Texans for Education Reform

Shapiro: When it comes to improving schools, it’s not all about money

manager — Thu, 13 Nov 2014 15:19:01 +0000

Austin American-Statesman

November 12, 2014

By Florence Shapiro

A state district judge recently ruled that the way Texas funds its schools is “inadequate.” While school districts, teacher organizations and others who directly benefit from proposed funding increases cheered the decision, the rest of us are left to determine what is “adequate.”

What should greatly concern Texas parents isn’t that Texas’ school funding is determined to be “inadequate” but rather that the ruling isn’t tied to any meaningful education reform solutions. The ruling suggests only money will solve the problem of “inadequacy.”

Consider that Washington, D.C., which spends the most per student nationally and outspends Texas by almost three to one, gets decidedly lower math and reading educational outcomes. In fact, D.C. students’ math and reading results are dead last when comparing 8th grade National Assessment of Educational Progress scores nationwide. New York, which is the second biggest spender, outspends Texas by at least two to one yet scores lower than Texas on the math NAEP in almost every category (disaggregated by white, Hispanic, black, and low income student performance demographics). Florida, on the other hand, spends less than D.C., New York and Texas yet outperforms or ties with others’ reading NAEP scores.

In comparison after comparison, it has been repeatedly shown that money spent is not a reliable predictor of improved academic outcomes for our children.

The Texas Education Agency’s latest data show us a real and urgent “inadequacy” ― only 18 percent of our high school graduates are considered to be college ready as determined by the SAT or ACT. To reverse this, we must concentrate on investing our public education dollars on strategies proven to make a difference in our public schools.

The first place to start is with excellence in the classroom. All research shows that an effective teacher is the strongest factor impacting student outcomes, far outweighing other factors such as class size. Therefore, we must improve our teacher evaluation system and strengthen the quality of professional development for our teachers. It’s time to honor the commitment of teachers by providing them the feedback and resources needed to obtain mastery in their profession while improving student achievement.

We also need to give all students access to excellent public schools. One way to do that is to change state laws to allow students to attend a public school of their choice within their district. This will give parents real and immediate options for their children and will spur healthy competition among our public schools.

We can further expand excellence with public school choice by encouraging the growth of free, high-performing open-enrollment public charter schools and giving charter school students equal access to taxpayer funded public school facilities.

Increasing transparency for parents and local communities is crucial in addressing the problem of chronically failing schools. Every parent wants to know how their neighborhood and district schools are performing. We should start by rating each school district and individual campus on an A-F system that everyone can understand.

When schools are failing, we should empower parents to intervene. Local communities should also be given the freedom to craft local solutions to their local educational needs. As a final option to ensure that every Texas child — regardless of race, ethnicity or ZIP code — receives the promise of high-quality, world-class education, Texas should establish a special statewide turnaround school district to improve the state’s lowest performing schools.

There are other strategies, including access to online courses and other high-tech education innovations, that should be utilized.

It’s not all about the money. For education to be truly “adequate” in Texas, we should be investing in what works ― effective teachers in every classroom, greater public school choice, increased transparency, improving failing schools, and high-tech innovation.

Shapiro is a former Texas state senator and chair of the Senate Education Committee. She is president of Texans for Education Reform.

Education reform

Article Type:

TER Initiatives

School districts look to PSJA as model for decreasing dropout rate

manager — Wed, 10 Sep 2014 21:29:32 +0000

ValleyCentral.com

September 9, 2014

By Brett Crandall

The Pharr-San Juan-Alamo ISD is raising the bar as the district continues to increase the graduation rate.

Eight years ago, PSJA ISD’s dropout rate was twice the state average. Today it's half the state average and now other school districts across the country are looking to this district to learn how to replicate their success.

When Dr. Daniel king became superintendent at PSJA ISD in 2007 he knew something had to change to improve the district's 62 percent graduation rate.

That's why the district implemented the countdown to zero dropout recovery walk.

Once school starts, the district attempts to locate every student that didn't return from the year before.

If they aren't in school, district staff will make home visits and find out how they can help students overcome their circumstances to get them enrolled in school.

"We have all kinds of support and programs to help them work through their problems,” King said. “A lot of it is convincing them that no matter how tough it is whatever they are facing the next step of life will be a lot easier with a high school diploma than to face the same challenges without a high school diploma."

With a 2013 graduation rate of 90 percent and a dropout rate half the state average, the Texas Education Agency uses PSJA as an example for other school districts to follow.

Since 2006 PSJA has reduced the number of dropouts by a stunning 80 percent.

That example Dr. King says is making sure students know teachers and administrators aren't giving up on them.

"Ultimately just about all of them want to finish their education. They just don't see how they can overcome particular issues in their life and I've felt that if we really reach out to them in a personal way and offer solutions, that we could be successful and show them how they can be successful, and it’s worked very, very well.,” King said.

Over the next couple of weekends, district employees and community volunteers will continue to find other students who are struggling and help bring them back to school.

To volunteer call 956-354-2027.

Cen-Tex charter school to support Azleway schools

manager — Wed, 10 Sep 2014 21:26:10 +0000

KETK

September 9, 2014

TYLER — Trinity Charter Schools (TCS) on Tuesday announced a new partnership with Azleway Inc., an organization that operates a residential treatment center in the Tyler-area and provides intensive therapy in a safe, healing environment for at-risk youth. Trinity Charter Schools will serve approximately 150 students on Azleway’s campuses in New Chapel Hill and Big Sandy and in partnership with Willow Bend Residential Treatment Center. School services at these facilities were formerly provided by Azleway Charter School.

“Azleway is known for its commitment to helping at-risk children and we are grateful for the opportunity to serve them through Trinity Charter Schools’ outstanding educational services,” said Jacqueline Piar-Thomas, TCS Superintendent. “Trinity Charter Schools’ partnership with Azleway, along with support from Commissioner of Education Michael Williams, will result in a smooth transition for students and faculty with no interruption to their school year. Students will be provided a quality educational program that empowers them to reclaim their lives. ”

“We are excited to announce a partnership to continue our school services with a proven leader in the education field for at-risk kids,” said Gary Duke, Azleway CEO. “By teaming up with an experienced charter school operator for students with emotional, behavioral and learning challenges, we are continuing the strong tradition of excellent service Azleway is committed to.”

