De Blasio Deserves Mayoral Control, but Progress Reports Are Going in the Wrong Direction

The state Senate is currently considering whether and how long to extend mayoral control of New York City’s school system. The Legislature should extend mayoral control well into the future because it is a far better system than the disorganized previous Board of Education or any alternative currently on the table. The mayor is in a better position to lead and be held accountable for the performance of a major urban school system than is any other elected official or body.

But while the previous mayor served to keep New York City schools accountable, Mayor de Blasio’s version of mayoral control has taken a different turn. His administration has instead taken a series of steps to leave schools less accountable to the students and parents they serve.

At its core, a school assessment and accountability system should seek to identify the district’s most and least successful schools and provide them with meaningful rewards or consequences, respectively. Under the current administration, New York City’s accountability system has moved away from those goals.

The city’s schools were previously assessed according to student performance and growth on standardized tests, as well as the results of parent, teacher, and student surveys that measured the school’s environment. Scores in each of these areas were then weighted, and each school received a letter grade from A to F to summarize its overall performance.

The letter grades offered easily recognizable information to parents and local policymakers about the administration’s assessment of a particular school’s overall quality. And there is evidence that receiving F grades motivated schools to improve.

That was happening in New York City, in fact. Separate studies by me and my co-author Joshua Cowen at the University of Michigan, and by economists Jonah Rockoff of Columbia University and Leslie Turner of University of Maryland, found that the F-grade sanction led to increased student test scores, on average, the following year relative to how students would have performed had the school received a D. Our work showed that students maintained these test score gains the following year, suggesting that they were not driven by test manipulation.

Nonetheless, the administration abandoned the letter grades beginning in the fall 2014, arguing that they were too simplistic for assessing overall school quality and responding to complaints that the schools did not like being labeled as “failing.” The current accountability system provides no summary measure of the school’s overall performance. Clearly stating whether the school is “good” or “bad” in the view of the district is no longer a feature of New York City’s accountability system.

Some don’t miss the letter grades. But the administration has made other changes to the accountability system that are fundamentally altering the system’s view of an effective school-but have thus far flown under the radar.

For example, the administration substantially altered parent surveys in the second year of the accountability system. Prior surveys focused heavily on how the parents viewed whether the school had high academic expectations. That focus is gone.

More worrisome are planned changes. According to the technical documents for last year’s school quality reports, the administration plans to phase out measure of student academic progress on standardized tests from the school quality reports next year. Measures of yearly student test score growth are essential for separating the school’s contribution to student learning from that of family background. To put the extent of this change into context, measured student progress on the tests accounted for 60% of a school’s overall score under the former accountability system.

The old system wasn’t perfect, and the changes that this administration has made aren’t all bad. A central feature of the current accountability system is the use of reviews from experienced educators who spend one or more days in the school. The introduction of a school inspectorate is a move in a useful direction. There are things that test scores and surveys can’t tell us that on-the-ground assessment of a school’s operation can.

But objective measures of school performance are essential for anchoring the accountability system. Without the grounding of student test score growth these qualitative assessments could easily become rubber stamps over time, just as subjective teacher evaluations were for so long.

Mayoral control is essential for governing a large urban school system like New York City’s in part because it keeps mayors accountable for their performance. An informative and strong school accountability program is similarly essential for ensuring that New York City’s schools continue on their upward trajectory.

The de Blasio administration should strongly reconsider its movement away from evaluating schools and labeling the worst performers as failing. Thanks to mayoral control, if faltering city schools no longer serve the needs of New Yorkers, they’ll know exactly who to look at.

This piece originally appeared in New York Daily News

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Photo by Pool / Getty Images

This piece originally appeared in New York Daily News