It Breaks My Heart
Dear Pedro,
I'm so glad that you mentioned the New York Performance Standards Consortium. It has been a pioneer for a different approach to standards and accountability for more than 25 years! One of the many "failed" successes in New York City's and state's history.
Founded under the "regime" of Superintendent Tom Sobol in the late 1980s, alas subsequent superintendents never followed up on the commitment to study the results of their work. But when the schools waivers were threatened by New York Commissioner of Education Richard Mills, he agreed to appoint a commission to study the results. That commission concluded that the alternate graduation system "worked"! So they left them alone. But the results never made headlines and had no impact on New York City or New York state practice. (And the first of these schools, a secondary school formed in 1984 as a follow up to the Central Park East elementary school network in East Harlem, was abandoned a half-dozen years after I moved to Boston. It didn't "die"; it was killed.)
During the same period an even larger "experimental study" of approximately 100 New York K-12 public schools
I'm so glad that you mentioned the New York Performance Standards Consortium. It has been a pioneer for a different approach to standards and accountability for more than 25 years! One of the many "failed" successes in New York City's and state's history.
Founded under the "regime" of Superintendent Tom Sobol in the late 1980s, alas subsequent superintendents never followed up on the commitment to study the results of their work. But when the schools waivers were threatened by New York Commissioner of Education Richard Mills, he agreed to appoint a commission to study the results. That commission concluded that the alternate graduation system "worked"! So they left them alone. But the results never made headlines and had no impact on New York City or New York state practice. (And the first of these schools, a secondary school formed in 1984 as a follow up to the Central Park East elementary school network in East Harlem, was abandoned a half-dozen years after I moved to Boston. It didn't "die"; it was killed.)
During the same period an even larger "experimental study" of approximately 100 New York K-12 public schools