Lutheran Social Services of the South (LSS) sponsored the charter for Trinity Charter Schools to help support LSS’ residential treatment center (RTC) programs – no other children’s services agency in Texas has this unique capability. TCS, on-site at LSS’ New Life Children’s Center in Canyon Lake, Krause Children’s Center in Katy and Bokenkamp Children’s Center in Corpus Christi, and in partnership with Pegasus Campus in Lockhart, provide specialized education for troubled youth with severe emotional and behavioral difficulties prepare for adulthood.

TCS is fully accredited by the Texas Education Agency (TEA) and has a proven record of helping students advance an average of three grade levels while in theircare. Through TCS, students learn appropriate social skills in a safe, structured, therapeutic environment before they transition back into the public school system or the next phase of their lives. In 2013, Trinity Charter Schools scored 100 percent on TEA’s review.

The Debate on Education Reform: The Battle for New York Schools

manager — Wed, 10 Sep 2014 21:24:25 +0000

New York Times

September 3, 2014

By Daniel Bergner

One afternoon this summer, Eva Moskowitz, who runs Success Academy Charter Schools, showed me her senior yearbook. “I was the editor,” she said. We sat in a half-furnished office at the construction site of her charter network’s first high school. A buzz saw shrieked in the background. She graduated in 1982 from Stuyvesant, the most selective of New York City’s public high schools. “I got completely engaged in how to take this sentimental book and make it a much bigger project.” She fought to apublish photographs capturing the political protests of that time — against nuclear weapons, against American aid to the government in El Salvador. To go with the pictures, she wrote a manifesto, concluding: “We do not live in a vacuum.”

“It took will,” she said about her yearbook triumph, in a tone that was only somewhat self-mocking. Moskowitz recalled, as well, Stuyvesant’s intractable failings. With an outrage that seemed barely abated by time, she described an alcoholic physics teacher who dozed through class, ceding instruction to an especially talented student, and endemic cheating on exams, caught by the cameras of her yearbook staff. “I thought it was my moral duty to show” the evidence “to the administration,” she said. “They were very adamant that they would investigate. They didn’t.”

At 50, Moskowitz is petite and favors tailored suits and spiked heels. She founded her first Success Academy, a kindergarten and first grade in Harlem, in 2006 and has swiftly created the largest charter group in the city. It stretches from the South Bronx to Bedford-Stuyvesant, with nearly 9,500 students in 24 elementary schools, seven middle schools and the new high school, which opened in late August. Most students are black and Latino and poor enough to qualify for federally subsidized lunch — the kinds of children the city’s regular public-school system seems all but incapable of educating. Fewer than one-fifth of black students in the city can read or do math at grade level, to take just one grim statistic.

Stepping out of the high-school office, we stood on the freshly laid linoleum in a common area. The tiles, picked by Moskowitz, have a grassy motif. In her eyes, the painted lawn hints at a college quad. There, as she envisions it, her students will soon be lingering to chat about “Hamlet” and “King Lear.”

The granddaughter of a public-school typing instructor and the daughter of two university professors, Moskowitz grew up and lives in Harlem. Early on she was drawn to teaching — she recounted lecturing her stuffed animals on geography. After Stuyvesant, she went to the University of Pennsylvania and then earned a Ph.D. in history from Johns Hopkins. By 1997 she was teaching at Prep for Prep, a program in New York City for gifted minority students. She assigned her 11th graders to document the disparities between the city’s cleaning of parks on the wealthy Upper East Side and its non-upkeep of a park in the Harlem neighborhood where some of them lived. She told the students to take photos and complain to the sanitation and parks departments. “We created a little bit of a ruckus,” she said. “I think Prep for Prep was nervous about it. I was asked why I couldn’t just do simulations.” The park, she continued, got a cleaning.

During that period, Moskowitz grew consumed with the dismal performance of the city’s vast Department of Education, which is responsible for schooling 1.1 million children — and with the union-guarded contracts that continue to make it nearly impossible to fire teachers for incompetence or give raises for merit. “I remember reading,” she told me, turning to the protections for administrators, “that a principal had to demonstrate ‘persistent educational failure’ to be in jeopardy of losing his job. I remember thinking, that’s crazy! Persistent. Like a driver would have to persistently kill people before being taken off the road!”

Moskowitz’s zeal persists to this day. My first exposure to her was at an informational gathering two years ago; my girlfriend was about to enroll her daughter in a first-grade class at a Success Academy school. I caught a glimpse of an educator who can be dismissive of anyone whose opinions differ from her own, and over the past four months, as I met with Moskowitz or watched her at work, that impatience with dissent emerged as one part of a furious and almost crazed passion. She has devoted herself to training a legion of young teachers and principals in how to conjure “world-class schools” or even, as she puts it, “educational nirvana.” Two of her own three kids attend her schools. She claims that her academies can stand up to any private school — she calls much of the teaching there “lazy.”

Her students have been performing phenomenally. In 2013, on the state exams that gauge proficiency in math and English, Success Academy schools far outscored not only the city’s regular public schools but also its most highly regarded charters, networks like Achievement First, KIPP (the Knowledge Is Power Program) and Uncommon Schools. At one of Moskowitz’s Harlem academies, the fifth graders surpassed all other public schools in the state in math, even their counterparts in the whitest and richest suburbs, Scarsdale and Briarcliff Manor. That year was no fluke. The 2014 results, released last month, put the network in the top 1 percent of all the state’s public schools in math and in the top 3 percent in English. At one Bedford-Stuyvesant academy, where 95 percent of students are black or Latino, 98 percent scored at or above grade level in math, with 80 percent receiving the highest of four ratings.

It might seem as if any New York mayor would be thrilled to have thousands of the city’s most underprivileged children educated so well. But during Bill de Blasio’s campaign last year and then as he claimed City Hall, he and Moskowitz took each other on in a ferocious political battle. They are two liberal crusaders with profoundly divergent ideas about how the mission of aiding the disempowered should be carried out. De Blasio is essentially a populist; Moskowitz, whose network’s board is filled with Wall Street one-percenters, is hardly a woman of the people. The political differences have stoked personal enmity, with de Blasio moving to block the expansion of Moskowitz’s network and Moskowitz mustering her own political resources to move him out of her way. The ultimate outcome of their clash may determine the city’s educational future.

Revamping public education and waging political warfare have long been intertwined in Moskowitz’s life. Around the time she was at Prep for Prep, she entered a race for City Council. Two years earlier, in 1995, she volunteered on the winning Council campaign of Gifford Miller; now, as a candidate herself, she campaigned on the lamentable state of public schools. She personally made, she said, 15,000 fund-raising calls. “It was miserable.” But she felt impelled. “It was a sense of fairness. I was running against a billionaire” — and an incumbent. “If I was going to lose, it was not going to be because of money.”

