennessee. The Project on Incentives in Teaching (POINT) study, released in September 2010 by researchers at Vanderbilt University, found that offering bonuses to middle-school math teachers in Nashville if they raised student test scores did not result in improved student achievement.

The study’s findings have been embraced by those wary of differential pay for teachers based on their students’ standardized test scores – mainly, teachers’ unions and their supporters. For those who support merit pay, including the Obama administration, the results of the Tennessee study were dismissed as too-limited in scope.

The What Works Clearinghouse, which evaluates education research, said the study doesn’t live up to its evidence standards. Although POINT used a random sample of teachers, the researchers didn’t provide enough information about the sample of students involved in the study, the WWC report said. In a footnote, the WWC report notes that the Vanderbilt researchers are planning to release more data soon, however, after which point the study will be reevaluated.

Newspaper reporters: Proudly innumerate?

Kevin Carey, writing in a blog post yesterday that criticizes a Washington Post writer’s analysis of an academic study, says a lot of newspaper reporters are “proudly innumerate,” meaning they lack basic knowledge of mathematics and the scientific approach.

Carey’s argument is used to bolster another, more run-of-the-mill complaint: that reporters are biased. The topic of concern is Michelle Rhee, whose tenure as D.C. Schools Chancellor was fraught with controversy, mainly over the numbers that have been used to defend and attack her approach. Carey argues that the Post reporter, writing about Rhee, “scoured a long and fair-minded … report” for “the most inflammatory word available and then used in [sic] a completely incorrect way.” The point of contention is the reporter’s use of the word “naive,” which can be used to describe an advanced statistical concept, in a way that Carey believes skews the report’s actual findings.

It’s true that more reporters probably majored in English than math, and that reporters are generalists, not experts. But the education beat — to which Carey is mainly referring — is where the nerds of the newsroom tend to cluster. To stick with the job, you have to enjoy analyzing test scores, explaining the meaning of value-added evaluations to the public (in some cases, even creating your own version), and digging into studies in search of p-values and standard deviations.

Education reporters are, in general, avid about studying up. You can find groups of education reporters gathered at conference panels to learn about the latest research almost monthly. Last week had some good examples of the fruits of those labors, including thoughtful coverage of a controversial study about KIPP charter schools and the finale of a USA Today investigation into cheating. Proudly innumerate is not the way I’d describe education reporters.

Online learning: A solution to the budget crisis?

As school systems around the country face severe financial problems, everyone’s talking about what might be cut from budgets. There is one area, however, where spending is likely to increase in many parts of America: online learning.

Proponents say online classes have many benefits, including allowing students to go at their own pace and increasing the number of courses any one school can offer. What is now particularly alluring to school districts, though, is the notion that digital classrooms can also be money-savers, as they typically require fewer personnel.

In New York City, for instance, even as its new school budget is being slashed and some 4,600 teachers face layoffs, the Department of Education is increasing its funding for technology, as part of a general “move toward more online learning,” The New York Times reported recently.

Right now, all but two states offer some form of online learning. Twenty-seven of them are home to full-time virtual schools. In state-run programs alone, 450,000 students were enrolled in online classes last year, according to Stateline. And that’s not counting private digital providers, which are a booming market.

But even as more places seem to be ramping up online offerings, Texas’s Virtual School Network is on the chopping block. The state’s House and Senate budget proposals seek to eliminate over $20 million for the system, according to a recent article by My San Antonio.

One paragraph in the story is worthy of particular attention: It might not be a foregone conclusion that online courses are cheaper than face-to-face alternatives.

San Antonio Independent School District (SAISD) “enrolled 25 students in [an online] driver’s education course last summer. A few opted out during the course for scheduling reasons, and the district considered the pilot program a success, said David Udovich, SAISD’s executive director for secondary initiatives. But the district didn’t see an immediate savings because it assigned a teacher to monitor student progress and it had to make the technology available to students who might not have it at home.”

