Gary Rubinstein's Blog

A loaded question that education reformers like to ponder is: Exactly how many students in the boroughs of New York City are trapped in failing schools?

In November 2014 there was a report put out by Families For Excellent Schools called ‘The Forgotten Fourth’ in which they put the number at 143,000 which is about 15%. This 143,000 number was quoted for months on the news and was featured in a New York Post op-ed by Eva Moskowitz, founder and CEO of the Success Academy charter school network.

Two weeks ago, July 2026 The New York Post had an article about a new report with an updated number of how many NYC students are trapped in failing schools. The new number is 409,379 or 43%. This is based on a newly released report called ‘By Any Honest Measure’ and written by, of all places, Success Academy.

So how, exactly, did the number of students trapped in failing schools triple in the last twelve years? It all depends on how the word ‘failing’ is defined.

But defining what is and what is not a ‘failing’ school is a very subjective thing and I’m going to examine in this post how ‘By Any Honest Measure’ defines it to arrive at the 409,379 number and how slight adjustments to their metric would result in a very different number.

In the 2014 paper, the measure of a failing school was a school in which fewer than 10% of the students passed the math state test and fewer than 10% of the students passed the ELA state test. Just looking at pass rates can be misleading because you could have a school, for example, in which 90% of the students get a 2.9 and the rest get over a 3.0 and that would be 10% ‘passing’ while you could have another school where everyone gets exactly a 3.1 and they have 100% passing even though the two schools are basically the same in terms of their test scores. So just looking at percent passing can give a misleading picture, it is the most crude way of measuring school quality. More sophisticated ‘growth’ measures at least try to capture the idea that a school can be doing a good job even though the students haven’t gotten to a certain level yet. But for that ‘The Forgotten Fourth’ that was they way they defined ‘failing’ despite the flaws in that simplified metric.

But this new report from Success Academy has concluded that the number of students in ‘failing’ schools has tripled in the past 12 years. So how is ‘failure’ defined in ‘By Any Honest Measure’? For this study, a failing school is one where under 50% of the students have passed either the math or the ELA state tests. So to compare the two ways: ‘The Forgotten Fourth’ needed both math and ELA to be under 10%. ‘By Any Honest Measure’ needed either math or ELA to be under 50%. So right there, we should expect the number of students in failing schools to skyrocket. Well I downloaded the report and had to do some number crunching from the New York Department Of Education database so I can look at the numbers more closely.

The first thing that came to mind for me was, why is the bar for ‘failing’ now under 50% passing when it used to be under 10% passing. The Success Academy report says that there has been grade inflation as the average state test scores have been increasing while the NAEP scores have been stagnant. This is actually a valid point (one of the few they make) but it still isn’t detailed enough to raise the failure bar from 10% to 50%. As an experiment, I recalculated these numbers to see what if the rule was to find schools where students got less than 40% on at least one of the two measures. Just changing that one number from 50% to 40% lowered the number of students attending ‘failing’ schools 242,822 (if you notice that my 50% on the chart is a little off from the Success Academy calculation, there are some very small differences in the counting but the difference is negligible). And if we lower to 10% like in ‘The Forgotten Fourth’ now it is just 14,000 students instead of the 143,000. But I will acknowledge that cut off scores and what qualifies as getting a 3 on a test is its own political issue so it is hard to know what is considered an alarming number of students not reaching an arbitrary cutoff. This is more the reason to use a more sophisticated way of trying to measure school quality and not just saying 50% is the ideal threshold to measure whether a school is failing. Here is a chart showing how the Success Academy numbers would change had they used a different threshold.

The next big difference between the new ‘By Any Honest Measure’ report and ‘The Forgotten Fourth’ report is that for the older one, for a school to be failing, it had to be less than 10% for both measures while for this newer report, for a school to be failing, it had to be less than 50% for either measure.

So this means that if an elementary school had 49% of their students get a 3 on the math state test and 100% of their students get a 3 on the ELA state test, by the methodology in this report, that would be a failing school. That school would be failing while a school that got 51% on both tests would not be failing. This is really the critical flaw in this report so I decided to crunch the numbers to see how this one thing, the AND vs OR decision, affected the numbers.

First I wanted to check to see if this was a common thing, a school having fewer than 50% on one test and much greater than 50% on the other test. So I went to the Success Academy report where they showed the numbers they used and I found something very interesting.

So in their list of failing schools, they only report the number for the one that is under 50%. So what I did was download the entire NY State database and fill in every missing value. So, for instance, that first school on the list there, PS 165, I found that their ELA score was 57% So they had 48% Math and 57% ELA but because one of those numbers was less than 50% all 459 students in that school, including all the K-2 who didn’t take the test are part of the 408,000 students ‘trapped’ in the ‘failing’ school. Had a few more students in 3-6 gotten one or two more questions right on that math test, 459 students would have been spared from this trapping. Well, I ran two calculations. First I looked at all 905 schools on the failing list to see if there were a lot of schools like this. I found that about half the schools had gotten under 50% on just one test. So I added together the two numbers and found 173 that had a combined sum of over 100, like a school that had 48% on one and 57% on the other, PS 165. Here are some of those results:

Like Brooklyn Bridge academy, that ‘failing’ school that had 48.5% passing math and 97% passing ELA. Above I listed the the top 25 schools, but for the 173 schools that had a combined over 100, their total enrollment 117,385. This, right there, the unfair labelling of a school as failing despite having an average of 50% or higher comprises about 1/3 of the students the report contends are trapped in a failing school.

I think that even if a school had 35% math and 60% ELA so it doesn’t add up to over 100 but I still think it is unfair to label that school as a failure. If you only count schools where both scores are under 50%, the number of students enrolled in failing schools drops from 400,000 to 180,000. That’s how much can change when you change an ‘OR’ into an ‘AND.’ Whether Success Academy purposely left off the relevant other numbers from their spreadsheets so nobody would question if a school with 48.5% math and 97% ELA is truly ‘failing’ I don’t know, but I was glad that I have the technical know-how to fill in those missing numbers.