She did lose, but in 1999, after the seat opened up, Moskowitz, a Democrat, ran again, denouncing the stranglehold that unions maintained on city schools. She prevailed despite vigorous opposition from the United Federation of Teachers, probably the most powerful organization in local Democratic politics. She was by then an outspoken advocate of charter schools — which are government-funded but independently run by nonprofit groups and accept all applicants or resort to lotteries to handle demand — and most of them do not have to employ union teachers and administrators. They operate largely outside the country’s education bureaucracy.

In 2002, Miller, who was by then the Council speaker, put Moskowitz in charge of the Education Committee (a post de Blasio had also reportedly been vying for), and she convened hearings on the school system. Grilling labor leaders who called her “McCarthy-like” and city officials who at first refused to appear, she strained to get to the bottom of everything from the schools’ dim reading scores to their dismal bathroom conditions.

“I thought that as chairwoman of the Education Committee, I could make a difference,” she said. But labor was too intransigent, the government bureaucracy too cumbersome and entrenched. “I kept getting more and more narrow: Well, if you can’t bring better science or better arts — I held a hearing on toilet paper. I thought, That’s going to be a winner, everyone’s for toilet paper, surely we can come together. But you couldn’t, because the administration denied” that there was a problem. “I had to go around photographing bathrooms where there wasn’t toilet paper. . . . I thought, This is not a system that delivers for children. Kids can’t wait till all the policies change. That’s going to be another two centuries.”

In 2005, Moskowitz ran for Manhattan borough president; after U.F.T. money and manpower helped defeat her, Joel Greenblatt and John Petry, philanthropists and partners in the hedge fund Gotham Capital, hired her as the chief executive of the charter network they wanted to start. The chief executive title, typical for charter heads, is a way to advertise accountability, to talk the language of business philanthropists who provide money, which helps the networks get going before they can rely wholly on per-pupil government financing. The title is a way to embrace the bottom line: Just as businesses need to show that they turn a profit, charter schools need to educate children in measurable ways.

To deliver, Moskowitz has implemented a range of strategies. The most recognizable are the ones Success Academy shares with plenty of other charter networks: uniforms for all students, long days, a no-excuses policy on homework and behavior, immediate discipline and an atmosphere of strict order. But other elements are more idiosyncratic — and more crucial. There’s her fierce engagement with literature, starting with picture books in her kindergarten curriculum. She told me she was determined to avoid the torpid sentences that flood the children’s-book market (“Scholastic should be shut down!” is her position on the publishing giant). There’s her belief that classroom discussion, whether it’s about math methods or paragraph structures and whether it’s with 7-year-olds or 16-year-olds, should consist of student voices 80 percent of the time. The best teachers talk least.

Above all, there are her exacting standards for the network’s adults — the teachers she hires straight from certification programs or after stints with public schools or Teach for America and the administrators who have been promoted from her faculty. It’s their intellectual capacity that is her main concern; the training sessions I sat in on this summer were less about teaching teachers to teach than about teaching them to think. I watched Jessica Sie, the associate director of literacy, lead an auditorium full of elementary- and middle-school faculty members in a discussion of the nuances in a short essay from The New Yorker. They wouldn’t be using the essay with their students. But Moskowitz wants her faculty to know how to read in the deepest way, so they can model this for their pupils right from the youngest grades, when everyone is discussing “The Tortoise and the Hare.”

During another training session, a principal, Abigail Johnson, coaxed new faculty members through a conversation about a Christina Rossetti poem. She later told me about her dread, a few years back, when Moskowitz subjected her and other school leaders to a written exercise on literary passages. After they turned in their assignments, Moskowitz led them in a training session. Two former teachers complained to me that Moskowitz was downright imperious. But the stringent instruction fit with one of Moskowitz’s favorite themes: The failure that pervades so much of public education has little to do with the blighted backgrounds of the children and everything to do with the adults who sit at the front of their classrooms.

From the network’s earliest years, Moskowitz’s methods have brought quantifiable accomplishments. But it’s on the new set of more challenging state exams — introduced in 2013 to align with New York’s Common Core educational goals, benchmarks meant to push schools to teach analytic thinking and better prepare kids for college — that her students have truly stood out. Last year, 82 percent of Success Academy students tested at or above grade level in math and 58 percent in English, while the network’s closest competitor, Icahn Charter Schools, had fewer than 60 percent passing in math and just over 40 percent in English. The other top networks fell much further below.

“The results are truly incredible,” Brett Peiser, the chief executive of Uncommon Schools, says about the scores of Moskowitz’s students. “I continue to be surprised that people” — and here Peiser, who taught in a city school for five years and whose parents were 30-year veterans of the system, meant people in that system — “aren’t banging down Success’s door to find out how she’s doing it.”

Like Peiser and other charter leaders, David Levin, the chief executive of KIPP, has been visiting Moskowitz’s schools to understand the instruction. “I’m blown away by the quality of the teaching and learning,” he says. “What is inspiring is the intentionality of what the teacher is doing. And even more impressive is the intentionality of the kids during discussion about books or during problem-solving in math.”

Outside the realm of charter schools, though, the talk about Moskowitz isn’t so reverent. Her critics, like Diane Ravitch, a New York University professor and education historian, view her as a troubling general of the charter-school movement, which gained momentum around the country in the late 1990s and now numbers over 6,000 schools. Charters haven’t proved to be a panacea for the ills of public education. They’re hatched with all sorts of pedagogical notions, and there’s little sign that over all they’re better than regular public schools. Some nationwide studies put charter scores slightly above those of conventional schools, some below. But for many critics, performance is almost beside the point. To Ravitch, the movement itself is destructive; “it undermines the public’s commitment to public education.”

When I talked with her, Ravitch indicted the hedge-fund titans and business moguls — including Kenneth Langone, a founder of Home Depot, and the Walton family of Walmart — who put their weight behind promising charter schools, leading their boards and lending political clout. “When they call themselves reformers,” she says, “it’s something I gag on.” What these philanthropists are all about, Ravitch says, is making themselves feel good while using charters as a halfway step in a covert effort to pull the country toward the privatization of education. For charter opponents, liberalism is in jeopardy. And from this perspective, Moskowitz, with her results and her readiness to trumpet them, poses the greatest risk.

