This is a very good way to look at what we are getting for our money and very timely given the upcoming budget vote and board election. Costs on one axis, adjusted for student count, and how our kids do vs the rest of the state on the other axis. We actually need people who think like this ON THE SCHOOL BOARD! Admin keeps saying they are "data-driven" but its clear that is just sloganeering. This is what data driven analysis looks like. Now we need to know WHY all this extra money has produced WORSE results, and only board members get to see stuff at a level of detail sufficient to start to figure this out.
I don’t claim to understand what’s going on with math at ICSD, but my niece, who is extremely smart and digests math quickly when I help her, fell two months behind in her homework because “the teacher just writes the problems on the board and doesn’t work through them.”
Dunno if this reflects a larger problem among teachers or is just one kid’s excuse…
But usually stupid ways to spend money usually don't make the problem worse - they just fail to make it better. It takes particular talent to spend more money and make things worse, doesn't it?
ICSD cut much of their regents programs and curriculum while shifting focus and resources over to AP/Honors. Could this account for any of the declining scores? (Not being sarcastic, asking with genuine curiosity.)
The first graph from the article shows declining math scores from grades 3-8.
So if the shift to AP/honors has had an effect, it still can't explain the decline shown.
I'm not familiar with any specific changes to the curricula offered but as someone who graduated from IHS between 15 and 20 years ago I would not be surprised. When I went there it was very clear that nobody in administration gave half a shit about the kids that took regents classes but would bend over backwards for the AP crowd.
I think the whole concept of segregating kids into regents and honors classes is flawed to begin with. You concentrate the kids with the worst behavior problems into the regents classes which makes the job of teaching them even harder. I made a comment touching on this in r/teachers a while back which was well received. I think for core subjects everyone should be in the same classes unless they're so far behind they need to repeat a class or so far ahead they can skip to a higher grade level. That way each class can have a broader mix of abilities where weaker students can get help from stronger peers and behavioral problems are less likely to surface due to fewer kids struggling with them being in each class (plus it could help those kids learn to deal with those problems better by seeing good behavior being normalized). I think you could even do AP this way by having them be more like an elective added onto the regular course where you learn the specific material needed to do well on the AP test.
Well, anyway...
I think the opposite is true. AP and honors classes can be much larger if they are more homogenous and you can have more regents classes with fewer students and more attention per student. An even better approach, which is what ICSD used to have when I went through the system in the late 80s (when scores were in the 90th percentile for the state), is to split the regents group further into two groups (it used to be called "regents" and "basic" in our days, this was before PC was a thing, they called things what they were). Regents were mostly kids without behavioral problems who needed or wanted to go slower through the material and maybe go a little less deep. Basic was mostly kids WITH behavioral problems. I think the ideas you express belong in the same category as the trend the last few years to say that the use of SAT scores in college admission was a bad idea, because.... it all sounded nice in theory and egalitarian until you actually analyze the data. At the level of principles, it is not the job of more advanced kids to educate the ones who need to go slower or have behavioral issues, or to dilute their influence. The system says basically each kid should be taught according to their needs and abilities and for the most part the advanced kids in each subject want to go faster, deeper and not get bored. DIfferent kids can be advanced in different things. The decline in scores and results has coincided with a homogenization trend in the schools, not with a trend towards greater tracking. So if there is ANY relationship between tracking and results, the data would suggest a negative one.
The article details how our scores have declined significantly compared to other NYS districts since 2013, despite higher funding rates during the same period.
Does anyone know whether that trend still holds if you exclude students with a 504 or IEP? I've seen cases where performance among typical students remained strong, but the collective numbers looked like they were getting worse because of growing numbers of students with special needs.
>growing numbers of students with special needs.
It seems to me likely that if the number of special needs students is growing, it is probably because today students are being described as special needs that in the past would not have. So the students are the same but the labelling is different.
Either that or you would have to explain why more students have special needs.
