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A Signature Bloomberg-Era Education Innovation Is At A Crossroads


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NEW YORK — One morning in March, New York City Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott stopped by Global Technology Preparatory, a middle school in East Harlem.

He watched as sixth–graders who had just read Yummy, an acclaimed graphic novel based on the real-life shooting of an 11-year-old Chicago gang member, searched for articles on their laptops to support an essay on whether child perpetrators should be tried as adults.

In another class, a student recited a poem that built on what she had learned in an extended-day apprenticeship.

Walcott also chatted with Valerie Miller, a teacher who has spent years working with foreign-language software that allows kids to study a range of languages.

Global Tech, a school where most kids are poor, black or Latino — and about 40 percent have special-needs certifications — has become a showcase for one of the Bloomberg administration’s signature education initiatives: the so-called innovation zone or iZone.

The premise behind the iZone initiative is that digital technology, projects based on real-world problems and tailored to student interests, as well as new approaches to scheduling both the school day and teachers’ time, will both expand the horizons of the traditional classroom and inspire kids to learn.

The iZone initiative aims to address the disconnect between students’ wired lives and the traditional chalk-and-blackboard classroom that, according to some education-technology experts, makes kids today less receptive to education.

In the waning months of the Bloomberg administration, however, the iZone initiative, and schools like Global Tech — which have benefited from extra funding and support offered through the program — are being buffeted by a series of changes, from budget cuts to city-wide implementation of the Common Core state standards.

And, with a new mayor set to take office in 2014, and likely changes in leadership at the Department of Education, it is unclear whether this Bloomberg legacy will endure.

Some of the changes, such as a new venture-capital-like challenge meant to get schools to compete for what is likely to be a much smaller pot of funding, are just the latest examples of the tumult that has characterized the experiment from the beginning.

As one iZone veteran told the Gotham Gazette on the condition of anonymity, ticking off the four executives who have run the organization in as many years: “The iZone is like the Hudson; it’s constantly flowing, always changing.”

The iZone highlights both the promise and the hype of the kind of outside-the-box thinking that was a hallmark of the Bloomberg years. It also demonstrates how challenging it can be to disseminate even the best ideas within New York City’s large and ever changing public school system.

The iZone began in the 2009/2010 school year with 10 pilot schools. A few of the schools, including Global Tech, showed great promise both in terms of traditional measures — Global Tech received an A and B on its first two graded school report cards, as well as off-the-charts marks for student engagement, academic expectations and attendance. But the majority of the pilot schools dropped out of the experiment.

With those “failures,” the DOE wrote the pilot year out of its history books and began dating the launch of the iZone to the following 2010/2011 school year when it expanded to 81 schools. The iZone initiative today encompasses 250 of the city’s 1,700 public schools.

“It’s been an iterative journey,” says Andrea Coleman, who became CEO of the education department’s Office of Innovation, which runs the iZone, in August. “The personalized learning experience overall has been a huge success for the district.”

Last year, the iZone became a two-tier system with about 200 schools taking part in a limited way via access to education software offerings on the Department of Education’s iLearn portal for interactive learning. Another 50 schools, including Global Tech, are involved with more extensive experiments, such as those involving scheduling, as part of what has become known as iZone360; participating schools also have access to a broader range of supports, including outside consultants.

For New York City’s one million kids, such innovations have the potential to put an end to what Ken Robinson, the British education expert, calls the batch-processing approach to education, in which kids are sorted by their “manufacturing dates,” i.e. by age and not ability or interests.

DEEP IN THE iZONE

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The iZone has worked best where it has hewed to the vision of personalized learning.

At Global Tech, Carolyn Tarr, a music teacher, uses everything from garage-band software to podcast performances to mini-lessons on rhyme and rhythm, to teach a “challenge-based performance class.”

The two sections of Tarr’s class, which each meet once per week and have about 18 students each, work in small-groups — some formed bands, while others worked solo on slam poetry — in one cacophonous classroom.