This threat lies near the heart of de Blasio’s aversion to charters and his attack on Moskowitz’s schools. He talks about how all of New York’s children must be saved. He has said that the more than 170 charters in the city take resources needed for the overarching mission, robbing the many to teach the few. This moral and economic drama, pitting charter schools against conventional ones, carries extra charge in New York City because of an arrangement known as co-location. Under Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, charter schools were readily granted free space alongside regular ones in cavernous school buildings. In this way, Bloomberg fostered Success Academy’s spread. The public schools — with the United Federation of Teachers spurring the fight — have protested that sharing space causes overcrowding, though in theory charters have moved in only where enough rooms were available.

The truth about overcrowding may vary from building to building, but almost always the proposed arrival of a Success Academy has met with hostility: union members bused in by the U.F.T. to pack community meetings, people heckling and spitting at Moskowitz, U.F.T. lawsuits to stop the moves. Resistance to other charter networks has been much more tepid. The U.F.T. may harbor a vindictiveness toward Moskowitz that goes back to her Council hearings. I asked Michael Mulgrew, the president of the union, why Moskowitz stirred such anger in him and his membership. “It’s her conflictual way of approaching everything,” he says. “It’s, ‘I’m going to show we’re better than public schools.’ ” That attitude infuriates many teachers at regular schools. When I spoke with a handful, they used words like “metastasize” and “venal” to describe Success Academy’s proliferation. That Moskowitz’s wealthy board members choose to highly reward her track record — her salary and bonus for the 2012-13 school year totaled $567,500 — only adds to the union’s fury.

Moskowitz isn’t the type to defuse the tension with the U.F.T. She isn’t given to finding common ground. She doesn’t seem to see any reason to. Consistently, there is desperate neighborhood desire for her academies. Applications for Success Academy schools outstrip seats by five to one. On the state exams, the schools that share space with the network have passing rates as low as 4 and 5 percent.

On the topic of scores, the U.F.T. and Ravitch insist that Moskowitz’s numbers don’t hold up under scrutiny. Success Academy (like all charters), they say, possesses a demographic advantage over regular public schools, by serving somewhat fewer students with special needs, by teaching fewer students from the city’s most severely dysfunctional families and by using suspensions to push out underperforming students (an accusation that Success Academy vehemently denies). These are a few of the myriad factors that Mulgrew and Ravitch stress. But even taking these differences into account probably doesn’t come close to explaining away Success Academy’s results.

In talking to dozens of current and former Success Academy employees and parents, the critique with the most staying power involved the schools’ overly heated preparation for the state exams. A former fourth-grade teacher recounted that network employees made a minivan run to Toys “R” Us and returned to unload a mound of assorted treasures in the back of her classroom. “It was a huge pile,” she says. “We called it Prize Mountain.” She would remind the pupils that a good score on a practice test meant a gift from the mountain.

Teachers also chart students’ results on the practice tests, posting their names and scores on classroom walls. Yet I heard from parents like Natasha Shannon, an African-American mother of three girls in Success Academy schools, that although the public posting could be painful for the children, it was important nonetheless. Shannon was the valedictorian when she graduated from a city school, only to find out when she enrolled in a community college that her education was so slipshod that she needed remedial classes. (Only 58 percent of the city’s black high-schoolers graduate within four years; of those, 13 percent are prepared for college, according to the New York State Education Department.) The experience shapes her thinking now. “Yes, she has test anxiety,” Shannon said about one of her daughters. “Yes, she has cried” after assessment results were posted. “But when I hear ‘test prep,’ I’m thinking, This is reality. People prep for the SATs, people prep to get jobs. When her name goes up on the wall in the lower group, I try to talk to her about how we use that to get better. I can’t let my kids fall into poverty. I comfort her, but I tell her: ‘I make $14.42 an hour. What are you going to do to have a better life?’ ”

For her part, Moskowitz asserts that the public charting is one aspect of the network’s emphasis on feedback, not only for the students but also for the faculty. Throughout the year, whether or not test prep is underway, scores on quizzes and writing assignments are analyzed at network headquarters. Each teacher’s outcome is tabulated, and bar graphs are instantly available to all faculty members. The teachers whose classes lag are responsible for seeking out advice from those who top the graphs, just as the students with red or yellow stickers by their names are guided to emulate the topic sentences of those whose stickers are green or blue.

Rancor between Bill de Blasio and Moskowitz grew intense as he campaigned for mayor. “Time for Eva Moskowitz to stop having the run of the place,” de Blasio told a United Federation of Teachers crowd in May 2013. Union banners hung behind him as he spoke into the microphone. “She has to stop being tolerated, enabled, supported.”

What precisely he had in mind wasn’t yet clear. Plainly, though, he was pledging to rescind the blessing Moskowitz enjoyed under Bloomberg. Success Academy’s spread “wouldn’t happen,” he said at the event, “if she didn’t have a lot of money and power and political privilege behind her” and if Bloomberg’s administration “didn’t ‘Yes, ma’am’ every single time, and that’s going to end when I’m mayor.”

Coming from behind in the primary and riding on a vow to end “a tale of two cities” — to diminish the divide between the rich and empowered and the poor and disenfranchised — de Blasio won the Democratic nomination last September. His victory in the general election was a foregone conclusion, and Moskowitz felt herself fixed in his sights. Never one to be intimidated, she put him on notice: A month before Election Day, she shut her schools for a morning and gathered Success Academy families for a march. She marshaled other charter networks whose leaders worried that de Blasio would try to cap their numbers and charge rent at city-owned school buildings. Moskowitz and her army of 17,000 strode across the Brooklyn Bridge with placards imploring “Let My Children Learn.”

She was effectively saying, These underprivileged families may be your voters in November, but they’re not going to like you for long if you make the wrong moves in office. De Blasio didn’t heed the warning. Bloomberg, in the waning months of his administration, approved a host of charter co-locations for the 2014-15 school year. Weeks after taking office at the start of this year, de Blasio indicated that he would honor most of them. But, he announced, three would have their space revoked. All were Success Academy institutions, including, inexplicably, the Harlem school with the math-whiz fifth graders, the one that beat Scarsdale and Briarcliff Manor. Now it looked as if the pupils and their schoolmates would have no space for the coming academic year.

Moskowitz was ready. Since Success Academy’s early phases, she’d recognized the need for political muscle behind her network, and for the past two years she’d been collaborating with Families for Excellent Schools, a pro-charter advocacy group funded in part by the Walton Family Foundation, which also donates to Moskowitz’s network. The group provided her with something akin to what the U.F.T. deployed, a platoon of organizers. It pays a team, including charter parents, to lobby politicians, raise the political consciousness of charter families and muster them for demonstrations. In addition, when de Blasio emerged as the inevitable mayor, Families for Excellent Schools convened focus groups and conducted polls. The results were enlightening. “What we learned,” Jeremiah Kittredge, the organization’s chief executive, told me, “is that data doesn’t resonate.” Superior test scores should play only a secondary role in rousing public sentiment. The group would be poised to fight de Blasio with the right media campaign.