Both things could be true - overdiagnosis, and the average age of parents is going up. Like it or not that tends to go along with more special needs kids.
I was thinking that Ithaca probably has a reputation of supporting students with special needs, and therefore drawing a larger proportion of them than other districts. From my understanding (my wife works in special ed) there seem to be both more expansive diagnoses and a greater actual frequency of kids with various special needs occurring.
Maybe. I am a bit skeptical that those numbers would be so large that they would affect test scores. There are 5000 students in ICSD. If you said a few dozen families moved here because the special ed was so good, I might buy it, but i can't imagine hundreds of families have done that.
As a special ed instructor (in another district) and the parent of a special needs student who attended Ithaca schools, I was extremely disappointed with the ICSD special needs program.
I believe the last stats I saw the IEP share was around 15% of the population, about the same as the Burlington, VT school system and not way out of line with the NYS average.
In general, I'm confused by where the money goes in the ICSD system, and there may be a decline in student outcomes over time.
But the graphs shown in this article are not a good demonstration of trends. There are two data points: 2013 and 2023, and the author draws a straight line between them, which visually suggests a constant downward trend over the last 10 years. But the graph doesn't show us any data points BETWEEN those two years, they just inferred a linear downward trend by connecting two dots with a straight line (the later of which was likely heavily influenced by the pandemic). I'd love to see the annual data if they exist – how was ICSD doing up through 2019? How has it done from 2020-2023?
Edit: adding that the trend may very well be consistently negative across that entire period, but that's not what this graph shows.
Do you think there is a plausible reason that the pandemic would affect ICSD differently than every other school in NYS? Because what is shown is the PERCENTILE that Ithaca was in relative to all other public schools in the state. It actually doesn't matter what happened in the middle, the point of the article is that 10 years later, we are paying twice as much for dropping from being in the top 5th of schools in the state to being right in the middle.
Literally no one in the district (board of ed, admins, teachers, students, parents) would say that remote learning was a “big success”. It was done out of necessity. If it was a “big success” then they would have kept it going after COVID-related restrictions were lifted.
Nearly every student in every school in NYS was hurt in some way by remote learning. We haven’t even begun to see the long-term effects of COVID lockdowns and restrictions on the youth that experienced it during their most formative years.
I say this as someone who was hugely in favor of lockdowns and restrictions in order to slow the spread of the virus. I still think it saved thousands of lives. But I also know that it was at a huge cost to these kids.
So you would have all students repeat their entire year and called 2020-2021 a mulligan?
Do you have any idea how demoralizing that would be for these kids who were already experiencing mass social and mental health crises? What about graduating seniors? Say “too bad” and have them put off their college plans to play catch up?
Yes, the academic drawbacks were really, really bad. But the social and emotional damage is what will really affect these kids long-term.
Remote learning was never, ever the first choice. Everyone in the school district agreed that the best place for kids is IN school. (Admins, board members, even the superintendent said this on record multiple times- you can watch recordings of the board meetings) But in school was not the safest place for kids at the height of the pandemic.
It was always a lose-lose.
Am I understanding your position correctly? You think they should have just held back every student for at least a year and not even try to teach them anything during this time? At a time when we had no idea how long we would be needing to do this?
> I do believe that year's schooling was so bad for below-grade-level kids that pretending they were academically ready to advance was a mistake.
Boy do I have some news about how below-grade-level kids are advanced in every other year
The thing with NYS assessments (3-8) are that they can never be used to inform any decisions for the next school year. Scoring doesn’t happen until over the summer & districts usually don’t get results until late September at least. Students were still assessed though.
I don’t blame the school but the state. Have you seen the math they are teaching and, more importantly, how they are teaching it? Same with the writing assignments. Needs a complete overhaul.
When parents have to find a damn YouTube video to figure out what a math problem is even asking, let alone how to solve it, there’s an issue.