Looking at the chart published in The New York Post, one thing that jumped out at me was that they claim that 62% of high school students attend ‘failing’ schools while just 34% of elementary schools do. So even though high school is just four grades, 9, 10, 11, 12, they comprise almost 40% of the total students in the ‘failing’ schools.

So elementary schools have grades 3-6 state tests in math and ELA but high schools don’t. High schools, however, take a bunch of standardized state final exams called The Regents. One of those Regents is Algebra I and another one is ELA. Many students take Algebra I in 8th grade so only the lower performing students take the Algebra I Regents in high school and those scores are skewed. For elementary schools where four different grades are used to make their math score, trying to capture the quality of a high school by just looking at the Algebra I scores for students who came in not already having taken Algebra I in 8th grade is not going to be a fair way to judge the school, especially since getting less than 50% on Algebra I, regardless of how the school did on ELA Regents, dooms the school as failing and the entire enrollment to be trapped in it.

And since a school is counted as failing if fewer than 50% pass either the Algebra I or the ELA Regents, the entire high school is labelled failing based on this one test. So the first analysis I did on the high schools was to look at the 297 schools and see how many had gotten less than 50% on both which ended up as 74 schools. Of the rest, 210 had gotten under 50% on Algebra I but more than 50% on ELA while only 9 had gotten under 50% on ELA but over 50% on Algebra I.

One of the 9 entries in the category of over 50% Algebra 1 Regents and under 50% ELA regents is the ‘English Language Learners – Inter Supp’ isn’t actually a school with 276 students trapped but a category that happened to be in the database and which Success Academy included as 276 students to add to their list.

As a last irony, I looked at Success Academy’s Algebra I Regents scores. To someone who doesn’t know about the infamous ‘curve’ on this test, the 94% pass rate might seem fine. But only 52% of their students got a level 4 or level 5. The other 48% of their students got either levels 2 or 3. To get a level 4, you have to get 51 points out of 82, which is a 62% (which gets ‘curved’ to a 75). Level 2, though technically passing, is curved up from as low as 35% correct to 51% correct. So 48% of Success Academy, had New York State not done this generous curve, would have gotten less than a 62% on the Regents which would be failing. And, based on a bell curve, it is likely that a few of their level 4 students would have gotten under a 65. So by a pretty reasonable alternative way of scaling the Algebra I Regents, fewer than 50% of Success Academy students would have passed it and, by their way of measuring high schools, Success Academy Harlem I would be a failing school in which all the students there are trapped.

OK, I think you get the point. ‘By Any Honest Measure’ is anything but. It is really kind of embarrassing that a company with tens of millions of dollars would probably pay about 50 grand to create this slop. Sadly, this report has been picked up by the media and it will surely be quoted for years to come.

At the height of my blogging, it was hard to keep up with the steady stream of stories about miracle schools, miracle districts, shoddy educational research, and shoddy models for school and teacher evaluation. But a few years ago I noticed a huge decline in the sorts of stories I like to blog about and my blogging slowed down with it. It was actually a relief to know that at least a part of ‘the war’ I was fighting seemed like it was contained.

But I continue to keep my eye on reform propaganda sites like The74 and, to a somewhat lesser extent, Chalkbeat. So I’ve noticed recently some scratching coming from the coffin of ed reform which, like The Measles, is never fully eradicated and can spread again at any time. So here’s a roundup of a few stories I’ve seen recently, like an ed-reform roundup.

Story #1, Arne Duncan is back

On April 30 in The74, there was an interview with former Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan. In it, he is singing the praises of vouchers and wishing that Democrats would go back to the policies he pushed, even though they all failed.

Story #2, Comparing value-added teacher evaluations to ABS baseball umpire evaluations

Also on April 30 in The74, an editorial makes an argument that a new technology in baseball demonstrates that we need to bring back value-added teacher evaluations. So in baseball there are a bunch of umpires in different parts of the field. One of those umpires is behind home plate and the main thing that that umpire does is call balls and strikes. So when a batter does not swing at a pitch, the umpire has to say whether or not the pitched ball went inside or outside this invisible rectangle called ‘the strike zone.’ It’s a little bit tricky since the boundaries of the strike zone are determined by how tall the batter is. And just like no batter can hit the ball 100% of the time, no umpire can call every pitch accurately 100% of the time. The ABS (automatic balls and strikes) system uses computers and cameras to determine if it was a ball or a strike. Apparently umpires are correct 92% of the time, which is actually pretty impressive. Just like with baseball players, you don’t just get to be a major league umpire because you know somebody. You have to work your way up through the minor leagues and all that. So this year baseball introduced a system where teams can challenge a ball or strike call and then they use a computer to see if the ball was in the strike zone or not.

So in The74 the writer says that this system shows that we were too hasty in abandoning VAM for teacher evaluations. Here’s why that argument is absurd: Whether or not a ball went inside or outside a rectangle is a pure geometric fact, it either is or isn’t a strike. In teaching I guess that would be like using a computer to measure how accurately a teacher graded a true/false test. But value-added is not just about how accurately teachers grade their tests. Value-added tries to use data to predict how students should do on standardized tests and then compare what actually happens to those scores.

Also, the ABS itself is right pretty much 100% of the time while VAM isn’t even consistent within itself, different VAM algorithms give different results and the same VAM rates the same teacher very differently in consecutive years. If ABS was as inaccurate as VAM, nobody, not the players or anyone, would want it to be used.

In baseball the proper analogy would be to have a computer predict which team should win each game and then rate the managers of the teams, not the umpires, based on that.

And this basically already happens in baseball in other ways. You always hear things like “With the talent the Yankees have, if they don’t make it to the World Series, the manager needs to get fired.” And managers often do get fired for just that reason.

Story #3, One student forgot the math she once knew in high school and then struggled in college. Her high school teachers are to blame.

This article really surprised me since it was by a writer I know a little, Matt Barnum. He writes for Chalkbeat which is a lot better than The74 but still on the ‘reform’ side. For a few years he worked for The Wall Street journal but is now back at Chalkbeat.

