Wear orange if you go into the woods this weekend. If, say, you’re tracking down remote rural voters, or even NYC schools research, hunting season is starting early.
James Kemble, the executive director of the new Research Alliance for New York City Schools, described his ambitious vision for independent research with such urgency at the press conference launch that NYC Partnership prez Kathryn Wylde, who followed him at the podium, commented, “You can tell Jim is loaded for bear.”
Joel Klein, who spoke next, said, “If Jim is loaded for bear then I’m the bear.” Indeed, chancellor.
Klein, along with Wylde, UFT vice president for high schools Leo Casey, and New York University president John Sexton, appeared to cheer the launch (re-launch, really) of the the alliance, a citywide research partnership on the city schools to be housed at NYU, which promises to provide “transparent,” “independent” and high-quality research and data on the schools. They’ll get no argument from the union on the need for that.
But this is the second round of promises. The alliance, then called the Research Partnership, was announced a year ago and then barely heard from. The newly-hired Kemble was universally praised and it all sounds good now, but this alliance will have to prove itself. Will the DOE give it full access to the data? Will its research agenda really reflect the important issues facing teachers and students? Will it have the independence it claims (Klein and UFT President Randi Weingarten are both on the board.)
Casey hit a more serious note. “We need to develop research to allocate what we know will be increasingly limited resources,” he said. Will research find a benefit to spending $2 million on couriers at the DOE? Or $80 million on a computer system that no one seems to be able to access?
The rewards are potentially great–bear-sized–if this alliance can produce high-quality, non-partisan research that everyone can agree on. “There is so much data but so little knowledge,” Casey noted.
Tagged: data, Randi Weingarten
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1 Comment:
1 Peter Goodman
· Nov 1, 2008 at 1:58 pm
The “chronic absenteeism” report – is one of the most interesting recent pieces of research re NYC schools … it refocuses how we look at attendance … and … it cost virtually nothing (done by Center for NYC Affairs at the New School University). Will the Alliance examine the impact of Mayoral Control? Analyze DOE claims re test scores? Individual teacher impact on student achievement? Who will decide the research? Will there be an RFP process for “outsiders”? and, since all this data is within the public domain why isn’t it available to all researchers?
Will the Alliance be a gatekeeper?
A nice press conference … now what?
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