Magic with numbers [Updated]

New York City’s parent blog predicted the city would win the the prestigious Broad Prize, though they weren’t happy about it. This is a $1 million award to the most-improved urban district, in the estimation of financier Eli Broad. New York under Joel Klein has twice been nominated but never won.

Much is improved in the city schools, and in my estimation it has everything to do with the teachers. Despite high turnover and problems with the Teaching Fellows and Teach for America programs, we have the strongest teacher corps in years. That is actually the estimation of both Michael Bloomberg and Randi Weingarten, too. Higher salaries have attracted more applicants, and newbies and veterans alike appear to be working extremely hard.

But the Broad Prize doesn’t really measure teacher quality. It doesn’t use the multiple measures that are needed to evaluate good teaching, nor does it have the on-the-ground ability to see what’s taking place in hundreds of real schools. It looks at “data,” which mostly means test scores and graduation rates.

And under Klein, the city schools’ public face is all about data. Test scores have been all but wrung out and tortured to produce happy-talk evidence of constant student progress. When Klein and Bloomberg talk they invariably flap those test scores and graduation rates in the faces of everyone they think matters–often business leaders and political leaders. You don’t hear them talk about curriculum and instruction the same way. And if there is bad news, that data is tucked into a dark hole somewhere far away from the spotlight’s beam.

Sir Michael Barber, the British education guru under Tony Blair and now a McKinsey consultant, has been a key advisor to Klein. He played UK education reform similarly. He focused the education bureaucracy on “deliverables,” which were higher test scores and reduced truancy. Progress towards these goals was measured regularly, while he set about to tear down the “civil service” culture in the education department and replace it with a culture of rapid and extensive change (for what isn’t totally clear). All this is in his book, Instruction to Deliver.

That same approach of unbalancing the culture and focusing relentlessly on delivering a limited number of measurable goals is much in evidence here in New York. Whether it translates to better education is debatable.

A report that came out in June says Barber’s reforms have not meant long-term gains. The Sutton Trust’s “Blair’s Education, an international perspective,” says the UK’s test score gains do not hold up against international measures, that they may have resulted more from teaching to the test than any longterm educational gains, and that “it is hard to say with certainty what the extent of progress has been. And while test scores have gone up, “monitoring has been largely under government control with vested interest in results.” Other measures of child well-being look negative, including a rise in truancy.

Diane Ravitch wrote a blog recently in response to a New York Times story on Barber. In it, she reprinted a letter, which the Times did not print, from a former Oxford professor and study author who said Barber’s education reforms may be short-lived. He wrote

In the last few years, England has created the most tested school population in the world from age 5 to age 18. School improvement lies in scoring even higher in the national tests, irrespective of whether these tests bear any relation to the quality of learning, and schools which see the poverty of the testing regime suffer the penalty of going down the very public league tables.

Winning the Broad Prize is certainly be a feather in the city’s cap, and a welcome affirmation of our teaching talent. But there is great mistrust of Klein’s reforms in the city. The parent blog actually urged Broad not to award the prize to New York. At the least, we should not mistake this as clear evidence of a serious, long-term turnaround in education in this city.

UPDATE:

Over at Eduwonk.com, Broad review board member Andrew Rotherham is calling this post “all grumbling and sourpuss.” It’s not. We quibbled with the evaluation criteria but not with the award. We deserved it. We have one of the best urban systems in the nation, though with miles still to go. We only hope what’s great in the city system survives NCLB and all the other reforms that are laid on it.