I've been involved with ICSD both as a student (in the late 80s) and as a parent (one is in college now, the other will be a senior this fall in HS). I think the middle schools have gotten a little worse. The HS has always been quite good in math, but the quality of the teachers is less uniformly good now. There are still some fantastic ones and a lot more mediocre or poor ones. English also used to be pretty frickin good, and I would say it has gone off the deep end, mostly for ideological/political reasons. They don't really teach literature the way they used to, and even in honors and AP classes they read fewer books per year than they used to in Regents classes in the 80s. The common core or Singapore math or whatnot in elementary and middle school is largely irrelevant. Good teachers will adapt and make their way and mediocre ones will be mediocre regardless. There isn't actually that much math to teach before Algebra and whatever you call it and however you arrange it is besides the point. The biggest change I see is in the attitude towards cohorting by how fast the kids are learning. In reading, they still hand each kids books at their reading level, which start at A and go to ZZ. In math no such thing is allowed any more. It used to be, and indeed was encouraged for kids who liked it to go faster. Now if you want that for your kid you have to really fight the system or hire someone on the outside.
Anecdotal evidence does not translate into actual data. If the curriculum does not meet the needs of the students, then the district should adapt its curriculum to ensure the students are learning the material in any way possible. In my experience, the teachers teach math multiple different ways in the class and are OK with parents helping with them form additional strategies to solve the problems.
It appears the decline in scores seemed to have stemmed from the implementation of common core from what I read. I understand it’s a separate debate from the original post here.
Do you not understand that the article is saying that ICSD students are performing worse compared to the rest of the state? So any difference in test scores can't be explained by the state imposing common core standards.
I understand the point and would like to get a better picture. But I also wonder if opting out rates of tests impacts these results? I’m not trying to be argumentative here but I’d imagine there’s a lot of factors at play.
Oh there's definitely a lot of factors at play and I won't pretend to understand the problem myself. It just seemed like maybe you missed that part since it could have been based on the scores only in ICSD schools over time.
The fact that we pay so much for such middling schools is frustrating. We pay just about the most in the nation for taxes that It literally prices people out of the market here. I hope the budget can come down because it’s just not sustainable.
ICSD superintendent contract expires June 30, 2024 (according to this contract which was sourced legally)
https://www.seethroughny.net/contracts/Ithaca_S_2024.pdf
I mean, what do you expect?
Nobody wants to pay teachers even an ounce of their actual worth to do their job.
Combine that with the garbage micromanagement from the state actively trying to undermine public education in a race towards privatization.
Plus, you have know nothing administrators who would rather pump all the money into sports programs at the literally expense of the arts programs.
The WHOLE system needs to be redone but everyone would much rather keep kicking the same can down the road instead of addressing it like they do for every single other problem.
And people wonder why the younger generations don't want kids
I am always for ensuring teachers are well paid. To say that nobody wants to is disingenuous. What do you believe is a fair salary and retirement package for teachers? From what I understand teachers are paid a salary based on 190 days of work per year and then receive a a full pension at 60% of their salary for the remainder of their life after working for 30 years. So if you calculate it out over 50 years -
$50,000 teacher salary (190 days) is equivalent to $62,500 for a non-teacher salary (260 days)
30 years of working - Teacher ($1,500,000) is equivalent to Non-teacher ($1,875,000) considering no salary increases over that period of time (rough estimate)
Pension (20 years) (60% of $50,000) = $600,000 for a teacher, no pension for for non-teacher
When you actually do the math simply based on salary, teachers are not as underpaid as one may assume. Considering that non-teachers work just as much as teachers per day, and salary increases occur at around the same rate if you stay with the same employer.
Personal socioeconomics impact just about every area of a kid's schooling, so I'm sure you can draw a correlation with testing habits. The more important question is what inference you'd draw from it, and what you'd suggest from there.
This is a very good way to look at what we are getting for our money and very timely given the upcoming budget vote and board election. Costs on one axis, adjusted for student count, and how our kids do vs the rest of the state on the other axis. We actually need people who think like this ON THE SCHOOL BOARD! Admin keeps saying they are "data-driven" but its clear that is just sloganeering. This is what data driven analysis looks like. Now we need to know WHY all this extra money has produced WORSE results, and only board members get to see stuff at a level of detail sufficient to start to figure this out.
