NYSUT Fights Against Testing Apparatus They Helped Put Into Place

The NYSUT is now trying to recruit parents across the state to fight against the high stakes testing and teacher evaluation system they helped implement just last year:

Saying their pleas are falling on deaf ears in state government and concerned that they are being poorly implemented, New York State United Teachers has taken the unusual move of launching a petition drive in which parents can urge a stop to the upcoming high stakes tests of the new Common Core curriculum for grades 3-8 which are scheduled for next month.

The trouble, says NYSUT, lots of schools still don’t have the new materials for the more challenging tests and some pieces were being rolled out only last month — which doesn’t provide enough time to prepare.

There’s been some back and forth between NYSUT and the state Education Department on this. While admitting that they expect test scores to drop with these new tests, Education Commission John King has said teachers won’t be held responsible for that. But there is lots of worry, as test scores will be playing a bigger role in the new teacher evaluation standards that school districts are adopting going forward.

The upshot: testing, and the way the tests are formulated, administered and graded, is likely to become a hot topic, possibly competing with the endless fights over school aid in future months and years. That especially true now that the 2013-14 budget, along with school aid amounts, is all but settled. “I think you are going to hear a lot about testing,” NYSUT President Richard Iannuzzi said during a brief trip to the LCA press room this morning.

Gee, Dick, if you were so concerned about the "implementation" of the new Common Core tests and the new evaluation system, maybe that's something you could have thought about before you dropped the lawsuit against the NYSED and the Regents over the testing (a lawsuit which you won in a lower court, btw, though it was being appealed by the state) or before you signed off on the Cuomo/Tisch/King/Mulgrew/Iannuzi APPR agrrement last February?

Did you think John King, Merryl Tisch or Andrew Cuomo actually cared about whether the new tests and the new evaluation system was going to be implemented in a fair and prudent way?

If you did, then you're a fool.

But I don't think you're a fool.

I think you knew that the NYSED and the Regents were going to use both the new tests and the new evaluation system as a bludgeon against schools and teachers, that they were going to add the new Common Core tests without giving schools or teachers the materials needed to get students ready for the tests, then look to fire tens of thousands when the test scores plummet and the VAM's used on the teachers come up "ineffective."

I think you signed off as a matter of political expediency and figured you handle whatever came later.

And you will, of course.

You're not a teacher, so what do you have to worry about? 

There are no VAM's or APPR for you.

No, it's the teachers who are going to be evaluated using this system who are screwed.

Just another example of why the entrenched corrupt leadership at the NYSUT and the UFT need to be sent packing.

They put political expediency and their own interests over the interests of students, teachers and schools.