For Walcott’s visit, Zoe Cambrelen, an eighth grader who was first inspired to write poetry during a poetry apprenticeship that was part of Global Tech’s after-school program, read, “Fight Like a Girl,” which reads in part:

When they look her up and down and tell her not to hang around, she says, this is my city …
When they come around and try to beat her down, she goes the distance.
And you know why? Because she doesn’t cry. She fights like a girl.

Meanwhile, on the Upper West Side, the West Side Collaborative, a respected, long-established Title 1 school, used its participation in iZone360 to expand experiments in flexible staffing, block scheduling and digital technology — all key iZone initiatives — that it had begun a decade earlier.

This year, for the first time, West Side created so-called “personal learning modules” tailored to the literacy needs of each student.

Working with a team of faculty, Jeanne Rotunda, the school principal, scheduled the entire seventh and eighth grades for a combined literacy period on Mondays and Fridays to work in small groups on discreet skills , which are based on each student’s abilities and are mapped to the common core standards, as well as their preferred learning style and interests. The regular curriculum continues to be taught Tuesday through Thursday.

To help decide which PLM would be most beneficial for each student, and “to establish a baseline for student's mastery of a particular set of Common Core Standards,” West Side teachers developed interactive challenge-based assessments. One of these, the Pacific Trash Vortex, which is based on a Texas-sized mass of garbage in the North Pacific, assembles a series of documents that students need to study, including news stories, lab reports and maps of ocean currents.

Each student is asked to imagine that she is an ecologist/oceanographer who has been hired by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to propose solutions to the United Nations. Students have to explain both the problem and the consequences of the vortex if it isn’t solved, and create a Google presentation on their findings.

“The assessment is rigorous, engaging and authentic, and includes some gaming principles,” said Paul Kehoe, a 32-year-old teacher who helped develop the assessment.

Teachers also surveyed the kids about their interests: sports, say, or art; their preferred learning styles — working in groups, individually or with a teacher; as well as data from their assessments.

By freeing up nine teachers to work with 120-or-so students in the combined grades, the teacher-student ratio for the PLM groups is much lower than it would be in a typical public- school classroom: While the largest group has 25 kids, the rest range in size from nine-to-18.

To support the idea of student-focused learning, West Side has also developed a highly nuanced “outcomes-based” grading system, in which students receive a grade of 1, below grade level, to 5, above grade level, on myriad competencies. Part of the point is to get kids to better understand their strengths and where they need to improve.

During a recent afternoon, students shared their report cards with their parents in student-led conferences.

Natalio Gonzalez, an 8th grader who loves art (especially the work of Brooklyn-born graffiti artist-turned-painter Jean-Michel Basquiat) and was recently accepted at the esteemed LaGaurdia High School, pulled up a multi-page spreadsheet on his MacBook to show his progress.

“My weakest spot is in communication,” explained Natalio, who earned many 4s on his report card, but noted that he got a 3 in communication. He said students set academic goals with their advisors during a once-a-week “base-camp.” One recent goal for Natalio was to do a better job of discerning evidence and using it to make claims in written essays.

Nearby, Niomi Manigault, a seventh grader, was showing her online report to her mom and older sister, explaining she wants to improve her performance in social studies in which she got an 88 on her most recent assessment. She also said she needs help in math.

Judith Manigault, Niomi’s mom, says she is comfortable with the student-led conferences, which have only been in place since last January. “It holds her accountable,” Manigault said. “I'm able to reach out to teachers via email or schedule a phone call” with questions and concerns.

Both West Side Collaborative and Global Tech are one-to-one laptop schools —though West Side’s computer program predates the iZone. What the iZone has brought is both resources — including consultants who are expert at scheduling and technology — and, equally important, says Rotunda: “permission to push further.”

Importantly, both schools also have developed their iZone innovations in collaboration with, and in order to maximize, the expertise of teachers. That is not always the case — either in the iZone or among education policymakers.

EVALUATING THE iZONE INITIATIVE

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The iZone came of age in a climate where education technology has often been used as a Trojan horse for sidelining teachers unions and increasing class size. Conservative activists, led by Terry Moe and John Chubb (Liberating Learning: Technology, Politics, and the Future of American Education), promoted an explicitly anti-union, anti-teacher agenda in which kids would learn via computer with only occasional assistance from “asynchronous” instructors who work out of centralized teacher warehouses.

