James Eterno described King's imposed system as an incoherent bureaucratic mess and I think that's exactly right.
So much of this system is unworkable in practice and won't improve either teaching or learning.
Of
course it's not meant to improve teaching and learning, it's meant to
give NYC the power to fire as many teachers as they want as quickly as
they want.
But I am not convinced that this will happen before the system collapses from unworkability and court challenges.
Will the VAM stand up to a court challenge?
Will the SLO's?
Will
the way they've rigged the 100 point system for the overall APPR to make
it almost impossible to be rated "highly effective" or "effective"?
Will allowing third graders to evaluate their teachers stand up to court scrutiny?
I'll admit, I'm not a lawyer, but I have a hard time seeing how something so convoluted and incoherent stands up to court challenges.
And there's the whole unworkability angle.
4-6 observations a year for every teacher using all 22 items on the Danielson rubric, with pre-and post-observation conferences.
How long does that kind of burn and churn system last before there's a mass exodus of administrators out of the system?
I know they want to fire teachers en masse, but where exactly are they going to get the hundreds of new administrators a year they're going to need after the current ones start walking away from the workload?
How about all the extra added paperwork teachers have to keep, the "artifacts" as King calls them, in order to prove they're not incompetent?
Most of the job next year will be collecting crap to play CYA with come evaluation-time.
Seriously, I have a difficult time seeing this piece of crap last more than a couple of years before it goes the way of the hipster goatee (oops - NYSED Commissioner/rookie teacher John King still wears one, doesn't he?)
Make no mistake, there will be plenty of careers and reputations destroyed before this thing falls apart under the weight of its own incoherence and unworkability.
But it will.
The arrogance of King, Tisch, Cuomo and the educrats in designing something so over-the-top and unworkable sows the seeds of the system's own destruction.
The Great Leap Forward failed too, but not before causing untold damage to China. This thing is their Great Leap Forward.
ReplyDeleteThat's an interesting analogy. I can see Shael helping run the Cultural Revolution and having lots of us who are insufficiently reformy enough sent to re-education camps...
DeleteI agree with you that this will fall apart, though many will be ground to bits in the interim.
ReplyDeleteMy guess is that if you could get a Unity representative to speak off the record, they'd say the same, and that the union had a rope-a-dope strategy to survive until it does collapse.
In the abstract, there might be some rationale for that outlook, but we're then still left with the reality that the union leadership that "negotiated" this monstrosity will still be there to deal with its collapse and after effects.
You're probably right about that rope-a-dope strategy, Michael. If that was their strategy, it was a bad one. If I'm not mistaken, Muhammad Ali got Parkinson's Disease. Dunno what part rope-a-dope played in that, but I bet it didn't help.
DeleteI agree, the first thing would be to vote for the removal of retirees from the election process. Mulgrew could not have won without them in the last election. The voivce of the union should be the rank and file who have been cheated by this maligned UFT leadership and will be subjected to this quagmire of an evaluation system.
ReplyDeleteI bet they try and make a retiree vote count 1.5 after they see how the active membership is feeling after a couple of years of APPR.
DeleteYep, that's the thing.
DeleteOnly retirees will be able to defend this monster.
NEVER let the point drop that Mulgrew welcomed this imposition, this surrender of our collective bargaining rights.
Stop lying, Michael M! Bloomberg's Wolfson and Wolcott said that NYSED gave away the store, shutting out the UFT's agenda.
So guess what? There is no way to vote to change the retiree vote because it requires a vote of the ex bd which is 100% Unity endorsed. There is an option by petitioning 10% of the total membership (about 17,000).
Delete