OK, so apparently there was an issue at UCSD where many students were failing their college math courses. You always hear about this with colleges having to offer remedial math since students can’t do higher math without mastering the remedial math first. I’ve even heard about this happening at schools like Harvard.

And for me the funny thing is that this is a symptom of a much bigger issue. It is an issue that I’ve written a lot about before, where the K-12 math curriculum is a mess and it is basically inevitable that students, even ones who ‘master’ the material in high school, will not retain it into college.

But this article is about one girl who got As and Bs in high school math and now is blaming her teachers because they had a system where students could re-take tests that they failed until they eventually pass it. This is something that some schools do, they call it ‘mastery learning.’ The idea is that the purpose is for you to learn it and if it takes a few times, that’s OK as long as you eventually learn it. It’s like if you were training to run a mile and you had to run it in 8 minutes but the first time you ran it in 9 minutes and then you trained more and eventually accomplished the goal, is that so bad?

The downside to the mastery learning idea is that students might not study as much, hoping they pass the first time and then only trying hard if they don’t. For me, personally, as a teacher I don’t like to do the second and third chances because I really want my students to study the first time. But I can see the benefit, there are pros and cons to both ways and I’m not saying that a teacher that offers second chances to prove mastery is negligent in any way. It’s actually a lot more work to do the second and third chances, you have to organize when they take it and have to make up new tests and regrade them. Teachers should be commended for doing it if in their estimation, it helps their students.

But in this article, the student throws her teachers ‘under the school bus’ saying that these second chances are the reason she is struggling in college.

And Barnum really is sloppy in his reporting here because he never mentions how this student did on her different standardized tests which she would not get second and third chances on and which she might have needed for graduation and for her transcript in getting into college.

The fact is that math is one of those things, for reasons I mentioned earlier, that doesn’t always get deep into long term memory. So when the teachers of this student gave her As and Bs in math, maybe she was good at the math at that time. Just like if someone eventually runs the 8 minute mile but a year later isn’t able to anymore, doesn’t mean she didn’t run the 8 minute mile at some time.

I think Matt Barnum should take the New York State Algebra I Regents again and see how he does and if he does poorly, will he say it is because his teacher from long ago inflated his grade?

In conclusion,

OK, so that’s my quick roundup of three stories that caught my eye. None were worthy of a full deep dive investigative report type thing I’m accustomed to writing, but I do see the ‘chatter’ of this type as an indication that the ‘reformers’ have been laying low and maybe are prepping for a comeback.

I know. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you get plenty of opportunities to read my writing for free. And maybe that’s plenty for you, and a pretty good deal. But something you might not know is that a few years back I was an aspiring writer of ‘personal essays.’ I guess if I were to categorize them, I would call them ‘humor’ but that makes it sound like they’re probably not funny.

Over a twenty year period, I would sit and write a personal essay about my family or about my anxieties or just stories about things that shaped who I am. Some of those essays were published in various editions of ‘Chicken Soup For The Soul’ books. I think I got four different essays published in those.

But my dream of becoming the next David Sedaris just never materialized so in 2015 I put the essays up on the kindle store as an e-book. These include some of my published writings on Education and a few blog posts from my greatest hits. And now you can download and own that book for the discounted price of nothing. That’s a pretty good deal.

In three days the promotion is going to end and then it is going to go back to the full price of $0.99 so get this while you can and I’d appreciate if you like it and want to tell friends about it (there’s the catch!).

Here’s the link: https://a.co/d/02iYj5Hg

I’ve been teaching Math for 35 years. And if I were to only be able to give a few words of advice to a beginning Math teacher, I would tell them: Don’t teach too much in one period. After all these years I’m pretty good at knowing what is the right amount of material to cover in one day but on a day where things don’t go well for my class, I always think “Next year I’ll split that up into two lessons.”

Learning Math is a slow and deliberate process. Especially with a current trend to have students more active in their learning, Math takes a lot of patience. And rushing through Math does not really serve any purpose. As there is no ‘end’ to Math, it’s not like someone who is a ‘year ahead’ or a ‘year behind’ their peers is really any closer or further away from the elusive end of Math.

So I had to take a breath before reading a recent article in the Campbell Brown anti-teacher education site The74. They nearly always get it wrong. One of the big claims of teacher bashers is that teachers have ‘low expectations’ for their students and these low expectations become self-fulfilling prophecies. I remember when the Common Core came out and I’d hear things like “the students are ready to be challenged more, now the teachers have to come on board.” The idea is that teachers are purposely teaching slow, presumably because the teachers are either too lazy to do the right thing or too dumb to know what the right thing is. If the teachers would just teach faster (more rigor) then the students would rise to that challenge. While I’m sure that there are some teachers out there who could teach more efficiently, this is not a very common thing. It is really in the teacher’s best interest to set an appropriate pace for their classes. Too fast or too slow can lead to problems.

So this article had the title “Maryland District Sheds Remedial High School Math Courses, Sees Students Soar” and the subtitle “Calvert County Public Schools reports major gains in kids successfully taking Algebra II, especially among Black students and those with disabilities.” To summarize the article: The district used to offer remedial classes before students took Algebra, then they got rid of those and had all 8th or 9th graders take Algebra and as a result, nearly all students in the district are succeeding in Algebra II while twenty years ago only 50% of Black students and 20% of students with disabilities had been.

Since this contradicts my intuition after decades of teaching Math, I decided to look into the numbers beyond these bar graphs. There are only four high schools in Calvert County, Maryland. Maryland has a very accessible public data site and you can double check my numbers here if you want.

The state tests in Maryland are called the MCAP tests and they offer them for the high school math sequence Algebra I, Geometry, and Algebra II.

For reference, the Maryland state proficiency percentages on them are 21.4% for Algebra I, 27.5% for Geometry, and 24.5% in Algebra II. When I see these numbers I would like to see the actual tests since low numbers like this could mean that the cutoff score is too high. Or it could mean that the tests are unnecessarily difficult. Or it could be that the students don’t know the Math very well.

