Performance Assessments And Regents Exams

We've been working our way through the first round of "performance assessments" in my school.

We're all little concerned what the June "assessments" will look like and what we'll have to do April, May and early June to make sure we "add value" to our students and they show "growth" on those June "assessments."

At my school, our heavy testing season for the ELA Regents is in January.

While we will have some remedial classes of students who still must pass the ELA Regents in June, many of our students will have gotten through that hoop by June.

It is going to be difficult, however, to simultaneously prep the students who STILL must pass the ELA Regents exam after failing it once for that June test while simultaneously trying to "add value" to their June "performance assessment" scores.

Nonetheless, our headaches will be nothing compared to the schools that have most students take the ELA Regents exam in June.

Those schools will be simultaneously prepping juniors for both the ELA Regents exam (with the increased scoring chart difficulty) and the second round of "performance assessments."

Those two areas will be worth 40% of many teachers' evaluation scores overall (20% for each.)

If teachers come up "ineffective" on both of those scores, they MUST be declared "ineffective" overall.

Leaving aside the ridiculousness of these so-called "performance assessments" being given in many schools (they are certainly not going to give teachers an "objective" and "scientific" score - but we'll get to that in a later post), there are going to be an awful lot of freaked out teachers in this city in June.

That, of course, is the rationale behind the entire evaluation system.

Not to offer "feedback" (as the Asshats4Educators people keep parroting because they read it on their Gates Foundation-funded talking points sheets.)

Not to help teachers improve.

To freak people out, to increase the anxiety levels in schools, to move some teachers out by getting them to quit and to move others out by giving districts the tools they need to "i-rate" them and fire them.

That's it - that's all this is about.