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Saturday, December 14, 2019

NYC Public School Parents: Why the DOE's analysis of the second year of the literacy coach program provokes more questions than answers

NYC Public School Parents: Why the DOE's analysis of the second year of the literacy coach program provokes more questions than answers

Why the DOE's analysis of the second year of the literacy coach program provokes more questions than answers




Yesterday, the DOE released an evaluation of the second year of its literacy coach program, created under Chancellor Farina in 2016-2017, and budgeted at $85.7 million this year. Each coach has a salary of $90,000 to $150,000, and there are approximately 515 of them working with K-2 teachers in selected schools currently.  The number of schools and coaches have expanded each year.
In August 2018, the DOE released a brief power point which purportedly contained the sole written evaluation of the first year of the program.  By analyzing the growth scores from October to May of second graders who were administered the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Tests (GMRT) at schools that received literacy coaches, compared to students at similar schools without coaches, they found no positive results in either word decoding, word knowledge, or comprehension.

The results were expressed in grade equivalents, which allowed one to see that rather than progressing, both groups had fallen further behind in terms of grade level.
I submitted a Freedom of Information request for the second year results shortly afterward, since these students' test scores should have been available by then and could have easily been analyzed.  Instead, the DOE waited until December 2018 to tell me that NO such analysis had yet been done. Yet they subsequently proposed an expansion of the CONTINUE READING: NYC Public School Parents: Why the DOE's analysis of the second year of the literacy coach program provokes more questions than answers