Joel Klein, the former schools chancellor who now runs Amplify, News Corp.’s education-technology business, had great enthusiasm for the iZone, especially its technology component: He envisioned classes in which Nobel laureates, such as Richard Feynman, would teach large groups of students via video.

“Joel misses the essence of teacher-student interactions, and the extent to which teachers focus on students’ physical and emotional well-being, in addition to their academic learning,” said Eric Nadelstern, the former New York City deputy schools chancellor and visiting professor of practice at Columbia University’s Teachers College. “Virtual communities don't raise children, people do.”

A subsidiary of Amplify has three current contracts with the DOE, though none for the company's new tablets.

There has been little systematic research inside or outside the iZone on the efficacy of K-12 online education. The number of U.S. students enrolled in online courses surged 47 percent in 2008 to just over one million, up from 700,000 two years earlier, according to two studies conducted by Anthony G. Picciano and Jeff Seaman, in a project funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. However, in the 2008 study, K-12 Online Learning, the authors note that, as of 2007, “no organization-public or private was systematically collecting” data on K-12 online schools.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that technology, in the absence of close teacher-student connections, doesn’t improve outcomes, especially in inner-city schools where most kids can’t count on parents to help them with their work.

Take the iZone’s School of One, which was hailed by Time as one of the 50 best inventions of 2009. School of One uses a computer algorithm to sort kids by ability, generate a daily “playlist” of assignments for each child and grade quizzes. About eight adults supervise a typical jumbo-sized School-of-One classroom where most of the 150 kids work on computers, while a few teachers help smaller groups of students; but since half the adults are student teachers, the actual ratio of certified teachers to students is about 36-to-1. Many see School of One as part of a trend to create “teacher-proof” education.

After the first full year, School of One saw decidedly mixed results. Two of three pilot schools dropped the program and the founder of School of One, Joel Rose, left the DOE. While the School of One continues to operate in a few schools, there is little talk these days about the program’s “miracles.”

THE PRECARIOUS FUTURE OF THE iZONE

As the iZone enters its fifth school year, it faces both strategic and financial challenges.

The iZone’s budget, which includes both public funds and private grants from philanthropies, such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, was $47 million in the 2012/13 school year. The city learned in December that it had lost a $40 million bid for Race-to-the-Top funding, which was aimed at rewarding schools that promote “personalized learning,” including those in the iZone.

A map of iZone locations (source: NYC OpenData)

New York City also has yet to receive $256 million in Race-to-the-Top grants, which have been withheld by the State until a teacher-evaluation process is in place. In addition, the city lost about $257 million in the 2012/2013 school year for failing to arrive at an agreement with the United Federation of Teachers on a new teacher evaluation system — although a court recently ruled that the state could not withhold the funds to punish the schools.

Meanwhile, the DOE’s $8.282 billion budget allocation from the state for the 2013/2014 school year represents about an 8 percent increase over the 2011/2012 school year.

Some schools — in and outside the iZone — also will benefit from a Microsoft class-action settlement with New York State, which will provide $87 million in the form of technology vouchers that will be reserved for high-poverty schools defined as those where at least 50 percent of the students are enrolled in a free or reduced-price lunch program.

At the same time, iZone schools are girding for a new system of “challenge” grants, which will be “shorter, sharper and more dynamic” than the more open-ended funding that has been provided thus far. The first of about 10 annual challenges will take place in May.

The challenge-grant process reflects the influence of business ideas on the DOE, which has worked with companies like Cisco and Apple since the beginning of the iZone.

For example, challenge-grant recipients are required to use such business-inspired strategies as “hackathons” — in the high-tech world, these are typically intensive one-day to one-week product development jam sessions. One long-time iZone consultant lauded the competitive nature of the challenge grants, saying they would ensure that only the best ideas, and most committed schools, get funding.

But educators are concerned. “School innovation isn’t like software design,” said Nick Siewert, a senior educational consultant at Teaching Matters, a leading nonprofit professional development organization, who works with several iZone schools.