So I looked up the results for the four schools in this district that had cut remedial math courses:

Calvert High had 5% Algebra I, 6.7% Geometry, and 5% Algebra II.

Northern High had 10.7% Algebra I, 25% Geometry, and 21% Algebra II.

Huntingtown High had 11% Algebra I, 23.2% Geometry, and 23.2% Algebra II.

Patuxent High had 6% Algebra I, 10.6% Geometry, and 19.3% Algebra II.

So even by the low baseline score for the State, these scores are always lower than the state average.

When I looked at these MCAP scores filtered by race, the data looked even worse. This is a graph for Calvert High for the past four years broken down by all students and by Black students. For 2025, the percent of Black students scoring proficient seems to be zero.

So what data was The74 using to support the thesis that low teacher expectations are to blame for low advanced Math test scores? Those numbers all near 100% are the number of seniors ‘completing’ Algebra II. But as can be seen from the MCAP scores, ‘completing’ is not the same thing as ‘learning.’ So it is unfortunate that so many students have to be forced into Math courses they are not ready for just so a district can claim that students always rise to higher expectations.

I think the one of the issues is that the term ‘remedial’ Math has such a negative connotation. There is nothing wrong with a Math course that is at a student’s level, just as there is nothing wrong with a low-impact aerobics class or running a Marathon at a 5 hour pace if that’s where you’re at.

The people who should be taking remedial Math are clearly the staff of The74.

If you regularly read my blog, you’ll be expecting a charter school takedown, a TFA rant, or some other education policy analysis. But I’m doing something a bit different today, part theater review part confessional.

So about a year ago I noticed an advertising campaign for a new Broadway musical called ‘Operation Mincemeat.’ From the little blurbs on the poster I gathered that it was a British musical comedy. The picture reminded me of other British ensembles like Monty Python or even the cover of The Beatles ‘Help’ album. Like Monty Python, three of the five actors in Operation Mincemeat also co-wrote the show (with one other person who is not in the show).

It opened in February 2025 and a few months later I decided to go to by myself and see it. By the end of the opening number, I knew that this was just the kind of show that I enjoy. The plot was interesting — a true story based on a World War II intelligence mission to fool Germany into sending their troops to the wrong country so the Allies could invade Sicily. The five main characters all had their own motivations: One timid man needed the courage to advocate for his own ideas, one young woman wanted to have a role in the mission besides being a secretary, one sensitive but uptight woman wanted to keep everyone on task, one egotistical man just wanted to get the recognition and credit for the mission, and there was a general who of course wanted the mission to succeed. An interesting casting decision was that two of the male characters were played by women and one of the female characters was played by a man.

There were a lot of styles of music in the show. Some of the songs were upbeat fun songs with a swing beat, kind of like some Disney classics such as ‘Never Had A Friend Like Me’ from Aladdin. But there were were other songs that had the kind of Broadway Rap like Hamilton or even a Gilbert and Sullivan fast talking song. There were so many different kinds of music, it really kept the music interesting. There was even a techno Euro pop songs sung by Nazis. There is even a show-stopping love song where you can audibly hear the audience sobbing. Their voices were great and really entertaining.

This show was more consistently funny than anything I think I have ever seen since ‘The Producers.’ Everything about the play was funny, the physical comedy, the dialogue, the song lyrics, even the music was, when needed, funny. Something that really contributed to the humor was that the five actors played multiple roles. I read that it was about 80 characters altogether, but I lost count. Whether it was for one song or one small cameo, when you’d see a new character, you’d know exactly which actor was doing it and admiring the theatrical range of that actor. One of the actors, Jak Malone, won the Tony award for his performance, played the serious middle aged woman, a flamboyant death expert, and an American pilot. I think that if there were more more actors playing these roles, the show wouldn’t have been as funny.

By the end of my first time seeing the show I was rooting not just for the characters to succeed at their mission, but I was having a connection with the actors themselves, rooting for them to succeed at getting through this ridiculously impossible show.

So that was back last April, I think. I saw it, I liked it. I even downloaded the soundtrack and listened to it so I could pick up some more of the fast paced lyrics. Fast forward to August and I told my daughter I thought she’d like it so we went and saw it again. I liked it even more the second time I saw it. It was like a fun ride that you could anticipate what’s coming and that made it fun in a different kind of way.

A few months later, in January, I told my wife I thought she would like it and I thought I’d like to see it a third time. She thought that was pretty unusual for me. Yes, I’ve been known to rewatch movies and I’ve seen my favorite movies (Rocky, Raiders Of The Lost Ark, Back To The Future, What About Bob?) probably 30 times each. And there was that 13 year period of my life where I spent a each year listening, almost exclusively, to one Beatles album until I did them all in chronological order. And I saw Billy Joel live about 20 times. But never did I see a Broadway show three times like that.

So she loved the show and I liked it even more the third time. And then I saw in The New York Times an article by a theater critic who had seen in thirteen times. In the article I learned that I was not alone. There was a whole subculture of people who watch this show repeatedly. They even dress up like the characters. They call themselves ‘Minfluencers.’ Also in this article I learned that the original cast was leaving on February 22nd.

So I joined an Operation Mincemeat fan club on Facebook. I learned how to track which understudies were performing when (I had seen 3 of the five understudies and they were excellent too). I tried to get tickets for the last original cast show but it was sold out so I got tickets to see it for the fourth time for Saturday February 21.

Then I was telling one of my friends about how I was seeing this show for the fourth time and he was intrigued so we got tickets for last Tuesday, so that was my fourth time and the Saturday was going to be my fifth. And then another friend said he wanted to see it so we got tickets for February the 19th and that was going to be my fifth show and the Saturday was going to be my sixth. And then I got an email that they were opening up one more show that was actually going to be the last show and that I was on a waitlist to give me a chance to get the tickets so I managed to get a ticket for the last original cast performance Sunday February 22nd which meant my original Saturday show which was intended to be my fourth is now going to be my sixth and the last original cast show will by my seventh. I hope that will be enough for me. I think everyone who knows me hopes that the seventh time will be the (lucky) charm.

