Details on those ‘Dozens and Dozens’ of Schools

As promised, I am posting the charts that I laboriously put together from data published by OSSE and a spreadsheet leaked to me, showing how unconvincing was the progress at the only 13 schools that WaPo reporter Jay Mathews could find that even vaguely resembled the ones that Michelle Rhee bragged about.

I am not going to look at the schools with large percentages of white students or at McKinley Tech.

First, here are my charts for Payne ES, Plummer ES and Prospect LC. I color-coded the chart much the way that Erich Martel does. That is, each diagonal sloping up to the right represents an individual cohort of students as they move from grade to grade, from year to year. Obviously I have no way of telling how many students transferred into our out of each cohort, but my experience in several DC public schools in all four quadrants indicates that students don’t move around all that much.

Thus, at Payne, under “Reading”, in the column for 3rd grade, in the row for 2010, you see the number 27. That means that at Payne, in the 3rd grade, in school year 2009-2010, about 27% of the students were ‘proficient’ or ‘advanced’ in reading according to their scores on the DC-CAS. The next year, most of those kids returned as fourth graders in the same school, and about 23% of them ‘passed’ the DC-CAS in reading because their answer sheets had enough correct answers for them to score ‘proficient’ or ‘advanced’. Note, that cell is also blue. But the next year, 2011-12, the percentage of students ‘passing’ the DC-CAS doubled, to 46%. I find that jump worthy of a red flag. Either that teacher did something astounding, or the students are an entirely different group of kids, or else someone cheated (most likely not the students).

 

Any time I saw a drop or rise of 10% or more from the year before for a single cohort, I noted my “red flag” by writing the  percentage of passing scores in bold, red.

Notice that at Plummer, the cohort in blue, in reading, went fomr 40% passing to 18% passing to 46% passing in the course of three years. The cohort in green in math went from 60% passing to 18% passing to  29% passing.

At Prospect, the cohort in yellow goes from 25% passing to 0% passing to 5% passing to 5% passing in reading. In math, the same group goes from 13% to 31% to 0% to 24% passing.

You see anything weird with that? I sure do.

Next come Thomson, Tubman, Hart, and Sousa:

 

The only one of these schools with a chart not covered with ‘red flags’ is Hart.

Your thoughts? (As usual, the “comment” button, below the end of this story, is tiny. Sorry about that.)

 

More on PIRLS international assessment of nations in reading

It’s utterly amazing:

Twelve minutes after twelve noon on December 12, 2012, (that is, 12:12 on 12/12/12 has come and gone, and somehow the sky still hasn’t fallen.

American fourth-grade students actually did quite well in comparison to about 50 nations in reading and literacy, according to the most recent PIRLS data. Here are two more graphs that I will share with you, which I took from pages 68 and 69 of that report.

This graph is packed full of information!

First of all, notice that the USA is #7 out of all the 40+ nations when ranked by what percentage of students in each country attained scores deemed “advanced”.  We beat nations like Ireland, Israel, NZ, Canada, Taiwan, Denmark, Australia, Germany, Sweden, Netherlands, France, Austria, and many more. That’s not bad.

Further, if you look at the middle, vertical blue line that I drew, you notice that the US has the sixth highest rate in the WORLD of students reaching the “high” benchmark as defined by PIRLS.

Finally, if you look at the median percentages, shown at the very bottom of the page and circled in blue by me, you see that the American rankings are way higher (farther to the right) than any of them.

My next graph shows how a few regions did. I’m going to take this with a bit more salt, however:

 

According to this table, Florida alone is #2 in the entire world. Is that really true? I don’t know; it doesn’t appear to be so highly ranked in reading on the NAEP; it’s tied for 12th place with Delaware, Kentucky, and Montana.

But I think it’s fair to say that American kids aren’t doing as poorly as many pundits and politicians keep saying.

 

 

If you’re keeping score…

A handful of graphs and a bit of analysis of where are the highest and lowest-scoring students: in the regular public schools of Washington, DC, or in the publicly-financed but privately-run charter schools.

If you buy the current “party line” from most newspaper editorial boards and folks like Arne Duncan, Michael Bloomberg, the Koch Brothers, and Michelle Rhee, you would probably conclude that students in the charter schools are wildly outperforming students in the regular DC public schools.

Facts, as someone once wrote, are stubborn things.

It just ain’t so.

Look at these two graphs, which show bars that depict what percent of students in each of the public and charter schools are proficient in math:

The chart shown above is for all of the regular DC Public Schools. Notice that there are 15 schools (out of 117, or about 13% of the total number of schools) with proficiency rates over 80%.

Now let’s look at the graph for the DC charter schools:

Here, there are only four schools (out of 70 charter schools, or about 6%) that have 80% or more of their students scoring at what is called “proficient”.

What about reading? The situation is very similar. For the regular DC public schools, the chart follows here:

Here, there are 14 regular DC public schools out of 117 with student bodies where 80% or more of the students are “proficient” in reading on the DC-CAS. That’s 12% of the schools.

And in the charter schools, in reading, here is the graph for SY 2011-2012:

We see that there are only TWO (2) charter schools out of 70, or about 3%, where 80% or more of the students score “proficient”.

As I’ve written before, the regular DC public schools not only have the lion’s share of the high-flyers, so to speak. They also have the lion’s share of the low-achievers as well.

