Teachers union VP Low: Beware test-score mania.
Half of New Haven Public School grads enroll in a second year of college within two years of finishing 12th grade. The district wants to boost that number to 75 percent.
That was one of three goals approved Monday night by the New Haven Board of Education as it enters the first year of a five-year school reform drive.
The goals for college success, dropouts, and student test scores were approved by a unanimous 8 – 0 vote after a presentation by school reform czar Garth Harries and schools data-cruncher Katya Levitan-Reiner. Click here to read their PowerPoint.
Until the reform drive launched about 18 months ago, the city didn’t track how well its graduates performed in college. As part of the reform effort, it hired National Student Clearinghouse to crunch some numbers. Initial numbers show that of the class of 2007-08, only 50 percent enrolled in a second year of college within two years of graduating from high school. The district set a goal to boost that number to 55 percent for current high school seniors, then five percent each year for each subsequent class.
That means for the current eighth-grade class, 75 percent of graduates would be expected to enroll in a second year of college within two years of their graduation in 2015.
The data isn’t perfect: It captures only about 85 percent of New Haven Public School (NHPS) graduates, because it tracks only those students who are legal residents with social security numbers.
According to the data, only 65 percent of NHPS grads enroll in college after graduation. The district set a goal to boost that number to 85 percent in the next five years.
What about students who never graduate from high school? Those who drop out aren’t counted in the college success goal. The district does have a goal for them, however.
New Haven’s Class of 2008 had a dropout rate of 27.4 percent — not 15.7 percent, as previously reported using a different calculation — school officials revealed in September. The district aims to cut dropout rate to 13.5 percent in the next five years. The goal was one of the three officially approved Monday.
The third goal is to close the achievement gap on standardized tests between New Haven kids and the state average on standardized tests. On Monday, the district laid out how much it will need to improve each year to meet that goal.
The plan calls for boosting student test scores by an average of 3.4 percent on Connecticut Mastery Tests and Connecticut Academic Performance Tests this year. For the next nine years, the district aims to boost scores by as much as 6.6 percent, for a total of 40 percent by 2018 – 19.
Reform czar Harries said these numbers will serve as clear goals that the public can use to assess the reform drive. Beneath the broad goals, the district will also look at scores in much more detail, by grade and subject, as well as school by school.
After the presentation, teachers union Vice President David Low pressed for more innovative solutions.
He said while the relationship between teachers and administration is “profoundly” improved, the school system needs more dramatic change to boost student achievement. The current model was “built to sort the top fifth of students” and prepare them for college. “The system isn’t built for all.”
Low said reforms like the new teacher evaluation system are premised on the arguments of the film “Waiting For Superman”: that “we just need to put the right people” into school systems and students will learn more. Continuing the current model, but asking teachers to perform better, “will get us only incremental gains,” not the “profound change” that school officials are seeking, he predicted.
Echoing the warnings of education reformer Diane Ravitch, Low cautioned against a school reform effort that is too focused on accountability. Teachers are likely to become so focused on test scores that they lose sight of more innovative solutions to getting kids to learn, he argued. He asked the board to “open up a space for innovation to occur,” including out-of-the-box solutions that don’t bring instant improvement on test scores, but may have more lasting long-term impact.
Board member Ferdinand Risco urged Low to give the reform drive a chance. There are no statistics yet showing the reform ideas have failed, he noted.
Schools Superintendent Reggie Mayo added that with the teacher evaluation system, teachers will have the classroom feedback and support that they have said was lacking. He said the district is off to a good start on the reforms, and “we’re still looking for good ideas.”