School Officials and Union Agree on Pilot Program for Teacher Evaluations

In a step toward reshaping how all teachers in New York City’s 1,700 public schools are judged, the Department of Education and the city teachers’ union agreed on Friday to a pilot teacher-evaluation system that will take effect next year in 33 struggling schools.

The deal, which ended months of disagreement, was needed for the city’s continued participation in a federal grant program that could bring up to $65 million in grants — up to $6 million for some schools — over the next three years.

City officials announced months ago that they had applied for the grants for the 33 schools. But the application was stalled by the state, which had to approve it and which said it was dissatisfied with proposals for how the money would be used and how teachers would be evaluated.

As of Friday, the city had not yet submitted its revised plans to Albany, state officials said, making it impossible to know for sure whether the schools would continue to receive the money.

Under the deal, announced by the city, all teachers in the struggling schools — schools with low graduation rates and low student test scores — will be rated annually as either ineffective, developing, effective or highly effective. In the current system, in place for decades, teachers have been rated simply satisfactory or unsatisfactory.

The revised system mirrors a recent state law that will require that four-tier evaluation scale to be used for all public school teachers statewide in the coming years. The troubled schools will be a testing ground for that system, union and city officials said.

”If we have an opportunity to look at this on a small scale, we might come to a better understanding of some of the issues inside of that legislation,” said Michael Mulgrew, the president of the United Federation of Teachers, the city teacher’s union.

But the city and the union remain a long way from a deal on reforming evaluations for all teachers, and many details of the evaluation system even within the pilot program have not been worked out.

Two of the most contentious unresolved issues are how much weight students’ standardized test scores will be given in a teacher’s evaluation alongside other measures of progress, and whether the union would agree to new standardized tests that the city is considering.

Several problems have beset the city’s effort to acquire the school improvement grants. Eleven schools were due to receive the grants starting last year, but delays in the application process meant that the money did not begin flowing until January, limiting its effectiveness. The city was also forced to reshape its plans for many of the remaining schools because of disagreements with the union.

Talks between the union and the city about the evaluation system foundered over whether a teacher would be allowed to ask for a meeting with a principal after a negative evaluation and whether the union could file a grievance on behalf of a teacher if such a meeting was not held, both parties said.

In the end, the city agreed to most of the union’s requests on that issue, in exchange for requiring that a record of a negative evaluation remain in a teacher’s file, said Matt Mittenthal, a Department of Education spokesman.

The federal grants were intended to help the city devise a plan for the struggling schools, most of which are high schools, to avoid having to close them. The grant can pay for additional training for teachers and would give principals the ability to hire “master teachers” who would be paid a 30 percent premium and would work extra hours.

Some of the schools will be taken over by a nonprofit organization under a plan called a “restart” in the federal government’s grant language.

The schools eligible for the grants include Cobble Hill School of American Studies, Boys & Girls High School and John Dewey High School in Brooklyn; Flushing High School and Long Island City High School in Queens; Herbert H. Lehman High School and Banana Kelly High School in the Bronx; and Washington Irving High School in Manhattan.

Brian Rosenbloom, the principal of Chelsea Career and Technical Education High School, one of the schools that had begun to receive grant funding this year, said news of the deal was not surprising in light of the budget accord last month that saved the jobs of 4,100 teachers.

“I figured they would come up with an agreement as soon as they decided they wouldn’t lay anyone off,” he said.

There was a sense of relief that after months of uncertainty, the grant money, particularly needed in a time of budget cuts, had been secured, even though the hard work lies ahead.

“It’s fantastic that there will be additional resources put into high-needs schools,” said Robert Hughes, the executive director of New Visions for Public Schools, a nonprofit organization that has applied to manage five struggling schools. “Now we have to make sure that those resources are effectively used.”

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School Discipline Study Raises Fresh Questions

When also considering less serious infractions punished by in-school suspensions, the rate climbed to nearly 60 percent, according to the study by the Council of State Governments, with one in seven students facing such disciplinary measures at least 11 times.

The study linked these disciplinary actions to lower rates of graduation and higher rates of later criminal activity and found that minority students were more likely than whites to face the more severe punishments.

“In the last 20 to 25 years, there have been dramatic increases in the number of suspensions and expulsions,” said Michael Thompson, who headed the study as director of the Justice Center at the Council of State Governments, a nonpartisan group. “This quantifies how you’re in the minority if you have not been removed from the classroom at least once. This is not just being sent to the principal’s office, and it’s not after-school detention or weekend detention or extra homework. This is in the student’s record.”

The study, which followed every incoming Texas seventh grader over three years through high school and sometimes beyond, joins a growing body of literature looking at how to balance classroom order with individual student need.

Several experts said in interviews that the data, covering nearly one million students and mapping each of their school records against any entry in the juvenile justice system, was the most comprehensive on the topic yet. The report did not identify individual districts or schools.

The findings are “very much representative of the nation as a whole,” said Russ Skiba, a professor of school psychology at Indiana University who reviewed the study along with several other prominent researchers.

Several teachers and administrators in Texas were shocked to learn of the report.

“That’s astronomical,” said Joe Erhardt, a science teacher at Kingwood Park High School in the Houston suburb of Humble, Tex. “I’m at a loss.”

Doug Otto, superintendent of the Plano Independent School District, said the data showed that “suspensions are a little too easy.”

“Once they become automatic, we’ve really hurt that child’s chances to receive a high school diploma,” he added “We’ve got to find ways to keep those kids in school. Don’t get me wrong — we have to provide safe environments for all the other kids. But you have to balance it out and cut down the suspensions and expulsions.”