Siewart argues that school improvement isn’t analogous to one-time solutions or product fixes; rather, he says, it’s about iterative learning and follow-through.

Chrystina Russell, the principal of Global Tech, worries that the challenge grant process will pit schools against each other and favor projects that “have immediate returns.”

She is also concerned that established schools, already working on a portfolio of innovations, will get short shrift; she notes that Global Tech has not gotten any new funding yet for technology for the 2013/2014 school year—the first time she has gone into a new school year without such a commitment—and worries that the iZone will stop supporting ongoing experiments in favor of quick fixes.

Nor has the DOE done a good job of disseminating lessons learned in the iZone.

There is relatively little systematic research on the myriad innovations across the iZone, and few mechanisms for sharing the ideas that work, as well as those that don’t.

“We know schools are idiosyncratic places, and finding the right opportunities to scale and diffuse ideas has always been a challenge,” iZone’s Coleman said.

She added that one of the iZone’s goals is to focus on “scale and diffusion” and finding better ways “to maximize ideas across the system.”

One way the iZone is hoping to do that is by expanding a system of principal and teacher-led affinity groups and events in which schools share the know-how they have developed in such areas as outcomes-based grading or fostering greater social-and-emotional awareness among kids.

Also this year, for the first time, schools receive some funding for assisting other schools.

This year, West Side Collaborative is helping East Bronx Academy implement student-led conferences. However, West Side’s Rotunda notes there are limitations on the extent to which schools can learn directly from one another: “People learn through creating — by seeing something in one version and trying to create it for your own world.”

Nor is it clear whether the education department will continue to fund this school-to-school mentoring initiative in the next school year.

Then, too, there is the chicken-and-egg problem.

The most respected iZone schools are ones that are noted for strong leaders who took advantage of myriad education department initiatives, especially the push to grant principals more autonomy and flexibility in exchange for greater accountability.

Even now, some of New York’s most intriguing grassroots efforts aren’t officially part of the iZone at all, but are led by entrepreneurial principals and teachers.

For example, the Staten Island School of Civic Leadership, a new school on Staten Island, uses software programs on the iZone’s iLearn platform to help its most advanced eighth graders take the regents exam in algebra.

But a promising experiment at the school is taking place one grade below, and entirely outside the iZone framework, in a seventh-grade class led by three teachers under what school principal Rose Kerr calls the “triad” system.

She says the model is based on close collaboration among the teachers, block scheduling, intensive multi-disciplinary class projects and digital literacy.

For example, the class recently finished a Declaration of Independence for Staten Island, which began with a unit on the history of American War of Independence, including discussions about taxation without representation. It went on to cover questions about democracy versus autocracy that drew, in part, on readings from MacBeth. And it culminated with the writing of a press release that explains the secession movement and tweeting the plan.

The school received Teaching Matters’ Elizabeth Rohatyn Prize, which recognizes principals who create rigorous and innovative learning environments, for its triad system. (West Side’s Rotunda won the first prize in 2011.)

EDUCATION INNOVATION BEYOND BLOOMBERG

The Bloomberg years, with their school closings and the battles over punitive teacher evaluations, have often been confrontational and divisive. Yet, the best of New York’s iZone schools have flourished on a culture of collaboration and entrepreneurialism fostered by strong principals and creative teachers who took advantage of a climate that promoted autonomy and accountability.

Now that autonomy is eroding, with a wave of new mandates from Tweed, even as the Common Core assessments and mayoral elections bring more upheaval. Last week, the iZone was abuzz with the news that two respected iZone principals had not received tenure.

Where the Common Core assessments are concerned, which have unsettled schools both inside and outside the iZone, the iZone schools have at least one advantage: Next year the assessments are to be administered online, which might help maintain funding for technology. It will also give schools that have done the upfront work on infrastructure an edge.

The real test for the DOE in the post-Bloomberg era will be whether it can nurture the entrepreneurism of both teachers and principals that have flourished at the best iZone schools, and find a way to spread that culture and the lessons learned throughout the system.

Andrea Gabor is the Bloomberg Chair of Business Journalism at Baruch College/CUNY; she is working on a new book on education reform.

