NYC DOE fails SpEd, Black, and Hispanic students
August 20, 2010 by Leslie E. Packer PhD
Filed under Advocacy, Featured
Two reports came across my desk yesterday that each demonstrate what I think is an appalling failure of the New York City educational system. No matter how the city may try to spin it, performance measures on standardized tests show that overall, NYC students lag behind the state average in English and Language Arts (ELA) and Math. And if your child is in Special Education, and/or is Black or Hispanic, the outcomes are even more appalling. Consider some of the data:
RegEd vs. SpEd
The first figure below, taken from a July 2010 report compiled by the NYC Department of Education Research and Policy Support Group compares regular education students to special education students in Grades 3-8 on math scores over years.
Do not overfocus on the apparent drop from 2009 to 2010. The city says the drop can be accounted for due to a difference in testing procedures: in 2010, students were required to answer more questions and the standards were raised, resulting in fewer students meeting standards. When the data were re-analyzed using 2009 standards, there was no significant drop. The bigger issue is that across all years, special education students routinely perform significantly worse on standardized measures. If special education was working, we would expect special education students to be able to perform commensurate with their non-disabled peers – or at the very least, we would see a clear trend towards closing the gap. I see neither in their data.
The second figure, below, compares regular education students to special education students in Grades 3-8 on ELA scores over years.
As poor as these outcomes appear, keep in mind that many special education students are exempt from taking these tests because of their disabilities and are given alternate testing. On some level, then, we are seeing how badly the best of special education students do in NYC schools.
To see how badly NYC students with disabilities fare on Regents examinations, find your geographic district and then follow the link to that district’s “Comprehensive Information Report.” If you are not sure what geographic district you are in, just click on this link and use the alphabetical listing of schools to find your geographic district. Then go to that page and click on the link for the “Comprehensive Information Report.” Do not be surprised to see huge differences in the percentage of disabled NYC students passing a Regents compared to their non-disabled peers.
Lest anyone think that the problems are solely in NYC, let me clear that they are not. The problems noted above are symptomatic of a broader problem in New York State when it comes to educating students with disabilities and non-Asian minorities. A state report card on whether the state had made Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) for the 2008-2009 school year depicts disturbing results:
In the figure above, the symbol ✔SH indicates that the group made AYP using an alternative measure of demonstrating progress (Safe Harbor Target) that is used for groups that have not met Effective Annual Measurable Objectives in English and Math. In other words, these groups only can be considered to have met AYP goals if we apply a lower standard to them.
The data indicate that in New York State, students with disabilities who take these tests are performing worse than their non-disabled peers in ELA in elementary and middle school and are failing to meet standards in both ELA and math at the secondary level. Statewide, only 45% of students with disabilities graduated in 2008, compared with an average statewide graduation rate of 74%. The only subgroup that had a lower graduation rate was students with limited English proficiency.
That said, there is no doubt in my mind that NYC’s outcomes are worse than the statewide average and it is no real consolation to parents to compare NYC’s outcomes to other big cities in New York State. The bottom line is whether our children are getting an adequate education that prepares them for the future.
Ethnicity
In addition to significant differences in outcomes between regular education and special education, other analyses in the report make it clear that there are significant racial differences in outcomes with Hispanic and Black students scoring significantly worse than Asian and White students. The differences appear by Grade 3 testing and are maintained over successive grades in both ELA and Math, with Asian and White students performing significantly higher than Black and Hispanic students. On a statewide level, Asian and White students graduate at rates of 84% and 82% respectively, while 59% of Black students and 57% of Hispanic students graduate, so clearly, racial differences are not just a city problem, but what is going on in NYC?
A new report, not issued by the NYC DOE, highlights the discrepancy in graduation rates between Black male students and the national average. The statistics are cause for grave concern. From the Schott Foundation for Public Education’s web site, with emphasis added by me:
Yes We Can: The 2010 Schott 50 State Report on Black Males in Public Education reveals that the overall 2007/8 graduation rate for Black males in the U.S. was only 47 percent. Half of the states have graduation rates for Black male students below the national average. The report highlights concerns that New York’s graduation rate for its Regents diploma is only 25 percent for Black male students. New York City, the district with the nation’s highest enrollment of Black students, only graduates 28 percent of its Black male students with Regents diplomas on time. Overall, each year over 100,000 Black male students in New York City alone do not graduate from high school with their entering cohort. These statistics—and the other alarming data in this fourth biennial report— point to a national education and economic crisis.
You can look up your state’s statistics via their interactive map, here and download the entire report with analyses here (pdf).
Taken together, these studies raise serious questions about the quality of education in NYC and issues of discrimination.
The NYC DOE has an annual budget of $21 billion to serve 1.1 million students. That works out to about $19,000 per student per year. Surely we should be able to achieve better outcomes for that type of investment in education.