Now I’m not saying that you must see this show, just that I must see it seven times. So really this post is not just about this show but about me and what the show is providing to me and why I want to go to it so often. I come from a theatrical family. My mother was on a path to be an actor and singer. She went to Hofstra and studied acting along with Christopher Walken and Madeline Khan. My mother even beat out Madeline Khan for a starring role in ‘Damn Yankees’ once. Instead of pursuing acting full time, my mother got married and had two kids and got into a life as a lawyer’s wife and a mother. She continued acting in Hofstra University’s alumni theater group so at a young age I was always going to the different shows and musicals she was in. I started playing the trumpet when I was in 4th grade and was very good and in all-county band and things like that. I particularly enjoyed playing in the pit bands of musicals in high school. One of the shows was ‘Fiddler On The Roof’ and acting in that show was Debbie Gibson who went on to be one of the most popular singers of the 1990s.

When my parents got divorced when I was 11, my mother started dating an actor named Ed Dennehy. Ed had a more famous brother, Brian Dennehy who went on to be a film star and a very popular character actor who eventually won a Tony award for ‘Death Of A Salesman.’ Ed eventually lived with us and since he was also a director, our basement became a place where the actors would come to rehearse. So I’ve been to a lot of shows from a very young age.

But as I’ve gotten older, it’s been harder for me to find things that I enjoy. I don’t know, maybe I just watched so much, it’s hard to surprise me. Sometimes I will try to watch a series that is supposed to be really funny, like recently I watched ‘Shrinking.’ And I know it’s supposed to be great but I find it to be awful. Then I sometimes find something else, like ‘Hacks’ or ‘The Studio’ which I love so at least I still have it in me to enjoy things. But when it comes to Broadway shows I sometimes overthink things and become so aware of the rest of the audience and the actors and sometimes I get in my own way of enjoying things.

But Operation Mincemeat, for me, had a way of making it effortless for me to turn off the part of my brain that prevents me from enjoying things. I like the music, the story, the physical humor, and now the anticipation of seeing my favorite jokes. And add to that a weird feeling that I have a connection with the actors themselves. This is truly irrational of me but they are a great underdog story themselves, starting in a small London theater and then going to The West End and winning all kinds of awards then coming to Broadway and winning a Tony and the original run getting extended over and over. They just always have that excitement in their performances still, like they are so happy to be on Broadway and they are going to give it their all. I’ve listened to some interviews and podcasts with the cast and they are just very likable, I like to think of them as my British buddies.

So definitely go see it while you can. It will continue until September with a new cast. But if you haven’t seen it yet, you’re really running out of time to get seven performances in before the original cast leaves on February 22.

Me and Jak Malone (Tony award winner)

Me and David Cumming (Actor and co-writer)

A few days ago I saw in my feed the headline “High-Poverty D.C. Charter School Students Outscore Wealthy Neighbors in Math.” When I started blogging about 15 years ago, stories like this were very common and I would dig into the data to find if the claim was true. When a school’s results were proved to be “too good to be true” they became known, sarcastically, as ‘miracle schools.’

Being a miracle school debunker is kind of a sad specialty, like being an autopsy doctor or one of those people who sifts through airplane crash wreckage to find the cause of the crash. If I’m successful at my investigation I show that the underdog did not actually win this time.

But in this era of social media, it is important to fact-check things like this otherwise what can happen is that the false claims start to influence politicians and eventually it leads to ineffective policies getting expanded. Like in Tennessee where the idea that charter schools were performing miracles in New Orleans led to about a billion dollars being wasted in a state takeover district.

So the claim in this article is that 70% of the 8th graders in Center City Congress Heights charter school in D.C. 8th Ward while only 64% of the 8th graders in the affluent 3rd Ward passed the same test.

So the first thing that I did was find if the claim is accurate at all. I found the database and verified that this school had 20 8th graders of which 14 passed the test so, yes, 14 is 70% of 20 so the claim at least is based on something is true. But 20 students is a very low number of students. A school usually has at least 75 students per grade. And even in this school most I checked and the other grades in this school have around 25 students. So attrition might play a part in this statistic since 14 out of 25 would be just 56%, for example.

The comparison to the affluent 3rd Ward, I think, might be that 288 out of 450 8th graders in a 3rd Ward school called Deal Middle School passed the same test, which is 64%.

Center City is a charter school network of which the Congress Heights school is just one of six schools in the network. So I looked up the other five schools in the network and found that they didn’t do quite as well.

The Brightwood campus had 10 out of 25 passing (40%)

The Capitol Hill campus had 5 out of 24 passing (20.8%)

The Congress Heights campus (the one in the article) had 14 out of 20 passing (70%!)

The Pentworth campus had 6 out of 24 passing (25%)

The Shaw campus had 3 out of 21 passing (14.3%)

The Trinidad campus had 4 out of 25 passing (16%)

So taken as a whole, in the network they had 42 students pass out of 139 which is 30%. This is slightly better than the D.C. average of 25% but definitely the 70% school was an outlier which is an excellent example of how data can be ‘cherry picked.’ If this charter network had some secret that worked so well on one campus, why not just use the same methods in their other five schools?

I also checked to see how charter schools, in general, are doing on this test so I looked up the gold star KIPP D.C. network. They only had 13% passing, with one of their schools with 3 out of 156 which is less than 2%. Now I know the article wasn’t about KIPP, but still

It is such a shame that propaganda sites like The74 are still running articles like this. The idea that there is a quick-fix in education has been proved wrong over and over. And though I don’t enjoy having to be that guy who has to give the full story and spoil the party, I still think it is important to call out these stories to give a full context.

To the 14 students (and to their teachers) who did pass the Algebra 1 test at Center City Congress Hall, you should be proud. Only 25% of students in D.C. passed it so each student who passes should be celebrated. But you don’t want your individual success to become something that gets used in propaganda and ultimately used as a weapon against other hard working kids and teachers.