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Correction: This is an updated version of the story. A previous version incorrectly identified Richard Feynman as a chemist. He is a physicist. The story also misidentified him by the wrong first name. 

Will A “Bar” Exam for Teachers Improve Student Performance?


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NEW YORK — A growing nationwide push for more rigorous teacher-licensing standards sweeping state houses from New York to Washington has reformers on sometimes opposing political sides looking at what was once considered nearly unthinkable: a bar-like exam for educators.

Even the American Federation of Teachers, the powerful union, has taken the old adage that the best defense is a good offense and begun to campaign for such exams as teachers are increasingly blamed for low student achievement. The AFT has also been campaigning for higher standards both for prospective teachers and for teacher-preparation programs.

In so doing, the AFT has found common cause with a number of education reformers with whom it normally doesn’t agree. A new AFT report, “Raising the Bar: Aligning and Elevating Teacher Preparation and the Teaching Profession” has won praise from many quarters, including Arne Duncan. And Joel Klein, the former New York City Schools Chancellor who now heads News Corp.’s education business, floated a similar proposal last November.

New York is among the states  moving toward tougher requirements for entry into teacher-preparation programs — currently, New York has no such minimum requirements — as well as a bar-like exam for graduates. After a panel that he created said it concurred with the AFT’s report recommending a bar-like exam, Gov. Andrew Cuomo, endorsed the idea in his State of the State address on Wednesday, saying that “every teacher” should take such a test and pass it “before we put them in a classroom.”

The New NY Education Reform Commission, convened by Cuomo in April 2012, recommended in a preliminary report that prospective teachers have a minimum 3.0 GPA, as well as an assessment, such as the GRE for graduate programs, or the SAT/ACT for undergraduate programs, but, notably, doesn’t specify a minimum score that candidates must achieve. The report, which points out that the state’s current certification exam has a 99 percent pass rate, also calls for adopting a ‘bar'-like exam that will test new teachers on how well they are prepared to lead classroom instruction.

Randi Weingarten, the president of the AFT and a member of Cuomo’s education commission, said the world’s most lauded education programs in countries like Singapore and Finland also have teacher-education programs with high degrees of quality control.

“Preparation really matters,” she says. “We talk a good game in this country about the importance of teachers, but no place in this chain do we actually treat it as important.”

The AFT report is largely a critique of the nation’s teacher-education system — a hodge-podge of traditional university based education programs, alternative certifications, and online programs — that the report says is “at best confusing and at worst a fragmented and bureaucratic tangle.” The AFT says it wants to develop national consensus on a “mechanism for ensuring high standards,” in large part by improving the connection between teacher-preparation programs and on-the-ground teaching.     

The bar-exam proposal coincides with two competing trends in K-12 education: on the one hand, the proliferation of alternative certifications that aim to attract young people from elite schools and are generally much shorter — and, critics say, more superficial — than many university based programs; and, on the other hand, a growing call for educational rigor in both teacher preparation and licensure requirements.

The proposal also follows a devastating 2006 critique, Educating School Teachers by Arthur Levine, the former president of Columbia University’s Teachers College, which took aim at both alternative certifications for doing away with “quality ceilings and floors” and the majority of traditional university based programs, which are “characterized by curricular confusion, a faculty disconnected from practice, low admission and graduation standards … and weak quality control enforcement.”

At the same time, an influential 2007 McKinsey  & Co. report, which claimed that the nation recruits many of its teachers from the bottom third of college graduating classes, unsettled education policy experts, even though the claim is based on somewhat misleading data.

By proposing a bar-like exam, the AFT believes that it will force changes throughout the teacher-preparation pipeline, much the way the Flexner Report did for medical schools a century ago. The Flexner Report prompted states to write more rigorous licensing tests even as medical schools revamped their training programs and toughened entry requirements. One upshot was that by 1935, half the medical schools in operation at the turn-of-the-20th century had closed (and inroads made by women were reversed as most medical schools became all-male institutions.)

