New York Post

“Violence in the city’s schools has soared to its highest levels in at least a decade — even as Mayor Bill de Blasio tells New Yorkers schools are safer.

This month, the mayor hailed a 29 percent drop in school crime since the 2010-11 academic year. That now looks like a carefully misleading statistic.

On Thursday, Families for Excellent Schools used state data to highlight actual trends in city schools. The number of violent incidents shot up a whopping 23 percent last year (the first full year under Mayor de Blasio) — from 12,978 to 15,934.”

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The Hechinger Report

“Looking back on her junior year at Saint Agnes Academic High School in the College Point neighborhood of Queens, Viktoria Mertiri admits that trigonometry ‘was the death of me. I never understood it.’

But Mertiri scored a 70 on the New York Regents Examination, a state standardized test of core high school subjects. It was a pleasant surprise: five points better than she needed to pass. In geometry, she scored an 85. She also passed the English language arts, U.S. history, global history, and a science Regents — with math, the five exams a student must pass, by law, to graduate from high school in New York State and receive a Regents diploma.”

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LA School Report

“Nearly two years after the trial in Vergara v. California first began, the case is set to move forward as judges from a state appeals court hear arguments Feb. 25.

The plaintiffs – nine students in five California public school districts – argue that five laws governing teacher dismissal, tenure, and ‘last in-first out’ layoff policies deprive them of their right to a quality education, in violation of the state’s constitution. Those policies disproportionately harm minority and low-income students, they say.”

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The 74

“Over the weekend, USA Today published a damning year-long investigation of the way school districts across the country do — or rather, do not — keep tabs on teachers who’ve gotten into serious trouble. This includes teachers who have been disciplined for beating or sexually assaulting their students.”

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USA Today

“A state-by-state audit of the nation’s only database for tracking teacher misconduct is being ordered in the wake of a USA TODAY NETWORK investigation that found thousands of missing names in the listing of troublesome educators.

Education agencies in every state voluntarily report to a privately run database operated by the non-profit National Association of State Directors of Teacher Education and Certification when they take a disciplinary action against a teacher for anything from minor infractions to serious cases of physical or sexual abuse.”

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New York Magazine

“Education-policy analysts have known for a long time that the traditional system for hiring teachers — giving them tenure after a few years, and tying their salary to years on the job — does not exactly optimize the quality of the teaching workforce. In 2009, Washington, D.C., launched IMPACT, a new system for evaluating teachers that combined in-class evaluations with testing that compared student improvement against expected levels. Critics of the education-reform movement attacked it bitterly. ‘The overall impact of IMPACT is not only unfair but not likely to do the job it is supposed to do: Root out bad teachers,’ complained Washington Post blogger Valerie Strauss. The Century Foundation’s Kimberly Quick argued, ‘the studies are careful to only point out that teacher IMPACT scores rose—not to say that student performance improved.'”

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The Washington Times

“A new study in the New England Journal of Medicine has a surprising conclusion. It finds that over the past decade, 1 percent of physicians accounted for 32 percent of malpractice claims. In other words, health care providers could eliminate one-third of malpractice and its associated health, legal and economic costs by removing the worst 1 percent of doctors.”

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The Atlantic

“The racial disparities in school-discipline rates are well-known, as are the damaging effects that harsh disciplinary policies can have on school climates. Less clear is whether—and if so, how —these tendencies contribute to the race-based achievement gap, a problem so entrenched and pervasive that discussing it is almost cliché.”

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The 74

“Mayor Bill de Blasio, elected on a signature campaign promise to radically transform educational opportunity for New York City’s youngest learners, proclaimed Thursday night that his administration is ‘shaking the very foundations of public education’ inside the country’s largest school system — but offered little evidence of the impact of such bold actions during his annual State of the City speech.”

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Gotham Gazette

“Mayor de Blasio’s annual State of the City address is a natural time to take a step back and review his performance running the largest school system in the United States. For StudentsFirstNY, our most basic litmus test for policymakers is a simple question – are they putting the interests of students first? After two full years with Mayor de Blasio, we can definitively say that the answer is ‘no.'”

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