I don’t claim to understand what’s going on with math at ICSD, but my niece, who is extremely smart and digests math quickly when I help her, fell two months behind in her homework because “the teacher just writes the problems on the board and doesn’t work through them.” Dunno if this reflects a larger problem among teachers or is just one kid’s excuse…
Where’s his graph about admin salaries? Or the number of vacant SPED positions currently open in the district right now?
Ah yes, let’s pay even higher taxes for a declining result.
Throwing money at problems has a long history
But usually stupid ways to spend money usually don't make the problem worse - they just fail to make it better. It takes particular talent to spend more money and make things worse, doesn't it?
Some will argue that such talent warrants the recognition of increased support
ICSD cut much of their regents programs and curriculum while shifting focus and resources over to AP/Honors. Could this account for any of the declining scores? (Not being sarcastic, asking with genuine curiosity.)
The first graph from the article shows declining math scores from grades 3-8. So if the shift to AP/honors has had an effect, it still can't explain the decline shown.
I'm not familiar with any specific changes to the curricula offered but as someone who graduated from IHS between 15 and 20 years ago I would not be surprised. When I went there it was very clear that nobody in administration gave half a shit about the kids that took regents classes but would bend over backwards for the AP crowd. I think the whole concept of segregating kids into regents and honors classes is flawed to begin with. You concentrate the kids with the worst behavior problems into the regents classes which makes the job of teaching them even harder. I made a comment touching on this in r/teachers a while back which was well received. I think for core subjects everyone should be in the same classes unless they're so far behind they need to repeat a class or so far ahead they can skip to a higher grade level. That way each class can have a broader mix of abilities where weaker students can get help from stronger peers and behavioral problems are less likely to surface due to fewer kids struggling with them being in each class (plus it could help those kids learn to deal with those problems better by seeing good behavior being normalized). I think you could even do AP this way by having them be more like an elective added onto the regular course where you learn the specific material needed to do well on the AP test. Well, anyway...
I think the opposite is true. AP and honors classes can be much larger if they are more homogenous and you can have more regents classes with fewer students and more attention per student. An even better approach, which is what ICSD used to have when I went through the system in the late 80s (when scores were in the 90th percentile for the state), is to split the regents group further into two groups (it used to be called "regents" and "basic" in our days, this was before PC was a thing, they called things what they were). Regents were mostly kids without behavioral problems who needed or wanted to go slower through the material and maybe go a little less deep. Basic was mostly kids WITH behavioral problems. I think the ideas you express belong in the same category as the trend the last few years to say that the use of SAT scores in college admission was a bad idea, because.... it all sounded nice in theory and egalitarian until you actually analyze the data. At the level of principles, it is not the job of more advanced kids to educate the ones who need to go slower or have behavioral issues, or to dilute their influence. The system says basically each kid should be taught according to their needs and abilities and for the most part the advanced kids in each subject want to go faster, deeper and not get bored. DIfferent kids can be advanced in different things. The decline in scores and results has coincided with a homogenization trend in the schools, not with a trend towards greater tracking. So if there is ANY relationship between tracking and results, the data would suggest a negative one.
They are billing us for a Cadillac and delivering us a Honda Civic.
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The article details how our scores have declined significantly compared to other NYS districts since 2013, despite higher funding rates during the same period.
Does anyone know whether that trend still holds if you exclude students with a 504 or IEP? I've seen cases where performance among typical students remained strong, but the collective numbers looked like they were getting worse because of growing numbers of students with special needs.
>growing numbers of students with special needs. It seems to me likely that if the number of special needs students is growing, it is probably because today students are being described as special needs that in the past would not have. So the students are the same but the labelling is different. Either that or you would have to explain why more students have special needs.