The AFT may also be gambling that more rigorous licensing standards will serve as a stumbling block for alternative certification programs, such as Teach for America, a key source of teachers for nonunion charter schools. While Abraham Lincoln famously qualified for the bar without going to law school, over the years, the increased rigor of the bar has made three years of law school a virtual requirement for aspiring lawyers.

The idea is also part of a growing push to reverse a trend — often the result of past and current political battles — that many educators say has dumbed down state and local licensing requirements. For example, in New York City, in the 1990s, the controversial Board of Examiners, which was initially established in the late 19th century to ensure that teaching jobs were based on merit, and not patronage, was eliminated in the aftermath of a lawsuit charging that the tests made it difficult for minorities to pass.

Today “it’s the right-wing reformers who are lowering standards,” says Diane Ravitch, a former assistant secretary of education and leading critic of the corporate education-reform movement, noting that Tony Bennett’s final act after losing his re-election bid, last November, as Indiana superintendent of public instruction — he was recently appointed education commissioner in Florida — was to weaken the state’s requirements for new teachers.

In particular, Bennett pushed through the state’s so-called adjunct teacher permit, which allows an applicant with just a BA degree and a 3.0 GPA, and who can pass a subject test, to teach for five years without any other training or student-teaching experience.

Bennett has defended the changes as expanding opportunities for teaching in Indiana’s classrooms. “The more opportunities we have with the ability to bring talent into Indiana classrooms, talent into Indiana school buildings, talent into Indiana school corporations, I think that’s good public policy,” he told reporters, according to Indiana’s State Impact news website.

Meanwhile, licensing rules in most states do little more than “screen out the bottom few who can’t master the English language or are badly schooled,” says Eric Nadelstern, the former New York City deputy schools chancellor and visiting professor of practice at Columbia University’s Teachers College.

The state that has pushed hardest to boost teacher requirements may be Massachusetts. After the Commonwealth created its much-lauded curriculum framework in the 1990s, it also revamped the state’s licensing regulations and tests. The new curriculum “would have amounted to little more than black and white noise without an academically stronger corps of teachers to teach to them,” writes Sandra Stotsky, who holds the “21st century chair in teacher quality” at the University of Arkansas and served as senior associate commissioner at the Massachusetts Department of Education, with responsibility for revising the state's teacher licensing regulations and tests.

Since 2005, Massachusetts has ranked at the top of National Assessment of Educational Progress scores in fourth and eighth grade reading and math, as well the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study scores in science and math in 2007 and 2011 (the state participated as an independent country).

Tougher tests will almost certainly result in many more failures among test takers. When Massachusetts instituted new licensing rules requiring prospective teachers to pass a new elementary math test, 75 percent of applicants failed in 2009, the first year the test was administered, according to Stotsky.

Many educators worry that the unintended consequences of a teacher’s “bar exam” could be to weed out many of the people they want in the classroom. “The only thing I'm certain a bar exam will do is keep out minorities,”says Chrystina Russell, the principal of a highly rated public middle school in Harlem who strives to make sure that her teaching staff resembles her black and Latino student body. Adds Nadelstern: “I don’t trust the testing industry to put together a test that is inclusive on the basis of gender, sexual persuasion or race.”

One reason that they see such an exam as disadvantaging people of color is that native speakers of Spanish and vernacular African-American dialects are at a disadvantage on written tests based on standard English because they often come from communities that are much more homogonous both ethnically and linguistically than those in which other immigrant groups live, according to Nadelstern, who adds: Speaking Yiddish didn’t get you very far if you grew up in an Irish, Italian and Jewish neighborhood.

The AFT counters that it has modeled its proposal on the so-called edTPA, formerly the Teacher Performance Assessment, which, instead of the prevailing multiple-choice  tests and written essays, emphasizes a detailed “review of a teacher candidate's authentic teaching materials,” including video clips of instruction, lesson plans, student work samples and analyses of student learning. The aim of edTPA tests, which are subject-specific, is to evaluate how a prospective teacher actually teaches a given subject to real students, rather than her theoretical knowledge of teaching.

