[I hope this post on the recently-released Learning Environment Survey proves interesting. It was originally posted on Edwize and written by Edwize blogger CitySue.]

. . . those who attempt to explain them often do. The so-called Learning Environment Survey released by the city of New York is a case in point.

For teachers the results were gratifying. Nobody -- not even Mike the Master of Spin -- could do anything to diminish a statistically astounding 90 percent approval rate!

Curiously, although the DOE apparently wanted to know what parents thought about "the quality" of their child's teacher, it didn't ask parents what they thought of the school principal. Though maybe it's not so surprising considering the fact that Klein is betting the farm on them to bail him out of the first and second reorganizations.

But teachers, on the other hand, did get to voice what they thought about their bosses, and the results weren't very pretty. Here again, the spinmasters were flummoxed by the clear consensus. Although two-thirds of principals came out OK, a significant quarter to a third were charged with being ineffective, untrustworthy, unsupportive, unhelpful, discouraging of honest communication, and uninviting of collaboration with teachers. Need I say more?

On the issues, however, the spinning got frantic. Under pressure from the UFT, parents and the State Ed Dept to get serious about reducing class size, Mike could not let go by a finding that parents chose smaller classes as the single most important school improvement they wanted by a substantial margin. (The next most popular choice was "More or better enrichment programs," chosen by 19% of parents.) So, what does he do? He lumps four other choices together -- enrichment, hands-on learning (13%), more challenging courses (8%) and arts programs (5%) -- and comes up with the conclusion that "double the number of people (actually just parents; the question was not in the teacher or student survey) wanted more money spent on enriching programs as opposed to class size." He must have been dizzy from getting that statement out.

Finally, he and the number crunchers at DOE committed a more serious statistical no-no by implying a question was asked when it wasn't. If someone told you that "Ten times as many parents strongly prefer more test preparation over less test preparation," you'd conclude that parents were asked if they wanted more or less test prep and 10 times as many chose "More." Not so. In fact, parents were given 10 choices of school improvements and told they could choose only one. Both "more test prep" and "less test prep" were on the list, but they were not posed as choose one or the other. Most people chose neither. Obvioously test prep was not high on their list of priorities; only 11% chose test prep at all, combining both the "more" and "less" choices.

Also an important point: a disproportionate number of respondents were in early childhood grades, K-3. Other than grade 3, there is not much test prep in those grades. In fact, any pollster could challenge the representativeness of the entire survey, whether by grade level or by almost every other demographic.

Still, no skepticism about the validity of the survey can undermine a result so overwhelming as a 90% vote for teachers. We can savor that with complete confidence.

More important are the individual school results. Are they informative? Helpful? Accurate? I'd love to hear some opinions from schools on that.

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