Here is the spreadsheet with the public data I used if you want to check my numbers

One of the initiatives of former (and disgraced) Mayor Adams and of the former (and disgraced) Chancellor Banks was a math plan called ‘NYC Solves.’ As part of this plan, all high school had to adopt an untested curriculum called ‘Illustrative Math.’

As math teachers began to learn the details of Illustrative Math, they knew that that it was problematic. As I wrote in my review of the curriculum, some of the ideas in Illustrative Math were reasonable. It encouraged teachers to use activities that help students understand the math more deeply which would lead to more learning than an approach based solely on memorizing algorithms. But the main problem with Illustrative Math was that the lessons were too difficult and the pace was too quick.

When it was originally proposed, teachers were told that they must stick to a pacing calendar. Then as critiques from teachers were eventually adopted by the UFT, the new Chancellor gave new guidance saying that teachers could have an extra two weeks of flexibility which really missed the point, but at least it was some kind of admission that maybe this new curriculum wasn’t totally appropriate.

Various ed reform publications like to tout Illustrative Math as an example of raising standards that children will rise to if teachers are not lazy. Though Chalkbeat isn’t as extreme as something like The74, they still published an op-ed by a teacher last August, touting the ‘rigor’ of Illustrative Math.

Two months after the June administration of the Algebra 1 Regents, a math teacher at New Directions Secondary School, wrote about how his students were rising to meet the more rigorous Illustrative Math curriculum. New Directions is actually a transfer school for students at risk of dropping out so a teacher should be strategic about pacing and not just repeat the naive idea that student always rise to whatever challenges they face in math, even something like the inappropriately paced Illustrative Math.

So just today I noticed Chalkbeat tweeting this op-ed again and I thought I’d see how New Directions Secondary School did on the Regents now that the results have been posted.

The first thing to know about the Algebra Regents is that there is a very generous curve. A passing score of a 65 is achieved by getting just 35% of the possible points on the test. A failing score is either a Level 1 which is 0% to 21% or a Level 2 which is 22% to 34%. Level 3, while technically ‘passing’ is 35% to 61%. Level 4 which in my mind should be the first passing level is from 62% to 84% and Level 5 is over 85%.

This school, the one where the students are rising to the rigor of Illustrative Math had 62 students take the Algebra 1 Regents in June. Of those students, just one of them got the level 4. 21 of the 62, or 34% of them, only got a Level 1. 24, or 39% got a Level 2. So 73% outright failed and will have to take the test again, not able to even get 35% of the points needed to get to Level 3. Of the other 17 students, 16 got a Level 3 (which means they got under a 61%) so those students ‘passed’ while just one student truly passed with a score above a 61%.

Now I do understand that this is a transfer school and these scores don’t mean that the students didn’t work hard or that the teachers didn’t work hard or even that the students didn’t progress a lot. But I am sure that if this teacher who loves Illustrative Math and its rigid pacing calendar and rigor were instead to use something else, the Regents scores would be better than this.

There is a new Mayor and a new Chancellor right now. I really hope they will consider reviewing the outcomes of the NYC Solves program and the Illustrative Math curriculum it is based on and try to go in a new direction. I am willing to advise them if they want my expertise.

Fifty years after the publication of her first book, ‘The Great School Wars’, author and historian Diane Ravtich has released her long awaited memoirs.  In ‘An Education: How I Changed My Mind About Schools and Almost Everything Else’ Ravitch takes us through her life from her childhood in Houston through the ups and downs of a long and productive life driven by truth and integrity.

What makes this book a ‘must read’ is that it has the three elements that a great autobiography should.  First, her life story is interesting on an objective level.  Anyone picking up the book and reading over the book jacket will know that Ravtich is someone who achieved fame and notoriety through the unlikely passion of the history of Education in America.  But in this book we learn about the sorrow she had to endure between her great triumphs.  So her story, even if it weren’t so well written, would make a very good book.  A second component of a great autobiography is the author’s ability to reflect on 80 plus years of life and find the pivotal moments that changed the course of her life.  But for an autobiography to be ‘great’ it must be infused and brought to life with excellent precise writing.  As ‘An Education’ has all three aspects, this is a book you are going to want to read and then keep to re-read over the years when you are in need of inspiration.

If you have read any of Ravitch’s education books, you know that she is a master of absorbing decades of events and processing them and creating an insightful, and incredibly efficient, thesis which she develops over the course of a book.  As she explains in this book, she learned her craft while writing as a journalist for The Wellesley News and then for The New Leader magazine.  In all her books she exhibits this efficient technique that would make Strunk and White beam.  But, by design, Ravtich’s books on Education are stripped of emotional language.  Those books educate you through a series of well chosen facts that lead you to understand the implications and big moments without having to spell out every detail.  The big question, which this new book answers with an emphatic ‘Yes’ is whether or not her kind of writing can be used to evoke the joy and the sorrow she experienced through her full 87 years of living.

When I started reading this book, I would bookmark interesting passages that show her talent for memoir.  Eventually I realized that I was bookmarking almost every page.  So after the first 50 of so pages, I had to slow down on the bookmarking.  Here are some of my favorite moments (I will try not to give away too much).

Since Ravitch can write a full tale in the span of five or six lines, there are so many interesting stories in this book.  As a writer she reminds me of one of those painters, I don’t know so much about painting to know what this is called – maybe impressionistic? – who, rather than producing a full photographic quality image, instead just does the minimal with the paint and brush to convey the emotion and ideas.  This is something that is very difficult to do yet she makes it look easy.

Here’s one I liked:  “The only Sunday school teacher I remember was a strapping guy who discussed Bible stories and the Jewish religion with us.  He told us that when he was our age he had run away with the circus.”  Ah, see how great this is?  In the first sentence she sets up the scene.  And then in just a few words tells us the perfect thing to understand this guy.  No more is needed and no more is said.

