At a Manhattan Institutebreakfast yesterday morning, held at the plush, posh Harvard Club, accountability bigwigs from the DOE, Columbia Universityand the Institute debated the effects of F progress reports on elementary and middle schools. For recaps of the meeting, see Gotham Gazetteand GothamSchools; click herefor the full report. A couple of salient points that emerged may be of interest to city parents.

For example, James Liebman, head of the DOE's accountability department, related average "levels" on test scores to eventual high-school graduation. If a child's 8th grade math and ELA scores average (add up the levels, divide by two) equals 3 -- which the city defines as proficiency -- that child has a 54.7% chance of graduating high school on time with a Regents diploma. (Seems disappointingly slim, for an academically proficient student.) The prediction rises steeply for those with higher average levels: 81.1% kids with 3.5 averages are predicted to graduate on time, as are 93.2 % of kids with level 4s. But the core question -- what happens to nearly half of the proficient kids along the way? -- wasn't addressed by Liebman or the Manhattan Institute panel, which confined the conversation to the progress reports study. Still, it's worth noting that proficiency, as 'demonstrated' by standardized test score, does not predict or guarantee graduation.

On the correlation of progress-report score and letter grade, Manhattan Institute scholar and report author Marcus Winters said, "anyone who's been in school knows, you get an 89, you get a B" -- but that familiar yardstick isn't used for progress grades, where A's begin at 64.0 of 100 (which looks like a C- from here). B's begin at 49.9. and C's at 38.8. And the skew is very much toward A's and B's -- of the 977 elementary and middle schools for which progress reports were published last year, 599 were graded A or B, with 125 total F and D schools. Demographically, troubling trends persist: Schools with low performance grades tend to have more African-American students (45% in F schools, vs 35% across the city), and higher-graded schools have more Asian students (16% in A schools, vs <12% citywide).

Critics derided the report as self-congratulatory and overly selective of good results: Test-score increases were celebrated, while decreases at the top proficiency levels were minimized to near-invisibility. Even author Winters worried aloud about "no repeat Fs" from 2006-07 to 2007-08, adding that "a lot of them becoming A's makes me worried." Tellingly, Columbia economist Jonah Rockoff said, "Those aren't magic numbers. They reflect the values of the people who create the system."