The charter movement worked on several fronts. When the mayor nixed the three co-locations in February, a charter delegation met with Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and his aides, and soon a separate delegation, including a Success Academy lawyer, met with Cuomo’s team, according to a charter advocate who was present for one of the discussions and was closely involved with the other. The movement’s financial backers had been among Cuomo’s major campaign contributors for several years. At a breakfast at the Regency Hotel in Manhattan in 2010, when Cuomo was the state attorney general and running for governor, he sat down with some of these financiers, including Petry, one of the hedge-fund partners behind Moskowitz’s network. They prodded him gently on their educational cause. At that point and into last winter, Cuomo favored charter schools without being outspoken on the issue. But by February, something had shifted as he huddled with the charter representatives.

Cuomo — a Democrat who clings to the political center, a long way from de Blasio’s populism — was disgruntled with the mayor. De Blasio was pressing the governor to raise taxes on wealthy New Yorkers to pay for a citywide prekindergarten program. The governor was all for prekindergarten but most likely didn’t want his presidential aspirations weighed down because he had supported a tax increase. Cuomo presumably also wanted to keep his major donors happy. Surely he would rely on them down the line if he made a bid for the White House.

Though Moskowitz wouldn’t acknowledge to me that she knew anything about the meetings, the charter advocate who was present recounted that Cuomo’s aides suggested that the delegates arrange a show of force: a loud media campaign, an Albany rally. The delegates hoped Cuomo would then answer the popular cry. The advocates and aides also discussed potential legislation, which Cuomo would support at the state level to shield charter schools from a mayoral assault.

Moskowitz and Families for Excellent Schools went instantly into overdrive. The advocacy group produced a television and newspaper ad blitz that appealed to the heart, not the head, telling of kids robbed of their “dreams and their hopes.” While the ads saturated the city, Moskowitz again shut her academies, this time for an entire day in early March. In a bombardment of emails, she instructed parents that they and their children should board buses, rented by Families for Excellent Schools, that would take them to Albany to rescue the network and defend educational excellence. If the parents couldn’t or didn’t want to take part, the emails stated, no alternate arrangements would be made for their kids; the parents would have to find child care. The advocacy group mobilized families from various charter networks, its organizers calling and calling their contacts to make sure that the buses would be filled despite frigid temperatures and high snowbanks from a recent storm.

Over 10,000 families came together at the base of the State Capitol’s steps. They wore bright yellow T-shirts demanding “Save Our Schools.” They chanted, “Eva! Eva! Eva!”

Rally organizers gathered the day de Blasio was leading his own demonstration nearby on behalf of his prekindergarten tax. Moskowitz’s crowd dwarfed the mayor’s. Suddenly the governor was bounding down the Capitol steps, bellowing to the parents and TV cameras: “You are not alone! We will save charter schools!”

The next day, Moskowitz appeared on “Morning Joe” on MSNBC, saying, “We have a mayor in the city of New York who says he’s a progressive on the one hand but wants to deny poor kids in Harlem an opportunity, a shot at life.” After this emotional plea, she proceeded to the scores of those fifth graders. “This is outrageous!” exclaimed the host, Joe Scarborough, about de Blasio’s decision. “It’s immoral.”

The governor soon negotiated a deal with legislators that guaranteed free space for most charters. Even so, Families for Excellent Schools continued the barrage of advertising: “You’re not thinking about the people that you’re hurting,” a tearful charter mother said, addressing de Blasio. Eventually, the mayor’s office called charter allies and donors, including Success Academy’s board chairman, Daniel Loeb, according to an article in The Times, asking for a truce and assuring that de Blasio wouldn’t stand in their path. When I reached out repeatedly to the mayor, to his schools chancellor, Carmen Fariña, and to a senior adviser, none would talk with me. It was as if they had been beaten into silence.

Moskowitz, though, feels no calmer. If the state board that oversees charters grants her proposal for 14 new schools, she’ll be in charge of 46 academies with 15,000 students by 2016. Part of her ambition is to expand beyond the city’s struggling neighborhoods; in the last few years, she has opened schools — with racially integrated classrooms — on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and in Cobble Hill and Bensonhurst in Brooklyn. Park Slope and the Upper East Side are on the list for the next phase. “We want to grow as fast as we can while creating extraordinary quality,” she said. But the City Council’s Education Committee wrote to the state charter board this summer demanding a halt to new approvals. Four lawsuits trying to stop Success Academy continue. As Moskowitz perceives it, she remains in a state of siege, and at times she seems to believe she’s almost powerless. “The experience,” she told me at the end of August, “is of having to wake up every day and beg” for the space and support to carry out her mission.

That mission, she says, may eventually extend to running for mayor. She doesn’t rule out a bid in 2017, an effort that would undoubtedly mean a climactic collision with de Blasio. When I asked about her plans for public education should she claim the mayor’s office in the near or more distant future, she wouldn’t address specifics. But as she spoke, it was easy to imagine her campaigning: “We have to face our educational crisis. Incredibly large numbers of schools are not working. There’s an endless need.” Moskowitz, in her mind, holds the answers.

Gallup Blog: Blended Learning Can Benefit Students If it is Done Right

manager — Tue, 09 Sep 2014 21:37:08 +0000

Gallup

September 8, 2014

By John H. Pryor

One of the hottest topics in education in recent years has been Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), which deliver all content through the Internet. Depending on who you listened to, it seemed like MOOCs were going to be both the savior and the death of higher education. It turns out they were neither.

In fact, discussions about MOOCs and the best way to deliver online content has seemingly bolstered another teaching method that has been used in educational settings for years: blended learning. Blended learning, also referred to as hybrid courses, is defined as traditional face-to-face classes that incorporate online materials and lectures that students can access at their convenience.

In the most recent Gallup-Inside Higher Ed Survey of College and University Presidents, Gallup presented college presidents with a list of 13 topics that have been in the news frequently in the past year and asked if these topics had been discussed on campus, if they resulted in some action on campus, or if neither discussion nor action were underway. Nearly all presidents surveyed said they discussed blended learning on campus (97%), and 87% were also taking action regarding blended learning. By contrast, 54% said they discussed MOOCs, and only 15% had taken action around MOOCs. Clearly, blended learning is winning the day.

