Matthew Ferry's List: Education

• Across the country, public school activists and teachers’ unions have criticized what they see as a pervasive culture of high-stakes testing that they say can contribute to cheating because educators fear the consequences if they do not raise scores. School closings and individual teacher evaluations are increasingly based in part on test results.

• In the fall of 2011, the state identified 33 Philadelphia schools where at least 10 students in one or more classes had five or more irregular erasures. The state investigated 14 of those schools.

• Mr. Davis, the district general counsel, said that one teacher had bought erasers for every child in her class to use on a test day, and that they had been used. No improprieties were found.

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• The pattern has become clear: defund the schools, precipitate a crisis and use that as an excuse to further attack the schools, pushing them closer and closer to a point of no return. The $50 million to open the schools this year is just the latest and most immediate example of three years of brinkmanship.

• Last year, the district took out a $300 million bond to patch another big deficit, the very definition of a band-aid fix as it only added to what is now $280 million in annual debt payments.
• Most of even that inadequate amount hasn’t arrived yet as the state sits on $45 million in federal money it refuses to disperse until the teachers agree to enormous salary cuts and rollback of other benefits and city officials bicker among themselves on how to deliver the money they promised.
• Critics see them as a way to divert public money into politically connected private hands, and even more important, a way to break the teachers union because they aren’t bound by district collective bargaining rules.
• Next year, stay tuned for a repeat. Barring an unforeseen economic renaissance in the city or thorough overhaul of the state executive and legislative branches, the district is poised for year after year of one crisis after another.

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• New York City has long provided preschool opportunities to children — it educates about 58,000 4-year-olds, most of them black and Hispanic. About two-thirds of those children attend part-day programs, which last two and a half hours each day, compared with six hours and 20 minutes for full-day programs. Mr. de Blasio’s plan calls for expanding access to full-day prekindergarten to 48,000 more in the next five years.

• The number of low-income families in the city who choose to enroll their children in prekindergarten is still disproportionately low. About 52 percent of prekindergarten students qualified last year for free or reduced lunch programs, city data shows; across the city, 75 percent of students qualify.

• One of Mr. de Blasio’s most immediate challenges will be to find space to house new prekindergarten programs. Many schools are already strapped for classroom space, and some have reduced such programs in recent years to make room for an influx of kindergarten students.
• Another option may be charter schools, which are lobbying for a change in state law so that they can offer prekindergarten classes. Mr. de Blasio has been critical of charter schools but recently suggested a willingness to work with them.

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• Mayor de Blasio, as he races to add thousands of new prekindergarten seats before fall, is looking far and wide for classroom space and qualified teachers. And charter schools are eager to add prekindergarten to their offerings. But state law prohibits that.
• Mr. de Blasio’s more immediate challenge is coming up with an estimated $530 million a year to pay for his plan, which includes an expansion of after-school programs. He wants state legislators to pass an additional income tax on city residents earning more than $500,000, a proposal that Mr. Cuomo, who wants to lower taxes, has not supported.
• Aside from charter schools, some public schools have empty classrooms, and nonprofit community groups are expected to offer more. But Mr. de Blasio has said his team would think creatively about unused space across the city.
• Mr. de Blasio seems to have the backing of New Yorkers. A poll by Quinnipiac University released on Thursday showed that 74 percent of residents supported passing a tax increase on wealthy New Yorkers to pay for the plan.

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• “90% of the brain develops between the ages of zero to five, yet we spend 90% of our dollars on kids above the age of five,” says Timothy Knowles of the University of Chicago.
• The most recent report by the OECD, a rich-world think-tank, in 2009, found that 15-year-olds who had attended pre-schools for more than a year performed better (even accounting for socioeconomic background) than those who had attended for only a year or not at all.
• Other enthusiastic providers of pre-school education like Sweden, Norway, France and Belgium and Denmark do not score particularly highly on attainment in later education, whereas Japan, which combines early-years provision with a fiercely competitive exam culture, excels.

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• Dr. Matson also asks students to “find some cultural norms to break,” like doing cartwheels while entering the library. The point: “Examine what in the culture is preventing you from creating something new or different. And what is it like to look like a fool because a lot of things won’t work out and you will look foolish? So how do you handle that?”

• Advocates for the homeless have pressed Mr. de Blasio to reinstate several policies that ended under Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. From 1990 until 2005, the city placed more than 53,000 homeless families in permanent housing by giving them priority referrals to federal subsidy programs, according to an analysis of city data by Patrick Markee of the Coalition for the Homeless.

   

   

• The Bloomberg administration canceled that policy and in its place created a short-term rent subsidy program that ended in 2011 when the state withdrew its portion of the funding. By the time Mr. Bloomberg left office at the end of last year, the homeless population had peaked at more than 52,000 — the highest number on record since the Great Depression.
• According to data compiled by the State Education Department, more than 80,000 school-age children in the city were identified as homeless during the last academic year.

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• In my daughter’s English class at Clarke Central, students engage the works of Plato and learn to discern and make philosophical arguments about abstract concepts like piety; they read Hemingway and learn how to engage questions such as whether a protagonist’s moral code can be attributed to the author.  You cannot pick “A, B, C, or D” for such things, or if you can, then the entire experience is trivialized. Of course assessments are a necessary part of any educational process, to help guide, inform and improve instruction, but the high-stakes test-and-punish regime now in place is not doing that.

   

• After the Arab Spring, a study by the Stimson Center looked back at whether various sectors had foreseen the possibility of upheavals. It found that scholars were among the most oblivious — partly because they relied upon quantitative models or theoretical constructs that had been useless in predicting unrest.