Almost 15 percent of students, a vast majority of whom had extensive school disciplinary files, had at least one record in the juvenile justice system, according to the report.

Minority students facing discipline for the first time tended to be given the harsher, out-of-school suspension, rather than in-school suspension, more often than white students, the study said. (The nature of the offenses was not noted.) A disproportionate number of minority students also ended up in alternative classrooms, where some have complained that teachers are often less qualified.

“What we really need to do is go in to those districts and see if these really are choices being made,” Mr. Skiba said. “We don’t really know enough about the reasons for African-American and Latino over-representation in school discipline. We have enough data to show that it’s more than just poverty and any greater misbehavior. My guess is it’s very subtle interactional effects between some teachers and students.”

Mr. Thompson, of the Council of State Governments, said one of the study’s most important findings was how demographically similar schools disciplined students differently. Although Texas law requires suspension or expulsion for certain offenses, Mr. Thompson said that 97 percent of suspensions were discretionary, and that suspension rates might say as much about administrators’ discipline philosophy as about student behavior.

“Schools are making very different uses of school discipline,” he explained. “And they can have an impact on how often a kid repeats a grade or graduates. We need to recognize that it’s something we need to improve upon.”

While the study found links between school discipline and criminal activity, there is no way to know whether one caused the other. Educators have long complained that many students, particularly from poor families, arrive in classrooms with problems far beyond academics that they have few tools to control.

A former alternative-education teacher in Texas, Zeph Capo still remembers the eighth grader who swore at teachers, threw books and pencils, and eventually was suspended and sent into the district’s disciplinary program. Mr. Capo said he did not know whether the student straightened out or slipped further. The study made him only more concerned.

“Are suspensions the tool to improve student behavior and help them be successful? No, I don’t think that’s the case,” said Mr. Capo, now a vice president of the Houston Federation of Teachers who trains others in classroom management. “Sometimes there’s not a lot of choice left but to risk chaos and anarchy in your school. There are potential times when human beings have had it and they drop the hammer, and maybe the hammer crushes too far.”

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The Choice: Standing Sentry at the Next Gate

The forthcoming issue of Education Life, the quarterly supplement that will be published in this Sunday’s Times, is devoted to the subject of graduate schools — and in that spirit I was asked to take a general look, in my regular column, at the admissions process for such institutions.

I did so through the prism that I, and many readers of The Choice, know best: that of the undergraduate admissions maze. While there are clearly fundamental differences — including that the weeding out of grad school applicants is often done by faculty members — I saw many similarities that should give applicants some comfort.

For example, Lisa Giannangeli, director of M.B.A. admissions for the Stanford Graduate School of Business, told me something that should sound familiar to anyone who has recently applied to an undergraduate program:

We need to understand your entire story: your background, your future aspirations. Your personal qualities and contributions — everything about you that makes you who you are? suggests how you see the world and what shaped the perspective you will bring to future classmates.

The other voices quoted in the piece, which examines the holistic side of graduate school admissions, are those involved in the process at well-regarded programs of law (Yale), English (University of California, Berkeley) and engineering (University of Texas, Austin). I also spoke to a counselor at Hamilton College who advises undergraduates on their graduate school aspirations.

You can read a preview of the full article here. Afterward, I hope you will use the box below to offer some advice or perspective of your own.

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National Briefing | SCIENCE: Top Science Fair Honors Go to American Girls

In Room for Debate, seeking a new path to practicing law: apprenticeships, shorter programs, better classes.

A big drug maker has taken an important step in making AIDS drugs more available worldwide. But obstacles remain.

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Geography Report Card Finds Students Lagging

Over all, high school seniors demonstrated the least proficiency on a 2010 test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the nation’s geography report card, with 20 percent found to be proficient or better, compared with 27 percent of eighth graders and 21 percent of fourth graders.

The average test score for 12th graders declined to 282 (on a scale of 500) from 284 in 2001 when the test was last given. It remained essentially unchanged for eighth graders during that period, though there were gains among the lowest-performing students. Fourth graders had the largest gains, with the average score rising to 213, up five points from 2001.

“Geography is not just about maps,” said David P. Driscoll, chairman of the National Assessment Governing Board, who expressed concern that students were not doing better in geography. “It is a rich and varied discipline that, now more than ever, is vital to understanding the connections between our global economy, environment and diverse cultures.”

The report found that boys scored higher than girls in all three grades, and that the average scores for black and Hispanic students in fourth and eighth grades were higher than in earlier tests.

Roger M. Downs, a geography professor at Pennsylvania State University who has studied the results, said that while he was encouraged by the improving test scores for fourth graders, and for low-performing and minority students, he was concerned that “geography’s role in the curriculum is limited and, at best, static.”

“That is ironic given the convincing case that can be made for the importance of geographic literacy,” Mr. Downs said. “But it is doubly ironic given a world in which adults and now children have smartphones and tablets that can download maps on the fly, provide directions to places, and give your location to your friends.”

The tests were given to a national sample of 7,000 fourth graders, 9,500 eighth graders, and 10,000 12th graders. The assessment program, which currently evaluates student progress in geography and eight other subjects, has also recently released scores in civics and history.

The geography test rated students’ knowledge as basic, proficient or advanced, based partly on knowledge of space and place — say, a particular place on Earth — as well as environment and society and spatial dynamics and connections.

It also assessed students’ cognitive skills through problem-solving questions. For instance, a fourth grader rated as proficient would be able to recognize factors that prevent soil erosion; one rated advanced would be able to use a map to understand city development, according to the report. A proficient eighth grader would be able to explain the effect of a monsoon in India.

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