Moreover, college presidents are significantly more likely to say that blending learning, rather than MOOCs, will have a positive impact on their institution. Half of college presidents surveyed reported that blended learning would have a very positive impact (50%) and an additional 44% forecast a “somewhat positive” impact. On the other hand, just 3% of college presidents thought MOOCs would have a very positive impact on their institution.

These results suggest that we will likely see more traditional classes transformed into blended learning classes in the years ahead. This shift toward blending learning could benefit students tremendously, but only if university leaders and faculty make the most of it.

In a blended learning model, students watch at least some lectures outside of the classroom. Two things can happen here. If the motivation is simply to cut costs, then the time that faculty members previously spent lecturing may be dropped from the class schedule. If, however, the move to a blended learning model is driven by a desire to increase student learning, professors can use this extra time to interact with students.

If faculty and students make the most out of the time they would have otherwise spent in lectures, it could contribute to students having a great job and a great life after college. Research from the Gallup-Purdue Index shows that student who feel supported in college are more likely to be engaged in their work and have higher levels of well-being after graduating. Being supported in college, we found, meant having the following three things:

1. A professor who made students excited about learning;

2. A professor whom students felt cared about them as a person; and

3. A mentor who encouraged their hopes and dreams.

Unlike MOOCs, blended learning allows students to interact with professors in more meaningful ways, thus increasing opportunities for students to cultivate strong relationships with professors and potential mentors.

Just as many college presidents expect, blended learning can have a positive impact on colleges. But will that impact come in ways that Gallup knows are linked to the most important college outcomes: having a great job and a great life? Or will it impact the balance sheet? Certainly, both better student outcomes and lower college costs are needed. If some colleges choose the balance sheet, will those savings be passed on to students in the form of reduced tuition or shifted to some other college cost center? How a college president deals with such decisions can tell us a lot about their priorities.

Opinion: MARCHAND: Charter schools and school funding

manager — Tue, 09 Sep 2014 21:35:33 +0000

Lufkin Daily News

September 8, 2014

By Bruce Marchand

Last week Judge John Dietz issued his final written ruling on what is the latest legal challenge to the system of public school financing in the state of Texas, the sixth such challenge since the 1980s.

Dietz concluded that “the Legislature has failed to meet its constitutional duty to suitably provide for Texas public schools because the school finance system is structured, operated and funded so that it cannot provide a constitutionally adequate education for all Texas schoolchildren.”

Charter schools through the Texas Charter Schools Association participated in the lawsuit and saw mixed results from the decision. On the plus side, charter schools will benefit from any new monies added to the system as charting funding is based on an average of the state’s funding for independent school districts. On the minus side, the ruling rejected the claim that charter facility funding is inadequate as the state does not provide facility funding for charters.

At PCA, our new facility currently under construction is paid for with state tax dollars that come from our foundation school program allotment, which for charters is solely dependent on student enrollment.

Those dollars pay for everything, including facilities. According to State Comptroller Susan Combs, PCA receives $8,435 per student in total revenue from the state, well below the state revenue average of $9,969. She notes that PCA spends $8,354 per student, again below the state spending average of $10,556.

The process PCA went through to get a construction loan was much more challenging than the process for independent school districts (ISDs), as charters must seek a more costly loan guarantee different than the loan guarantee through the state’s Permanent School Fund that is available for ISDs.

The end result is that charters as a whole spend much more to borrow construction funds than do ISDs, even though both ISDs and charters educate the same public school students and share the same state performance expectations and financial accountability standards.

So even though PCA has an unbroken streak of superior financial ratings in the state’s financial accountability system, it costs us more to borrow the same amount of money than a district with a lower state financial rating would pay.

Do I sound like I’m complaining? Not a chance. I spent 29 years as a teacher and administrator in two high-performing ISDs before moving over to the charter world five years ago. It’s been a great experience, and I have been able to share so many of the wonderful benefits that charter schools can offer to students. One of my favorite things about PCA is that we can respond efficiently to any situation with flexibility, and we can adapt to the needs of students quickly.

As charters fight for recognition, credibility, and our share of the public school financial pie, our goal at PCA remains unchanged — to provide every student in Angelina County and the surrounding area the very best public school education as we prepare students, ad vitam paramus, for life.

Bruce Marchand is the director of Pineywoods Community Academy in Lufkin. His email address is bmarchand@pineywoodsacademy.org.

Charter Schools Helping Tribes Revive Fading Native Languages

manager — Tue, 09 Sep 2014 21:33:14 +0000

Education Week

September 9, 2014

By Lesli A. Maxwell

Preserving indigenous languages and repairing decades of cultural loss is critical to most, if not all, of the nation's tribal communities, and charter schools seem to be playing a notable role in that endeavor.

A small number of charter schools have been founded over the last two decades to educate Native American students, with many providing instruction in native languages and curricula infused with tribal cultural beliefs and practices.

Click here to read more.

Grading Teachers, With Data From Class

manager — Fri, 05 Sep 2014 14:19:55 +0000

New York Times

September 3, 2014

By FARHAD MANJOO

Halfway through the last school year, Leila Campbell, a young humanities teacher at a charter high school in Oakland, Calif., received the results from a recent survey of her students.

On most measures, Ms. Campbell and her fellow teachers at the Aspire Lionel Wilson Preparatory Academy were scoring at or above the average for Aspire, a charter system that runs more than a dozen schools in California and Tennessee.

But the survey, conducted by a tech start-up called Panorama Education, also indicated that her students did not believe she was connecting with them. Ninety-six percent of the students at Lionel Wilson are Hispanic, and 92 percent receive school lunch assistance.

“It’s a very different population from where I grew up,” Ms. Campbell, who is white, said in a recent interview in her classroom. “I wasn’t scoring where I wanted to with questions like ‘I feel comfortable asking my teacher for help’ or ‘My teacher really cares about me.’ I was below average, and I don’t want to be below average.”

Panorama is trying to assess how well teachers are doing by conducting scientifically valid student questionnaires that collect data about a variety of factors that might affect a teacher’s performance, from how well she conveys the material and whether she encourages interest in a subject to whether a school fosters a sense of belonging for students.

The company, which is run by two 23-year-old Yale grads with a penchant for computers and data crunching, has run surveys in more than 5,000 schools, and it has been adopted by some of the largest school systems in the nation, including the Los Angeles Unified School District and schools in Connecticut.