A few pages later, Ravitch relays an amusing story about how as a teen she found a pearl in an oyster and ended up in the newspaper for it and also got food poisoning from eating the oyster:  “The next day, after the newspaper appeared with a  photograph of me in short shorts, identified by name, strange men began calling the house, asking for me and saying impudent things.  That went on for days, along with the vomiting.  My mother was not amused.”  This is so efficient, not a word wasted and it does convey the absurdity and the humor with a minimal delivery reminiscent of maybe Bob Newhart.

Throughout the book, Ravitch takes stories and moments that could easily fill several pages and finds a way to convey them in a few words.  For the reader, this has the effect of injecting all the humor and sometimes the sorrow of these moments directly into our brains without it having to be processed and translated in our minds.

Though these two examples are fun and convey the innocence of childhood, Ravitch is similarly terse in her telling of some of the deepest tragic moments of her life.  When these happen in the book, the descriptions are so efficiently written that, like sometimes when bad things happen in life unexpectedly, we find ourselves pausing and wondering if that really just happened.  The matter of fact telling of memorable moments of life, both big and small, happy and tragic, has a powerful effect on the reader.

The book really gets rolling when Ravitch enters college in 1956 at Wellesley.  In one sense she is a fish out of water and then she eventually completely at home with the lifelong friends she made there.  This was a really fun chapter to read as Ravitch has the first of her many brushes with fame, like her friend Maddy – eventually Madeleine Albright.  Just as always, Ravitch perfectly sets up the matter of fact description of her friend’s background and then, in an instant it is revealed who she became known as. The Madeleine Albright story was less than one page long.

One of my favorite parts was the description about a satirical musical Ravitch and her friends wrote for the Wellesley Junior Show.  It was hilarious.  I kind of want to see the full script but her description of it, as all her descriptions, gave us just enough that we feel like we saw the whole show but forgot some of the missing details.

After college, Ravitch starts domestic life but isn’t quite content.  She then goes on a lifelong quest for love and for purpose.  As she goes through different eras in her life, she meets a new cast of colorful characters, some famous, some not, but always relevant to her story.

In this book we learn how she went from being the wife of an influential New York City figure to the influential Dr. Ravitch the Education guru of this country.  As she rises in the ranks, she finds herself in the company of so many famous people — even several presidents, yet she conveys in her telling of these encounters that, to her, it wasn’t such a big deal.  They are all just people.  Anyone who has gotten the chance to meet her in person and see her interact with so many people who are not famous will see that she treats non famous people like they are special and is always asking them questions rather than talking about herself.

One of the funniest anecdotes in the book is when she inadvertently got Isaac Asimov angry with her over small talk related to word processors.  Again, this is only a few lines, but another interesting adventure in Ravitch’s full life that put her often in the room with all kinds of famous people.

While married to her husband, Diane unexpectedly meets her soulmate who happens to be a woman. In the chapter about the genesis and growth of her relationship, they have now been together for almost 40 years, she is able to convey what it means to finally experience the joy of true love.

In the last chapters of the book we learn about the Washington years in the Department of Education and how that came about and what she tried to accomplish there.  We also learn about what it took to renounce much of her work and to follow the evidence into a more evolved system of beliefs about what can improve education in this country.  She lost a lot of friends and titles in the process but she kept her personal integrity and commitment to the truth.

Throughout the book, the theme is that Ravitch is never just one thing or the other.  Is she a education conservative or an education liberal?  Is she straight or gay?  Is she a southerner or a north easterner?  Is she an introvert or an extrovert?  Is she a socialite or a homebody?  And throughout her life she is sometimes one and sometimes the other.  She is someone who defies categorization.  And though in the subtitle she says she ‘changed her mind about schools and almost everything else’ she never changed her core belief that you don’t just stay in the same place just because you are comfortable there.

And like with her, this book is a lot of different things.  On one level it is an amusing and interesting read about someone whose choices led her on an unlikely adventure ending with her being, in some circles, a huge celebrity.  But it is also an inspirational tale of how having values and staying true to them can help you overcome some of the unfortunate obstacles you have to deal with in life.  And though I doubt it was intended to accomplish something else, I think that for many readers they will want to write down their own memoirs after reading this.  Ravitch makes it look so easy to analyze your life, find the key moments in it and write some succinct prose – though of course it isn’t so easy but still a worthwhile task.

After finishing this book, I had an experience that only a few people were also able to have.  In the acknowledgements in the ‘friends’ section, among sixteen other names, there was my own.  I got a chill seeing this, never expecting it.  But this made me think something else, also a lesson, though maybe unintended from this great book.  This book reminds us of the importance of relationships.  Everyone you know has a story to tell.  Some people’s lives may not have the highs and lows of Diane Ravitch’s but for each person, their joys and sorrows are meaningful to them.  And even if they don’t have the capability to write the way Ravitch can, if they could, you might find yourselves in the acknowledgement page for that friend or family member.  So enjoy the relationships you have while you can and remember that you are an important person in many people’s lives.

So pick up a copy today and take a ride through the ups and downs of a well lived life.  Though she has made a career of writing about education and teaching, through this book she educates and teaches us that if you keep an open mind and are committed to learning and following the facts, you might end up in a comfortable home a long way from where you started.

It has been 20 years since Hurricane Katrina wiped out the New Orleans schools system causing it to be replaced with all charter schools. And it has been over 15 years since former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said, based on what he considered early evidence of the success of those charter schools that Katrina was “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans.” And it has been also about 15 years since educational researchers have been continuously debunking the New Orleans educational miracle.

So I was quite surprised to see that The Washington Post just published an opinion piece with the headline “‘Never seen before’: How Katrina set off an education revolution — Twenty years after the hurricane, taking stock of the miracle in New Orleans Schools.”

Reading this Op Ed was a strange experience for me. Supposedly based on recent research, it basically trotted out all the old bogus claims that I hadn’t heard anyone claim in at least ten years. Since it was The Washington Post, I figured it had to be Jay Matthews who has been known to write puff pieces (and books) about KIPP and Michelle Rhee. But these talking points were so antiquated that it would have been odd even for him to use them. No, this anachronistic Op Ed was not from any of the usual suspects but from a name I had never seen before: Ian Birrell.

