Columbia sociologists Jennifer Jennings and Aaron Pallas (also known as Eduwonkette and her sidekick, skoolboy) take a long, hard, statistical look at this year’s progress report grades and find that the mayor and chancellor’s claim that the new, higher grades reflect school improvement is way overblown. They conclude:
At best, there is no correlation over time in the DOE’s reports of which schools are good at inducing growth in ELA achievement. At worst, the DOE’s system finds that the schools that were better than average in 2007 were actually worse than average in 2008.