Panorama has followed the model of Uber and Airbnb in using the unconventional methods of tech start-ups to reinvent industries that have long been seen as tech backwaters. And its increasing popularity suggests that techniques pioneered by the tech industry — including the collection and analysis of large troves of data — may help address problems in American education.

The firm’s techniques have been widely praised by education experts, and it has won prominent supporters in the tech industry. Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder of Facebook, and Google Ventures, the search company’s investment arm, are among its largest backers.

Some of its innovations sound small, but they have been instrumental in making its surveys more widely accessible than older educational survey methods. For instance, to reduce the costs of its surveys, Panorama created its own scanning system, which allows it to print and collect students’ answers on regular paper, rather than the expensive bubble-scan sheets more commonly used for collecting responses. The firm says its surveys and analytics services are about half the price of older survey methods.

Panorama also hired a team of software engineers and statistics experts to create a kind of analytics “dashboard” for schools — an interactive panel of graphs and charts that presents practical information teachers need in a comprehensible, rather than overwhelming, user interface.

Teachers can dig into how they performed on a question-by-question basis, and they can monitor their performance by subgroup. The survey reports allow teachers to see if they’re connecting better with boys than with girls, or if students who have trouble with English are having more difficulty in a classroom than those who are native English speakers.

Panorama has also invested heavily in improving survey science. It has sponsored research into the best way to ask questions of students to get the most accurate assessment of what’s going on in the classroom, including one recent study by Hunter Gehlbach, a professor of education at Harvard. Last week, again borrowing from the tech industry, the company announced that it would make the survey open-source, meaning schools can use and amend it free.

Seeing how students think about teachers, and how that perception is affecting what they learn, is an unusual development in public education. Today, schools assess the effectiveness of teachers primarily through standardized test scores and observations by administrators, but both measures have been criticized as too narrow, unable to shed light on the complex interplay between teachers and students on a day-to-day basis.

“Education is just starting to figure out what measurement actually means,” said Aaron Feuer, Panorama’s co-founder and chief executive. “Five years ago we thought test scores were the answer to everything. We’re offering a way to focus on the right metrics.”

But in some ways, what the company is doing isn’t new. Student surveys have long been seen as a potential third metric for education. In 2012, the Measures of Effective Teaching Project, a three-year study sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, found that when combined with test scores and observations, student surveys made for a more reliable and consistent way to measure how teachers were performing.

“A lot of people are unhappy with an overreliance on test scores, but I don’t think it’s an option to drop test scores and go to nothing,” said Thomas J. Kane, a professor of education at Harvard who directed that study. “Student surveys are the most obvious place to add some other measures that aren’t based solely on test scores.”

Mr. Feuer became fascinated by student surveys when he was attending an urban high school in Los Angeles in which about half of incoming freshmen did not graduate. Mr. Feuer is a computer enthusiast with an appetite for data, so he naturally searched for numbers to explain his school’s low performance, but found few hard statistics. He became active in student government, eventually becoming president of the California Association of Student Councils. In that role, he persuaded California’s Legislature to pass a law that would encourage schools to solicit student feedback.

But after Mr. Feuer graduated from high school and began attending Yale, he realized that the law he’d helped push had gone nowhere. As useful as they were, student feedback surveys were too expensive and cumbersome for widespread adoption. Then, in college, he met Xan Tanner, a student who was working as a statistical analyst for the Yale men’s basketball team.

“We were in a military history class talking about his basketball analytics work, and we realized that there’s a pretty strong parallel between coaching athletes and coaching teachers,” Mr. Feuer said. “Athletes, like teachers, are smart, talented professionals, and you can’t reduce what they do to a couple of simple stats.”

Instead, you need close monitoring and a large constellation of data to effectively assess their performance. In 2012, the pair decided to start a tech company devoted to making surveys more widely available for schools. The business proved immediately successful, with dozens of schools signing up to test the program.

It is too soon to tell how widely schools will adopt surveys like Panorama’s, and how deeply surveys might become integrated into the education-reform movement’s effort to find a better way to measure teachers. But some teachers and administrators, including those at Aspire Lionel Wilson in Oakland, say the surveys have been instrumental in how they approach the classroom.

After discovering her difficulties connecting with students, Ms. Campbell began to adjust her classroom manner. “I do a presentation where I open up to them, making myself vulnerable about my college experience, and telling them why I’m working with them,” she said. “They start to get me as a human being. And they’re willing to follow me when I push them harder in history and English.” In surveys since then, Ms. Campbell has noticed an improvement in her results.

“The surveys have been transformational in how I operate,” she said. “I’ve grown tremendously from this data.”

5 Ways Technology Is Disrupting Education

manager — Thu, 04 Sep 2014 20:18:02 +0000

WallStreet Cheat Sheet

September 3, 2014

By Jess Bolluyt

In today’s classrooms, stacks of heavy paper textbooks, battered notebooks, and worn-down pencils are giving way to e-readers, tablets, laptops, and a multitude of digital tools, apps, and software that are completely changing the way that students learn. These new tools don’t just change the delivery of the same material, though. Instead, they’re kicking off an array of changes to how students engage with what they’re learning, how they collaborate, how they receive feedback from teachers, and even how they learn to think and interact with the huge amount of information available to them. Here are five big ideas about how technology is disrupting education, and some of the resources pushing them ahead.

1. Technology enables adaptive, personalized learning

Here’s an idea that turns the idea of a traditional, linear textbook on its head. Adaptive digital textbooks created by the OpenStax project at Rice University use machine-learning algorithms to enable biology and physics textbooks to adapt to individual students, as NewScientist reports. The books can deliver additional questions and practice sessions if the algorithms detect that a student is having difficulty with a subject, and the algorithms also determine when to use retrieval practice to give students quizzes on material that they’ve already learned.

On a broader level, teachers will be able to implement that same personalization throughout an entire course. Companies like Knewton build technology and infrastructure for online learning environments. They use predictive analysis — made possible by data science, machine learning, content graphing, and more — to find out exactly what a student is successfully learning, and let the instructor know what needs more reinforcement. The technology helps teachers improve pass rates and withdrawal rates, because adaptive, personalized learning is more effective than one-size-fits-all solutions.

2. Technology encourages collaboration among students and among teachers

Collaboration tools like Basecamp enable students to upload, share, and edit documents and track assignments’ progress with to-do lists and schedules on when everything is due. Google Apps for Education provides similar capabilities, and integrate Google Docs, Google Drive, and Gmail to make it easier for students to collaborate whether they’re in the classroom together or not. Google Classroom pushes the platform’s functionality further, and enables teachers to create and organize assignments, view and comment on students’ work before it’s turned in, and easily communicate with their classes. Podio, Kickoff, and Producteev are other productivity and collaboration tools, and students can even use them on mobile devices both inside and outside the classroom.