I’ve talked with officials in several school systems that offer online classes for students to “recover” credit from classes they’ve failed, and many people have told me that to have a high-quality online class, you still need some sort of teacher presence, whether virtual or physical. While this can be done in ways that minimize costs, it’ll still always be more expensive than just having students work their way through courses without support or monitoring.

And at a higher-education conference I attended recently, a presenter from a community college discussed how the institution had begun delivering its math courses in a “mixed mode” — or half in a traditional classroom and half in a computer lab. The program had great results in terms of the percentage of students passing the class, but taking into account all of the components — like computer-lab proctors and tutors — the presenter said the community college didn’t really save any money.

That’s not to say online learning can’t ever, or often, be cheaper than traditional learning in classrooms with teachers. But it’s worth keeping in mind that, in general, the higher a program’s quality, the higher its costs.

Gentrification and school reform

What if gentrification could solve the problems of inner city public schools?

The root problem behind the poor academic achievement in most struggling inner city schools is concentrated poverty. Being poor, while not a guarantee of low achievement in itself, is attached to all kinds of other problems that can hurt a child’s academic chances: poor health, domestic violence etc.

The new education reformers, including people like Michelle Rhee, the former D.C. chancellor, argue that good teachers can overcome all of these problems. But for years, schools with high numbers of poor children have had a hard time attracting the best teachers, who usually can have their pick of places to teach. Often, they’d rather teach in middle class schools, where the money is better, the support is stronger, and the children are easier to educate.

Williamsburg, Brooklyn. (photo courtesy of Johnnie Utah)

For decades, school desegregation was one method of trying to even out the playing field; busing often (but not always) reduced the concentration of poverty in inner city schools. Now, school desegregation has faded as an option after the 2007 Supreme Court decision that limited the use of race-based busing, and student assignment plans based on income status, once imagined as a possible new wave of desegregation, are also on the outs.

For those who favor the idea of attacking the problem of inner city schools by trying to dissolve concentrated poverty, gentrification – a form of de facto integration – seems like a tempting opportunity. Inner city neighborhoods across the country have been transformed in recent decades as young middle and upper class families have rejected the suburbs and exurbs in favor of cities (though not in the most destitute places like Detroit and Camden). In New York City especially, this has been the trend.

But de facto integration is also fraught with problems. An article in Capital New York this week documents the conflicts that roiled one school in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where artsy, liberal white parents began sending their children to a poor-performing school, P.S. 84, that had traditionally been filled with low-income Hispanic children. The potential for a transformation at the school was marred by resentment, misunderstandings and power struggles. And although the end of the story is upbeat about a new effort at mingling the two groups inside the school walls, the author, Greg Hanlon, writes: “There’s no turning back the tide of gentrification and changes to the neighborhood, which is getting whiter and thicker with children by the day.”

And so this is an inherent problem with gentrification, if left unchecked, as a school reform: that eventually, mixed neighborhood is likely to end up completely wealthy as low-income residents are pushed out by rising rents and home prices. In Williamsburg, the Hispanic population dropped precipitously in the last decade, according to new census numbers, from 40% of Williamsburg’s population in 2000 to only 30% last year. In a few years, the concentration of poverty at P.S. 84 may not be a problem anymore; soon enough, most of the poor students will likely be gone.

Can we raise standards and graduation rates at the same time?

The House Public Education Committee in the Texas Legislature has come under criticism this week for unanimously approving a bill that would take the teeth out of the end-of-course exams to be introduced next school year, as reported by the Dallas Morning News. The committee gave as its rationale a desire to give more control to local school districts, many of which appear to have requested a delay in introducing the new tests because of budget cuts.

According to the Dallas Morning News, “If the full House approves the legislation, it would put the chamber at odds with the Senate, where the chairwoman of the education committee, Florence Shapiro, R-Plano, has promised there will be no retreat on the end-of-course tests in high school or the new State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness in middle and elementary schools.”

The bill’s passage into law seems unlikely, but its very proposal is a reminder of the inherent tension between high standards and high graduation rates.

It seems clear that if graduation requirements are lessened, more students will earn diplomas. Or, alternatively, as requirements are ratcheted up, fewer students will make it to graduation.