So far seven states, including Illinois, Washington and Minnesota, have adopted the edTPA, which was developed by Stanford University and the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education; test administration and scoring are being coordinated by Pearson, the education company. New York State is adopting edTPA beginning in 2014.

The edTPA assessment is not without controversy. Last year, students at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, one of 200 colleges in close to two dozen states where the new assessments were being piloted, refused to participate, saying the requirement that students submit 20-minute videos of their teaching practice was too onerous. They also questioned whether the test evaluators, who are being paid $75 to review each assessment, will put in the two to two-and-a-half hours necessary to do a thorough job. While Pearson helps to recruit scorers, Stanford notes that the scorers are experienced teachers who have been specially trained to evaluate the assessments.

Taking the edTPA will cost prospective teachers $300, about double what licensure tests cost today, but still far less than other licensing tests, such as those for nursing or the law.

Such controversy may be why the AFT, rather than adopting the edTPA outright, has asked The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, which established the standards for so-called master teachers, to convene a gathering of educators and other “stakeholders” to design a multi-dimensional entry bar that could well include edTPA, minimum GPAs for teacher-prep candidates, as well as new student-teaching requirements.

With many states already signed up for edTPA, there is a danger that the AFT’s  “bar exam” could result in yet another addition to the national licensure smorgasbord — rather than a national consensus.

“There is a tension here with the AFT’s desire to get to a single national system,” concedes Linda Darling-Hammond, the Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education at Stanford Univ., and a contributor to edTPA’s development. “How to get there is not immediately clear. We already have a patchwork. It’s conceivable that you could end up with more than one addition to the current schema.”

The biggest problem with the AFT’s proposal may not be getting consensus — but getting it too quickly. The rush to jump on the next big thing, no matter how dubious the evidence, may be the biggest Achilles heel of the education reform movement. EdTPA’s predecessor, a performance-assessment test known as PACT that has been used in California for several years, has shown promise. Yet it will be a few years — when student achievement data are available for the teachers who participated in the edTPA pilots — before strong conclusions can be drawn on whether the assessments can weed out bad apples and select for teachers who consistently improve student achievement.

But that hasn’t stopped numerous states from jumping on the edTPA bandwagon. Similarly, even though the Massachusetts curriculum framework propelled student achievement in the Commonwealth to the top of national and international rankings, the state effectively jettisoned that framework for the untested Common Core; Massachusetts has also embraced edTPA.

As for whether a “bar” exam will help get teachers, and the teaching profession, more respect: That might be an even bigger hurdle.

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Andrea Gabor is the Bloomberg Professor of Business Journalism at Baruch College/CUNY and the author of several books, including The Capitalist Philosophers

 

Council wants to know whether kids are getting enough physical ed


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A winning design from the DOE's 2012 school wellness poster contest.


NEW YORK — A group of City Council members is trying to change the conversation about the obesity epidemic from soda to the lack of physical education in public schools.

In a letter sent earlier today to Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott, the group of 34 led by Melissa Mark-Viverito and Letitia James, called for increased physical activity in the public schools, citing reports that they are not meeting state standards.

They also requested information on how much time children spend in physical education classes.

"With all of the public discussion about the mayor’s proposed ban on the sale of large sugar-sweetened beverages, we cannot neglect the critical role that physical activity plays in reducing obesity," they said in a statement.

The city's Department of Education responded by saying it had created an office dedicated to overseeing physical education, health education and wellness in 2003.

“We are helping schools provide a high-quality physical education, and through the obesity task force, we will be expanding fitness and wellness programs," said Deidrea Miller, a DOE spokeswoman.

The obesity task force was convened in January, with commissioners from major agencies, to find innovative policies to reduce the rates of New Yorkers who were obese or overweight. Among the proposals, the DOE said it would increase funding for health intiatives; create "wellness coordinators" to advise schools; and work to develop the connection between health and nutrition in cafeterias.

The proposed ban on the sale of sugary drinks in containers larger than 16 ounces at any food establishment that receives a health department inspection also came out of discussions by the task force.

The proposal has won praise from public health experts, and ridicule from comedians.

The Bloomberg-appointed Board of Health will vote on whether to pass the new soda regulation in September.

See the letter below:



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