The same online productivity and collaboration tools enable teachers to collaborate with other teachers, as well. Teachers benefit from a huge variety of shared resources accessible online. As TechCrunch reports, OpenCurriculum curates and organizes an open library of lesson resources from teachers’ blogs and from publishers. Teachers can access a lesson plan builder and other tools through the website. An array of similar communities and resource libraries have been created online; there’s even a section of Pinterest that acts as a dedicated space for teachers to share lesson ideas and resources.

3. Technology enables students to learn and consume content socially

As classrooms shift from a teacher-centric model — where all students listen quietly to a lecturing instructor to learn the material — learning more often becomes project-based, and sometimes even game-based. Apps and educational games enable teachers not only to differentiate lessons to each student’s needs, but also to get students to work in teams and complete challenges and assignments together. Open-source learning platforms like Moodle enable teachers to set up courses where students can engage in discussion when they’re away from the classroom.

Especially when they’re working together, students naturally turn to technology to make the learning process more social. Rather than reading traditional books in solitude, students find it more natural to read e-books where they can make annotations, or even to peruse blogs where discussions arise in the comments section. Another great example is students’ gravitation toYouTube, which is simultaneously visually stimulating, mobile-friendly, social, and engaging.

While in the past most students preferred to search Google for an article on a period of history or a scientific process, many students now choose to watch a video instead, and that video is what forms the basis of their inquiry, or acts as the catalyst for a further search for information. Technology — in this case, any computer or mobile device, plus an Internet connection — makes the process of consuming information more social, more easily shared, and more engaging. Many teachers respond to students’ natural predisposition to learning via videos by teaching with videos from TED-Ed or Khan Academy, and the TED-Ed website even includes a tool to help teachers build their lessons around videos available online.

4. Technology enables students to learn anything from anywhere

The most obvious example here is the rise of the MOOC, or massive open online course, which enables thousands of students from anywhere in the world to learn from one instructor via an online platform. The MOOC hasn’t lived up to its promise of disruption so far, mainly because of the lack of a formal system of accreditation.

But as educational institutions catch up with the technology, online education is improving. As an article from The Economist reports, MOOC provider Coursera has eight million users and earned $1 million in revenue last year after introducing the option to pay a fee between $30 and $100 to have course results certified. Udacity has collaborated with AT&T and Georgia Tech to offer an affordable online master’s degree. Harvard Business School has launched the beta version of an online “Pre-MBA” called the HBX CoRE, which the university will offer to students nationwide this fall at a cost of $1,500. Other online education providers delivering courses in forms other than the MOOC enable students to learn anything from coding to ancient history online.

Even in an elementary school classroom, a simple Internet connection opens up a practically unlimited amount of information and learning potential. That’s why the Chromebook – Google’s lightweight, inexpensive, and Internet-reliant laptop — makes a lot of sense for schools. To accompany constant Internet access, it’s critical that schools teach students not only how to think critically and how to learn in the traditional sense, but how to be literate consumers of information, to research effectively, and to synthesize information intelligently.

5. Technology centralizes grading and assessment — and gives teachers better insight

Data-driven tools like BubbleScore make it simple for teachers to give tests via mobile devices, or scan and score paper tests with a mobile device’s camera. Similar apps enable teachers to export students’ results to their grade books, and track progress against Common Core or state standards. Adaptive software like Knewton can automate these tasks, which have traditionally taken up large amounts of teachers’ time. Platforms like ThinkCERCA help teachers think strategically about how to help each student build Common Core-aligned skills in literacy, writing, and critical thinking.

Ultimately, that means that technology not only gives teachers more time to spend interacting with students and completing meaningful work other than record-keeping, but provides them with better insight into what works for each student and what their goals for each student should be. That underscores one of the most important things that you can realize about technology in the classroom: the teacher is still integral to the classroom and to the learning experience. While technology can and should help teachers monitor how their students are progressing, no algorithm can replace a human who brings creativity and problem-solving skills to the classroom, physical or virtual.

Tens of thousands go to next grade despite Texas law against social promotion

manager — Thu, 04 Sep 2014 20:10:09 +0000

Dallas Morning News

September 3, 2014

By Terrence Stutz

AUSTIN — More than 76,000 Texas students in the fifth and eighth grades — about 1 in 10 pupils — were unable to pass the STAAR math or reading tests on the third try this summer. Most were promoted to the next grade only through a loophole in state law.

New results compiled by the Texas Education Agency showed that 11 percent of fifth-graders failed in reading and 9 percent failed the math section. Among eighth-graders, 9 percent failed in reading and 11 percent in math.

While students in other grades also were tested, the exams for fifth- and eighth-graders are considered high-stakes because state law requires students in those grades to pass the math and reading sections to be promoted.

The results come after Education Commissioner Michael Williams’ decision to suspend the promotion requirement in math for fifth- and eighth-graders in the 2014-15 school year. Students will still have to pass in reading.

Williams said he suspended the requirement because new curriculum standards in math are being introduced this year.

“For the 2014-15 school year, districts will use other relevant academic information to make promotion or retention decisions for mathematics,” Williams said.

The requirement for fifth- and eighth-graders to pass the STAAR dates back several years to a law that George W. Bush signed as governor. The law was intended to curb social promotion, the practice of automatically passing students regardless of their achievement.

Most of the 76,000 students who failed the tests this year still were promoted, though. The law allows the student to advance if his or her principal, teacher and parents agree to overlook the test results. Promotion rates for the two grades are not available yet.

Failure rates for minority students in the two grades were high, according to a TEA analysis. Among fifth-graders, 17 percent of black students and 14 percent of Hispanics were unable to pass the reading exam. About 5 percent of white students failed.

Eighth-grade results were slightly better: 13 percent of black and Hispanic students failed in reading, compared with 4 percent of white students. But 18 percent of black eighth-graders failed in math.

The failure percentages would have been higher if not for the low passing standards set for the STAAR’s initial years. For example, eighth-graders this year had to correctly answer only 39 percent of the questions — 22 of 56 items — to pass in math.

Summer results also were posted for the five high school end-of-course tests that must be passed to receive a diploma.

Students continued to struggle with the English I and English II tests. Of the nearly 82,000 students retested in English I, about 59 percent failed. On the English II exam, where nearly 57,000 were retested, 67 percent failed.

End-of-course tests are given three times a year. They will be administered again in the fall.