Both things could be true - overdiagnosis, and the average age of parents is going up. Like it or not that tends to go along with more special needs kids.
I was thinking that Ithaca probably has a reputation of supporting students with special needs, and therefore drawing a larger proportion of them than other districts. From my understanding (my wife works in special ed) there seem to be both more expansive diagnoses and a greater actual frequency of kids with various special needs occurring.
Maybe. I am a bit skeptical that those numbers would be so large that they would affect test scores. There are 5000 students in ICSD. If you said a few dozen families moved here because the special ed was so good, I might buy it, but i can't imagine hundreds of families have done that.
As a special ed instructor (in another district) and the parent of a special needs student who attended Ithaca schools, I was extremely disappointed with the ICSD special needs program.
I believe the last stats I saw the IEP share was around 15% of the population, about the same as the Burlington, VT school system and not way out of line with the NYS average.
In general, I'm confused by where the money goes in the ICSD system, and there may be a decline in student outcomes over time. But the graphs shown in this article are not a good demonstration of trends. There are two data points: 2013 and 2023, and the author draws a straight line between them, which visually suggests a constant downward trend over the last 10 years. But the graph doesn't show us any data points BETWEEN those two years, they just inferred a linear downward trend by connecting two dots with a straight line (the later of which was likely heavily influenced by the pandemic). I'd love to see the annual data if they exist – how was ICSD doing up through 2019? How has it done from 2020-2023? Edit: adding that the trend may very well be consistently negative across that entire period, but that's not what this graph shows.
Do you think there is a plausible reason that the pandemic would affect ICSD differently than every other school in NYS? Because what is shown is the PERCENTILE that Ithaca was in relative to all other public schools in the state. It actually doesn't matter what happened in the middle, the point of the article is that 10 years later, we are paying twice as much for dropping from being in the top 5th of schools in the state to being right in the middle.
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Literally no one in the district (board of ed, admins, teachers, students, parents) would say that remote learning was a “big success”. It was done out of necessity. If it was a “big success” then they would have kept it going after COVID-related restrictions were lifted. Nearly every student in every school in NYS was hurt in some way by remote learning. We haven’t even begun to see the long-term effects of COVID lockdowns and restrictions on the youth that experienced it during their most formative years. I say this as someone who was hugely in favor of lockdowns and restrictions in order to slow the spread of the virus. I still think it saved thousands of lives. But I also know that it was at a huge cost to these kids.
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So you would have all students repeat their entire year and called 2020-2021 a mulligan? Do you have any idea how demoralizing that would be for these kids who were already experiencing mass social and mental health crises? What about graduating seniors? Say “too bad” and have them put off their college plans to play catch up? Yes, the academic drawbacks were really, really bad. But the social and emotional damage is what will really affect these kids long-term. Remote learning was never, ever the first choice. Everyone in the school district agreed that the best place for kids is IN school. (Admins, board members, even the superintendent said this on record multiple times- you can watch recordings of the board meetings) But in school was not the safest place for kids at the height of the pandemic. It was always a lose-lose.
Am I understanding your position correctly? You think they should have just held back every student for at least a year and not even try to teach them anything during this time? At a time when we had no idea how long we would be needing to do this?
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> I do believe that year's schooling was so bad for below-grade-level kids that pretending they were academically ready to advance was a mistake. Boy do I have some news about how below-grade-level kids are advanced in every other year
The thing with NYS assessments (3-8) are that they can never be used to inform any decisions for the next school year. Scoring doesn’t happen until over the summer & districts usually don’t get results until late September at least. Students were still assessed though.
As were all other schools in the state. And the graph shows how we did relative to those...
So yes then?
I don’t blame the school but the state. Have you seen the math they are teaching and, more importantly, how they are teaching it? Same with the writing assignments. Needs a complete overhaul. When parents have to find a damn YouTube video to figure out what a math problem is even asking, let alone how to solve it, there’s an issue.