Of course, many students who drop out are capable of succeeding academically. Research shows that factors outside of the home – like having to earn money to feed a family, or having to take care of an ailing parent – contribute to the country’s dropout problem. Other students drop out not because school is too difficult but because it is too boring; weakening graduation standards would likely do little to keep such students in school.

But in many cases, academic standards and graduation rates are linked. I’ve talked to schools that are being asked to raise standards and graduation rates simultaneously, and they’re struggling with how to strike a balance between the two. In fact, it’s a question the entire country is wrestling with.

Nationally, between 25 and 30 percent of high-school students fail to graduate. But rigorous standards aren’t the likeliest culprit, as standards at most schools aren’t particularly high. After all, significant numbers of high-school graduates who go on to college must enroll in at least one remedial course.

It’s not impossible for schools to ramp up their academics and get more students through to diplomas at the same time. Indeed, places like some “no-excuses” charter schools pride themselves on the exceptionally difficult curriculum they require students to take as well as on high graduation and college-going rates.

Early College High Schools — in which students have the opportunity to earn up to two years of college credit while still in high school — had an 85 percent graduation rate in 2009, and most students graduate with at least some college credits as well.

But many states and school districts are still trying to figure out how to reconcile the push for higher standards with the pressure to lower dropout rates. To many, accomplishing both is a daunting task – and one that keeps educators, reformers and policymakers awake at night.

Are charters in the North losing black students to the South?

Reports in recent years have documented a trend of higher attrition rates in charter schools than traditional public schools. For instance, a charter might start out with 100 students in its first-grade class but, five years later, end up with only 80 graduating fifth-graders. Many of these reports have been published by teachers’ unions, which tend to oppose charters, in attempts to suggest that charters push out low-performing students. Charters sometimes counter that the students who leave do so freely — because they can’t handle the high expectations.

Another explanation I’ve heard from charters is that many of their African-Americans students leave to move down South. Now, new census data lend some credence to this theory.

A New York Times article today reports that the South’s black population has risen to its largest size in 50 years. Much of that growth comes from migrants leaving northern cities like New York and Chicago, and the people who are leaving tend to be of child-rearing age.

This change has huge implications, of course, and not just for the South. According to the Times article, the families who are leaving tend to be college-educated and middle-class. Does this mean that those left behind in Northern cities are less educated and poor? Possibly, and for inner-city charters in the North, and schools in general, this suggests a more difficult road ahead. Already, we’re seeing what such demographic changes have done to Detroit.

In the South, the biggest growth for blacks is happening in places where they were previously a small minority. At the same time, there has been a boom in the number of Hispanics, who are relative newcomers to the area. Out of the top 10 states with the fastest rates of Hispanic growth in the past decade, eight are in the South, according to a new analysis by the Pew Hispanic Center.

Will schools in the South become less segregated? (Already, they tend to be less segregated than schools in the rest of the nation.) Or will there be white flight in the places minorities choose to move? Depending on the reasons people are moving – to start new, better-paying jobs, to take jobs requiring fewer skills, or to move in with family because of unemployment – will Southern schools be contending with more affluence or more poverty, and how will they handle the changes?

Fewer ‘dropout factories’ nationally, but problems remain

Those crusading against the dropout problem had reason to celebrate this week. A report released by the U.S. Department of Education, “Building a Grad Nation,” announced that the number of “dropout factories” in the country – or high schools that fail to graduate at least 60 percent of their students – continued to drop.

In 2002, there were 2,007 dropout factories. By 2008, that number was down to 1,746. And in 2009, an additional 112 schools were removed from the list, bringing the total down to 1,634.

Raising high school graduation rates has prompted sweeping reforms across the country in recent decades, including popular strategies like the promotion of small schools, the use of data to pinpoint student weaknesses and predict those most at risk of dropping out, and having private companies take over schools in “turnaround” efforts.