In math, there are 17 regular public schools, or about 15% of the schools, where less than 20% of the students are proficient in math. In the charter schools, there are only two schools (3%) with such low rates of proficiency.

In reading, there are 19 regular DC Public Schools (about 16%) with less than 20% of the student body proficient. In the charter schools, there are only two such schools (again, 3%).

By the way: none of this data is published at the regular NCLB/OSSE/DCPS data location, at least not yet. There are so far no breakdowns of student populations at each school by gender, race/ethnicity, proficiency in the English language, special education status, family income, AND grade — which is why I haven’t published anything on that. Seems to me that as time goes on, DCPS, charter schools, and OSSE are all releasing less and less information to the public.

I got this data here:

http://osse.dc.gov/release/mayor-vincent-c-gray-announces-2012-dc-cas-results

Real Data on NAEP scores in DC over the past 20 years

I would like to remind you that Michelle Rhee’s and Richard Whitmire’s claims that she single-handedly boosted the NAEP scores in DCPS, way in excess of anything that happened previously, are bogus.

Michelle Rhee and Richard Whitmire aren’t left with very much to brag about concerning her supposed accomplishments in DCPS.

• The ‘Capital Gains’ project was a total failure – even according to the data provided by Harvard professor/entrepreneur Roland Fryer (who has also run a massive randomized experiment in NYC showing that paying teachers money for higher student test scores was counterproductive)
• Bringing in an outside agency to run Dunbar SHS was a total failure
• The situation with the least-trained, least-experienced teachers staffing most of the roughest, lowest-income schools in DCPS is worse now than ever
• The situation with special education is the usual mess
• There are more central-office employees than ever, and they make more money than ever
• It’s clear that the enormous sums she spent on consultants haven’t done a damned thing
• The teachers are totally demoralized
• Real teaching has been replaced by 100% test-prep, all the time
• The method that her favorite principals employed to raise test scores involved simple cheating: long hours of meticulous erasing of wrong answers, after the students and teachers had left the buildings

So let’s look at a few graphs of how NAEP scores have changed over the past 20 or so years, so you can see for yourself whether the 3 years of Rhee made much of a difference.

First, please look at a graph of the average 4th grade DCPS ‘Scale Scores’ on the Math NAEP:

As you can see, they have been rising more-or-less steadily since about 1996.

Next, look at a graph showing the percentage of students “Basic” or above (which really does mean ON GRADE LEVEL)  and “Proficient” or above (which really does mean ABOVE GRADE LEVEL) in math since about 1992. Again, you can see that these percentages have been pretty steadily rising since about 1996. Once again, SuperWoman’s presence apparently didn’t make a huge change.

Next, let’s look at the average scale score for DCPS 8th graders on the NAEP reading test:

Here the record doesn’t go back as far, but besides the drop in 2003 and 2005, the overall trend has been upwards.

I’ll post a few more graphs tomorrow. Right now, I am too tired to keep going.

Increased scores in math in DCPS on NAEP

A recent report from NAEP shows that the scores of DCPS students in math are no longer at the bottom for all states and urban school districts. At the 4th grade, in math,  our kids are now significantly ahead of Cleveland, and essentially tied with Chicago and Los Angeles. This doesn’t terribly surprise me. After all, the problems that I see in inner-city Washington (my home town) are not that different from what I see in other big American cities that I have visited. And they are not going to be fixed by wholesale firing of veteran teachers.

Here is a table that I made from the graphs in the report. The yellow line is scores for the last 6 years in the entire nation in 4th grade math; the salmon-colored line is for all big cities; and the green line is for us here in DC – just regular DCPS students, not charter schools. (Although, if you look deeper, there is virtually no difference between the scores for the charter schools and the regular public schools. Even the NAEP admits that scores that are only 1 or 2 points apart are not “significantly different”.)

As usual, the press, especially the Washington Post, are eager to give all of the credit to Chancellor Rhee. That is a joke. As you can see in the following graph, which I made from publicly available data on national and DC averages, the trend in DC 4th grade math NAEP scores has been upward for quite some time – since the mid-1990′s, when Michelle Rhee was still trying to get her own act together teaching in Baltimore in a for-profit school that failed.

Note that this is from the publicly available data, so I am unable to separate out the charter schools. And note also how high the scores are for white DC fourth graders. In fact, theirs are the highest for any such subgroup in the entire nation. Looking even closer, we see that Rhee can take credit (if she wants) for the fact that 4th-grade White DCPS students gained twice as much under her watch as 4th-grade Black students!

On the other hand, nobody really knows what these numbers really mean. Do they mean that our students are doing better than 17 years ago? I don’t know. However, in my own experience over 30 years of teaching, incoming 7th graders seem to know a heck of a lot more math now than they did in 1978, which was back in the days of “Back to Basics”.

The entire NAEP is so long that no single student could ever possibly take the whole thing; instead, the students who do take it only take about a morning’s worth of it. By no means do all 4th and 8th graders take the NAEP, either. There is some formula for deciding which classrooms in which schools will be asked to take either part of the English NAEP or part of the Math NAEP. Many teachers of math and English may go their entire career without ever administering it to their own classes, especially if the teach neither 4th or 8th grade.

The latest report from NAEP concerning cities is at

http://nationsreportcard.gov/math_2009/

I will have some more comments on this later.