Reading up on the biography of Ian Birrell, things made a bit more sense. Ian Birrell is a British journalist who has mainly written about international affairs. I’m sure he is a very competent journalist but this is his first foray into education reporting. So he heard about the New Orleans ‘miracle’ for the first time, got a totally biased ‘research’ report from Doug Harris supporting the miracle and, not knowing that there has been an ongoing battle over education reform in this country where the ‘reformers’ have all kinds of tricks for misrepresenting data to advance their agenda. So, thinking he has discovered something incredible, of course he wants to write something about it. But what he writes is completely naive since he doesn’t know the right questions to explore to get to the truth. It’s kind of like if I decided to become a nature reporter and wrote a thing about Big Foot based on just photoshopped images and unreliable first hand accounts.

The New Orleans Miracle is pretty easy to debunk if you know the right questions to ask.

So the first thing to look at is the Louisiana AP scores. Even though AP tests and the way they are sometimes misused, are not the only thing that matters in looking at a state’s education quality, colleges do look at AP scores so it is a bit of a measure of ‘college readiness.’ From the College Board website, it can be seen that Louisiana has the third worst AP passing rate in the country.

In the Washington Post Op Ed, Birrell describes the interventions after Katrina as follows: “They fired all 7,000 teachers, sidelined unions, invited ambitious experts to run the schools and offered parents almost total freedom over where to send their children.”

If he knew the full history of this he would know that the “ambitious experts to run the schools” included KIPP, the famous charter chain created by two Teach For America alums. So to measure the size of the miracle twenty years later, just check to see how the KIPP Booker T. Washington High School students are doing academically. For this I went to the recent US News & World Report data.

So the gold standard charter network in the miracle city of New Orleans has an 11% Math proficiency, a 21% Reading proficiency, and a 10% Science proficiency.

As far as AP scores at the top charter chain in the miracle city of New Orleans, the exam pass rate is just 2%.

But maybe you think I am cherry picking a KIPP school that was never mentioned in the Op Ed. In it Birrell writes about a specific ambitious expert “Among those watching the horrific Katrina news footage 20 years ago was a former corporate financier with Boeing who was planning to move into education. Ben Kleban told me in a 2010 interview how, soon after the disaster, at age 26, he moved to the city from New York to set up a school, starting in a refurbished building with 120 pupils ages 11 to 15. His venture grew fast, took over a nearby failing school, improved proficiency tests and won a national medal for its successes. “For too long,” he said, “the public school system found excuses rather than being properly accountable to parents.” He explained how he relied on “basic business practices” with a daily flow of data on attendance, discipline and classroom performance.”

So I looked up Ben Kleban to see how his school was doing. It is a little confusing but it seems like the entire charter chain he created was shut down in 2018 except maybe one school which is called Walter L. Cohen High School. For them, there are no AP passing scores reported. For their test scores, they are a little better than KIPP for math and reading but lower on science.

So what evidence did Birrell see that convinced him that the New Orleans miracle was authentic? Doug Harris has some nice graphs that shows test scores in New Orleans scores now compared to test scores in New Orleans 20 years ago. But of course this is not the proper comparison to make. The way a scientific experiment works is that if you want to measure the impact of an effect, you try to take a group and split it in half and apply the impact to half of the subjects and make the rest the ‘control group.’ So in this situation, had they not made all the New Orleans schools into charter schools but instead randomly picked half the schools and made them charters and left the other half under local control, then you could compare the results of the two groups after 20 years and, as long as the groups continued to be randomly distributed, that could be a useful way to make a comparison.

But that is not what happened since unfortunately there is no control group to compare to. It is quite possible that the scores now are lower than they would have been had Katrina never happened and the New Orleans charter experiment had never happened. But even without anything to compare to, the data from that one gold standard KIPP is, in my opinion, pretty good evidence against the miracle. Just like the way you can check the temperature of a Thanksgiving turkey by putting a meat thermometer into one spot of the Turkey, looking at what is supposed to be the best charter school is a good measure of all the schools since the KIPP is surely better than the average school there.

I thought I’d never have to debunk the New Orleans miracle again, but I guess I’m going to have to every five or ten years for each milestone anniversary of “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans.”

According to the latest US News & World Report high school rankings, a New York City KIPP High School is the 18th ranked high school in New York State.

Strangely, a different New York City KIPP High School is ranked 682nd.

How can there be such a discrepancy between the two KIPPs? How can one of their schools be so good while the other is so bad? It’s simple. I know because this is a scam that they have been pulling off and on for the past 8 years. And in 2017 they would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for this meddling blogger. In 2023 they did get away with it despite this meddling blogger. Whether they get away with it this year, only time will tell.

Here’s the way it works: There is only one KIPP high school in New York City and it is called KIPP NYC College Prep. So what are these two schools, KIPP Academy and KIPP Infinity? Those are two middle schools. The main statistic US News uses to rank high schools is the percent of students at that school who passed at least one AP test with a 3. So what KIPP does is it takes all the students from KIPP College Prep who pass an AP test and say they are enrolled in the middle school called KIPP Academy. Then they take the majority of their students who don’t pass an AP test and say they are enrolled in KIPP Infinity. This way KIPP Academy middle school becomes a high school with 100% of their 50 students passing an AP while KIPP Infinity middle school becomes a high school where 0% of their 216 students passed an AP.

It’s actually pretty ingenious. As I mentioned, they got caught in 2017 and got disqualified that year. I haven’t checked every year but I also checked in 2023 and they were not disqualified that year. You can check out the links to those previous posts if you want more details.

Now I don’t know if KIPP is using this fraudulent data to get people to donate to them. I also don’t know if their teachers are even aware of this. But if anyone who works for KIPP NYC College Prep is aware of this (maybe by reading this right now) and you don’t speak up about this, you are teaching your students that it is OK to cheat and to lie, so try to think about that as you teach each day.

And if anyone knows of any way to report this fraud to US News & World Report, feel free to do so.