Credit recovery — in which students who fail classes are allowed to make them up, often quickly and online — is becoming a booming digital business and is a crucial part of the strategy to reduce dropout rates in places like Houston, Texas. And many cities are recognizing the importance of dropout recovery – or bringing former dropouts back into school systems – as a way to increase their graduation rates.

Some cities, like New York and Philadelphia, have seen improvements. Other places, like Portland, Ore., haven’t seen much payoff for their efforts.

The news isn’t all good. Even with the number of dropout factories declining, 2.1 million students still attend them nationwide. And many students not in dropout factories don’t make it through to a diploma either. Between 25 and 30 percent of students fail to graduate every year, experts say.

Some people also question the value of a high school diploma today, asking whether standards have been lowered in attempts to bump up grad rates. Credit recovery, for instance, has come under attack by many teachers and bloggers who say that, when abused, it requires students to do little or no work to earn credit for a semester’s worth of learning.

Fewer than half of U.S. students are considered “college ready” when they graduate high school, the report said. Over a third of all students must take at least one remedial course in college. At community colleges, the figure is 60 percent.

Learn more about the nation’s dropout problem in The Hechinger Report‘s GO DEEP section on dropouts.

Social media and a tale of two New Jersey principals

Middle-school principal Anthony Orsini of Ridgewood, N.J., made national headlines last year when he urged parents to keep their young adolescents off Facebook — at least until high school.

Middle-school principal Anthony Orsini (photo by Justin Snider)

The slings and arrows of social-media stings by peers — also known as cyberbullying — were far more common than any from adult predators, Orsini said, calling threats from the latter “insignificant compared to the damage that children at this age constantly and repeatedly do to one another through social-networking sites, through text- or picture-messaging.’’

In the leafy, upscale suburb of Ridgewood, Orsini witnessed pain caused by gossipy online barbs. So he took a stand against the use of social media — one that landed him on television and as a subject in a lengthy New York Times piece last spring.

Orsini discussed the reasons behind his cautionary views last week at a seminar in New York City on digital media, children’s learning and schools, sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation and hosted by the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media.

In a fascinating contrast, Eric Sheninger, a New Jersey principal known around his school as “Mr. Twitter,’’ spoke of why social and digital media can be powerful learning tools for the plugged-in generation, and described ways he incorporates them into daily life and learning at New Milford High School. He does so, among other ways, through the school’s Facebook page and Twitter account, as well as his blog, “A Principal’s Reflections.”

“It’s been so powerful in my little district,’’ he said.

While there’s a significant difference in the ages and maturity levels of most middle- and high-school students, the contrasts between the two earnest, well-spoken principals and their educational philosophies were highlighted by the brave new world of digital learning, and the different ways that educators are reacting to it.

Sheninger’s embrace of social media was a big turnaround for a principal who had once banned cell phones. He was skeptical at first whether any of the new digital tools that so many students use at home could be educational.

High-school principal Eric Sheninger (photo by Davin McHenry)

“Prior to 2009, I felt social media had no place in schools and [were] a distraction to students,’’ Sheninger said during his presentation. He worried, but then he decided to join Twitter after hearing it could be an effective communications tool.

“It was at that moment that I learned of my ignorance and how my students were suffering because we would unplug [them],’’ he said.  Sheninger soon realized how odd it is to take away the very technology and tools that engage students outside of school the minute they step on campus. He decided instead to teach students how to be “digitally responsible,’’ and he embraced technology as a learning tool.

“The entire focus can’t be about increasing scores,’’ Sheninger said. “How can we expect gains in student achievement if students are disengaged? What we are doing now [by embracing technology, allowing students to bring and use cell phones in school, and encouraging positive uses of social media] is about student engagement.”

Orsini’s social media views are based on the very real pain he has heard expressed by parents and students who have been victims of online attacks, via texting and Facebook. He’s also concerned about increasing expressions of suicidal thoughts by young teenagers.

“What we see … is real damage,’’ Orsini said. “The amount of angst among young people has definitely increased.”

Orsini said he’s not sure his words and message have actually lessened his students’ use of Facebook. He is certain of one thing, though: “It started a discussion,’’ he said.