Last week, New York City chancellor Joel I. Klein released the list of 208 schools that will be exempt from the new citywide math and reading curricula that go into effect next year in the rest of the country's largest school system.
Ignore for now the issue of whether a uniform citywide curriculum is a good idea. [On that point, see "Letter from New York City: Bloomberg's Reforms," by Diane Ravitch. Disregard as well the awkward question of whether Klein has chosen sound reading and math programs. [See "Chancellor's New Reading Program Is Unproven," by Diane Ravitch, Newsday, February 10, 2003 for more on this.] Focus instead on two other aspects of this policy.
The first is Klein's (and Mayor Bloomberg's) decision not to impose their new curricular regime on the Big Apple's best schools. This is presumably meant to reward them for their success with a measure of autonomy and self-determination that will be denied to less successful schools - and to follow the ancient maxim that "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." Note, though, that these schools aren't getting any new freedoms or building-level prerogatives (more control over personnel or budget, say); they're simply not losing any of the curricular independence - some would say fragmentation-that previously characterized all of Gotham's schools.
That exemption provoked grumbling before the list came out, for the mere idea of making such a list means distinguishing between higher- and lower-performing schools, i.e. naming the haves and the have-nots and recognizing that they're different. Critics said this will divide the system into (in teacher union chief Randi Weingarten's phrase) "schools that work and schools that don't." A principal (whose school ended up on the list) warned that "What you're going to have is two very different cities. It's going to make the rift wider."
Educators often talk that way because they don't much like competition, which leads to winners and losers, and they don't like comparisons, which can make some people and institutions look bad. But such laments carry little weight in the real world and, in the No Child Left Behind era, they carry less, considering that state and federal governments now publish long lists of failing schools and that comparisons of schools that do and don't make "adequate yearly progress" are becoming the name of the education game.
So turn to the second and more vexing issue, which is how Klein & Co. determined which schools are "successful." They wanted to base this distinction on test scores, in particular on the proportion of a school's pupils who are "at or above grade level" on state and city reading and math tests. That seems reasonable. At least it deals with outcomes, with standards, and with the two core subjects being tracked by NCLB.
As everyone knows, the tests show that most New York schools have a huge distance yet to traverse. Only 39 percent of elementary/middle school students attained grade level in reading and just 37 percent in math. (Averaging across grades is problematic, though, considering that 52 percent of 4th graders met the math standard in 2002 but only 26 percent of 7th graders managed to do that.)
So it's good to give schools additional incentives to improve their scores. But building the list according to a strict test-score hierarchy posed two big problems. The politically vexing one was the likelihood that an overwhelming fraction of the top schools would be located in middle class and white (and Asian) neighborhoods. Given New York's hypersensitivity in such matters of ethnicity, to term that a politically problematic outcome would be a gross understatement.
The educationally vexing problem was that a simple score hierarchy would reward some schools that regularly turn in high scores but are "running in place," i.e. making no gains from year to year and possibly adding little academic value to their pupils, while hard-charging schools making significant gains and adding much value would feel punished because they hadn't yet attained "grade level." This would be especially awkward when NCLB is telling schools that all must progress from their baseline toward universal proficiency, not rest on their laurels.
In a word, Klein and Bloomberg needed a way to ensure that the list would contain sufficient ethnic and economic diversity and would at least make a gesture of recognition to rapidly improving schools. So they opted for a form of affirmative action. They sorted the city's schools into three categories, based on poverty levels and proportions of LEP (limited English proficient) and special-ed students. Then they assigned different "cut scores" to each category. The least poor ("low need") schools had to attain a score of at least 140 (160 for high schools) when the percent of kids meeting the city/state reading standard is added to the percent meeting the math standard. (Thus, for example, a school could hit that mark if 80 percent of its pupils perform well in reading and 60 percent in math - or vice versa.)
For the poorest ("high need") schools, however, the cut-off score was 110 (and 125 for the middle category). Additionally, a school was deemed "successful" if it made big gains last year AND its score came within ten points of its category's cutoff.
As affirmative action always does, this scheme had two predictable effects: it yielded a measure of diversity - about 40 percent of the children in the 208 winning schools are black and Hispanic - and it provoked an outcry from those whose schools would have made the list under a strict meritocracy but were shut out by the triage system.
Thus, for example, Middle School 167 on the prosperous Upper East Side, which has long touted its test scores, lost out because its combined score was 128 - which would have been enough if its students were "needier" and likely would have been enough under a single ranking system. This infuriated its elite parents. One told The New York Times that she will surely move her daughter into a private school if M.S. 167 is forced to follow the citywide curriculum. (Aggrieved schools have a couple of weeks in which to appeal to Klein.)
In due course, one assumes, criticisms will also be voiced by minority leaders and spokesmen for the poor, dismayed that Klein's selection scheme yielded a list of schools enrolling just 2/5 black and brown youngsters in a system where white and Asian pupils comprise barely 1/4 of the total.
When the dust settles, plenty more questions will remain. Is it not condescending and deterministic to accept lower performance standards for poor children a year after NCLB sought to end such thinking? Will Chancellor Klein's uniform curriculum make things better or worse at the thousand schools that will now be told what to teach? And what happens if New York City's reward system for schools turns out to be incompatible with the state's newly approved NCLB plan for tracking yearly progress? How embarrassing if some schools in Klein's "successful" category emerge as candidates for intervention or reconstitution under federal law.
"Joy and anger greet list of top city schools," by Abby Goodnough and Jennifer Medina, The New York Times, February 15, 2003
