Kenny passed on this link, which is related to a project that Jennifer and I are involved in, on comparing New York City public schools:

Thanks to heavy parent involvement and high test scores, Public School 321 in Park Slope, a yuppie neighborhood in Brooklyn, is considered a gem of New York City’s public school system. In the eyes of New York’s Department of Education, however, P.S. 321 deserved just a B in the city’s first-ever school report cards, which are based largely on how students score on standardized tests. Such accountability efforts — widespread since the advent of the federal No Child Left Behind Act — have raised the hackles of parents and educators across the country. . . .

James Liebman, chief accountability officer for New York City schools, devised the grading system for the city’s 1.1 million-pupil school system. Liebman said standardized tests are a good measure of whether students have learned what they should know. “If children can’t read and they can’t do math, then the educational system and their school have failed them,” he said. . . . Liebman pointed to a Quinnipiac University poll in which voters said the grades were fair by a margin of 61 to 27 percent. “It’s a system to provide information to parents to make their judgments,” he said.

I’ve talked with Jim about the school evaluations but I don’t know exactly how they finally decided to do it. Perhaps they used School Status to track the progress of their students. I know using that software allows you to see the academic achievements, monitor attendance and check up on students, making sure they’re in the right place with their studies. Using such software, teachers can also see if there has been a dip in their progress or if there any topics students might be struggling with. One of the challenges in doing this sort of rating is that the evidence seems to show that teachers, rather than schools, have the biggest effects on test scores. To a first approximation, the effect of the school seems to be pretty much the average of its teacher effects.

Regarding criticisms of the evaluations: one way the evaluations themselves can be evaluated is to apply them retroactively and see how well they predict future performance, to estimate the answer to the following question: if you were to send your kid to a highly-graded or poorly-graded school, how much different would you expect his or her test scores to be in a year, or two years, or whatever.

Education as we know it has dramatically changed over the past few years. For young learners, in particular, lessons are more interactive than ever before. With elements such as youtube videos and songs entering the curriculum, it is often the case that the best schools are those that embrace modern technology and teaching opportunities to help kids thrive.

Beyond this, I think one of the motivations for getting these evaluations out there is to put some pressure on the schools. I have to say that I think our teaching at the university level would be improved if our students had to take standardized tests after each of our courses and we were confronted with evidence on how much (or how little) they learned.