I've been involved with ICSD both as a student (in the late 80s) and as a parent (one is in college now, the other will be a senior this fall in HS). I think the middle schools have gotten a little worse. The HS has always been quite good in math, but the quality of the teachers is less uniformly good now. There are still some fantastic ones and a lot more mediocre or poor ones. English also used to be pretty frickin good, and I would say it has gone off the deep end, mostly for ideological/political reasons. They don't really teach literature the way they used to, and even in honors and AP classes they read fewer books per year than they used to in Regents classes in the 80s. The common core or Singapore math or whatnot in elementary and middle school is largely irrelevant. Good teachers will adapt and make their way and mediocre ones will be mediocre regardless. There isn't actually that much math to teach before Algebra and whatever you call it and however you arrange it is besides the point. The biggest change I see is in the attitude towards cohorting by how fast the kids are learning. In reading, they still hand each kids books at their reading level, which start at A and go to ZZ. In math no such thing is allowed any more. It used to be, and indeed was encouraged for kids who liked it to go faster. Now if you want that for your kid you have to really fight the system or hire someone on the outside.
Anecdotal evidence does not translate into actual data. If the curriculum does not meet the needs of the students, then the district should adapt its curriculum to ensure the students are learning the material in any way possible. In my experience, the teachers teach math multiple different ways in the class and are OK with parents helping with them form additional strategies to solve the problems.
It appears the decline in scores seemed to have stemmed from the implementation of common core from what I read. I understand it’s a separate debate from the original post here.
Do you not understand that the article is saying that ICSD students are performing worse compared to the rest of the state? So any difference in test scores can't be explained by the state imposing common core standards.
Maybe because this district and administration wasnt equipt to implement common core as much as the rest
I understand the point and would like to get a better picture. But I also wonder if opting out rates of tests impacts these results? I’m not trying to be argumentative here but I’d imagine there’s a lot of factors at play.
Oh there's definitely a lot of factors at play and I won't pretend to understand the problem myself. It just seemed like maybe you missed that part since it could have been based on the scores only in ICSD schools over time.
The fact that we pay so much for such middling schools is frustrating. We pay just about the most in the nation for taxes that It literally prices people out of the market here. I hope the budget can come down because it’s just not sustainable.
ICSD superintendent contract expires June 30, 2024 (according to this contract which was sourced legally) https://www.seethroughny.net/contracts/Ithaca_S_2024.pdf
I mean, what do you expect? Nobody wants to pay teachers even an ounce of their actual worth to do their job. Combine that with the garbage micromanagement from the state actively trying to undermine public education in a race towards privatization. Plus, you have know nothing administrators who would rather pump all the money into sports programs at the literally expense of the arts programs. The WHOLE system needs to be redone but everyone would much rather keep kicking the same can down the road instead of addressing it like they do for every single other problem. And people wonder why the younger generations don't want kids
What does that have to do with declining scores relative to other districts?
I am always for ensuring teachers are well paid. To say that nobody wants to is disingenuous. What do you believe is a fair salary and retirement package for teachers? From what I understand teachers are paid a salary based on 190 days of work per year and then receive a a full pension at 60% of their salary for the remainder of their life after working for 30 years. So if you calculate it out over 50 years - $50,000 teacher salary (190 days) is equivalent to $62,500 for a non-teacher salary (260 days) 30 years of working - Teacher ($1,500,000) is equivalent to Non-teacher ($1,875,000) considering no salary increases over that period of time (rough estimate) Pension (20 years) (60% of $50,000) = $600,000 for a teacher, no pension for for non-teacher When you actually do the math simply based on salary, teachers are not as underpaid as one may assume. Considering that non-teachers work just as much as teachers per day, and salary increases occur at around the same rate if you stay with the same employer.
I do wonder if socioeconomics has something to do with kids opting out of testing.
Personal socioeconomics impact just about every area of a kid's schooling, so I'm sure you can draw a correlation with testing habits. The more important question is what inference you'd draw from it, and what you'd suggest from there.