9486 in the collection  

At P.S. 8, Image Didn’t Match Performance

Ohanian Comment: The
message here is that parent knowledge of the
school their children attend doesn't count for
beans. The message is that McGraw-Hill knows
better. Read deep into the article and you'll
find out the numbers they're talking about
here: one-tenth of 1 percent in
proficiency. And remember: McGraw-Hill gets
to define proficiency. Nobody else's opinion
counts. Certainly not teachers or
parents.

By JIM DWYER

How could a red-hot school in Brooklyn Heights
— with surging enrollment from middle-class and
wealthy families, with test scores that are
above average, and with extras paid for by
parents’ fund-raisers — be declared a failure?

For some people, news that Public School 8 on
Hicks Street will be getting an F on its
upcoming report card cinches the case that
education officials have lost their test-taking
marbles.

And yet there is a strong argument that the F
grade is just the sort of blunt truth-telling
needed for schools that are highly regarded in
the vaporous, unchallenged esteem of
conventional wisdom.

More than 80 percent of the kids at P.S. 8
passed a standardized math test. Two-thirds
passed the language arts test. In 2006, the
mayor said the school should be imitated. In
July, the schools chancellor announced that an
annex would be built to accommodate the demand
in what he said was a “very successful school.”

In reality, children who start the year at P.S.
8 with decent or good scores in math and
English actually have gone backward, said James
S. Liebman, the chief accountability officer
for the city’s Department of Education.

“You drop them off at the beginning of the
year, and on average, by the end of the year,
your child lost ground in proficiency,” Mr.
Liebman said.

Children on the lower end of the scale — the
ones who had the most room for improvement —
made only the slightest gains compared with
those at similar schools, Mr. Liebman said,
while at most schools across the city, there
were big improvements.

“Where was the child last year, and where is
the child this year?” he asked. “You’re
comparing them to themselves.”

For many people, the F grade for P.S. 8
ratifies their skepticism about standardized
tests. If all the children, like those in Lake
Wobegon, are above average, how could the
school be failing?

“The whole formula is ridiculous,” argued Jane
R. Hirschmann, who founded the Parents’
Coalition to End High Stakes Testing. “They
have turned our institutions of learning into
institutions of test-taking.” It is only after
the standardized English test in January and
the math test in March that real teaching
begins, she said.

She noted that in a 2003 journal article, Mr.
Liebman himself bluntly criticized tests.

“High-stakes testing turned out to be an
unreliable measure of the performance of
individuals or institutions,” Mr. Liebman and
his co-author, Charles F. Sabel, wrote in
The New York University Review of Law and
Social Change. “It often created perverse
incentives — to teach to the test, or to
exclude from the testing pool the students most
in need of help.”

At the time the article was published, Mr.
Liebman, a law professor at Columbia and one of
the country’s leading authorities on the death
penalty, was not yet working for the Department
of Education.

“When he wasn’t in the shoes he is in now, he
certainly understood that high-stakes tests are
not beneficial to students or schools,” Ms.
Hirschmann said.

Mr. Liebman does not dispute that point at all.
The school reports are not the product of a
single test, he said, but a blend of
measurements that take into account how each
child progresses and how well — or poorly —
similar schools are able to help students move
forward. Children from better-off families
typically do much better on standardized tests
than those from lower-income households.

“If you use high-stakes tests and nothing else,
you’re measuring ZIP code, race, socioeconomic
status,” Mr. Liebman said. “Most importantly,
you need to measure how much kids improve after
a year at their school.”

Ms. Hirschmann said that test results — which
make up 60 percent of a school’s grade — did
not illuminate the quality of work. “This has
nothing to do with education,” she said. “It
only tells us whether the child can take a
test.”

On average, Mr. Liebman said, the higher-
performing students at P.S. 8 lost a little
more than one-tenth of 1 percent in proficiency
in English and math; the lower performing
students gained about a tenth of a percent. Why
should anyone care about such numbers?

They make a major difference by the time the
students are 18, Mr. Liebman said. Students get
scores between 1 and 4. Of those who finish
eighth grade with a 3.0 proficiency in math and
English, just 55 percent graduate from high
school four years later. For those with 3.5
scores, the graduation rate is 75 percent.

“I know it’s troubling to people in the
neighborhood, and it should be troubling,” he
said of the F grade. “The point is, compared to
any other school in the city, this school is
off the charts on the low end.

“We’re trying to move away from a school that
gets by on its reputation.”

E-mail: dwyer@nytimes.com

— Jim Dwyer
New York Times
2008-09-13


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