They're Setting Us Up To Fail

The four horseman of the NY State education reform world (Tisch, King, Walcott, Polakow-Suransky) wrote an opinion piece in the Daily News to let everybody know that these new Common Core tests that 4th-8th grade students are taking next week will be really, really hard and they expect scores to fall a lot.

They offer this reassurance:

And yes, because the new tests are aligned to a higher bar, the percentage of students scoring proficient or above will not be comparable to previous years. Kentucky saw an almost 35% difference between the Common Core scores and its old test results. This does not mean schools are getting worse or students are learning less; this is a completely different baseline.

Transitions take time. This year’s results will not lead to a surge in summer school attendance and are not meant to disadvantage any one teacher or school.

The results will serve a more important purpose: Parents will learn where their children are on the path to college and career readiness, and teachers will get the feedback they need to help their students master the new benchmarks.

Yet these scores WILL be used as part of the new teacher evaluation system next year.

According to a WNYT.com article, the NYSED claims the new Common Core tests won't have much impact on teacher evaluations:

 On the State Education website, it says the expected declining scores will have "little or no impact" on principals' or educators' growth scores.

But this teacher in Saratoga crystallizes exactly how many of us our feeling:

"The results of these tests will be used to determine whether we are good educators," Swift suspected. "Low test scores will lead to our low evaluations. It seems that we've been set up to fail."

A commenter on the article says the same thing:

 I am not sure how they can say it will have no impact on teachers evaluation being that that is why the kids are taking the test. The test scores are part of the evaluation.

That's exactly right.

It would be one thing if they put these new Common Core tests into place a few years before APPR went into effect, piloted the changes through and carefully assessed how things were going before shoving the thing on the whole state.

But they're not doing that.

They're pushing the new Common Core tests and the new teacher evaluation system based upon those tests in the same year.

 

They're telling us that scores are going to drop precipitously and we should know that going into testing season but we shouldn't worry about the consequences - even as they tell us that teachers are going to get this more "rigorous" test score-based evaluation system that will use the Common Core tests for its data and will root out the "bad teachers."

 

It's a set up, pure and simple.

It's a shame our union leadership, such as it is, played directly into the education corporatists' hands by agreeing to this garbage.

But they did and now we teachers will have to do the best to protect ourselves from what is a very toxic system developed purely to label teachers as "bad" and schools as "failing."

I think Bruce Baker at Rutgers is providing plenty of ammunition for the eventual lawsuits over this garbage.

Here are two recent posts you should read here and here.

Get as familiar as you can with how they're screwing you with the VAM and the growth measures, because it may save your reputation and your job in the very near future when they VAM you out of your job.