Regents Blame Local Districts For Too Much Testing

The state evaluation system requires that teachers be held accountable for their students' test scores.

40% of the evaluation is based on test scores - 20% from state tests, 20% from "local measures."

In order for teachers to be evaluated on the local measures, students in every grade in every subject must be tested at the beginning of the year to get a "baseline" of knowledge so that when they are tested again in every grade in every subject, the state can figure out whether teachers have "added value" to these students over the course of the year.

It's an insane system that requires a ton of "assessments" and "tests" in order to pull it off so that every teacher can be evaluated for their local measures.

Having to give all these "assessments" and "tests" in every grade in every subject so that teachers can be evaluated is not the fault of local school districts - it is the fault of the educrats who put this system together, the legislature that passed it into law, the union leadership that signed off on it despite members like myself warning over-testing was going to be a huge problem, and the governor who signed it into law and forced it onto every school district in the state by tying evaluation system impositions to budget increases.

But of course the Regents and the SED do not take the blame for this mess themselves - oh, no, like Sheriff Andy Cuomo yesterday, they displaced the blame onto others by throwing the responsibility for all the testing onto the local school districts themselves:

Some agreed with King that school districts should take more initiative in reducing the number of tests used locally. The commissioner's aides pointed to what they consider the positive example of districts such as Herricks, which sharply reduced the amount of pre-testing done in the fall to determine students' "baseline" knowledge.

"Sometimes it gets a little tiresome to take all the responsibility for change," said Anthony Bottar of Syracuse, the board's vice chancellor. "Local leaders have to do their job as well."

SED Commissioner King imposed the teacher evaluation system for NYC teachers himself.

It has an insane amount of testing built into it.

And even the test "reduction" options that are open to schools within the system are insane.

For example, in my school we could have given "assessments" in every subject in every grade in September and June and used that to evaluate teachers on the local measure.

But that would have meant an insane amount of testing (and an insane amount of test creation, since many of these tests are not available from the state and the city, especially for vocational classes), so instead we decided to use the ELA performance assessment to evaluate teachers in every subject in every grade on their local measures.

That means social studies, science, physical education, art and vocational teachers will all be rated on how well their students do on ELA tests.

That's one of the "fixes" for the over-testing problem that the Regents and SED are talking about, and like so much of the reform agenda they have pushed onto schools, it is an insane one - teachers being evaluated by test scores for students they don't teach in subjects that neither teach or are licensed in

This whole reform agenda is falling apart, piece by piece.

Cuomo, Tisch, King, Duncan, the Board of Regents, the NYSED - all are flailing away, trying to hold together the inherent contradictions and problems with the Common Core/testing reforms.

And quite frankly, they're not doing a very good job of it.

Trying to displace the blame for this mess onto others - local school leaders, administrators in schools, teachers, parents and students are not at fault for any of this mess.

This is all on Tisch, King, Cuomo, the Regents and SED.