No, seriously:
Gov. Andrew Cuomo was questioned earlier Friday about news that school districts are likely to request delays in implementing the new teacher evaluation program he inserted in this year’s budget. He stressed that the tests used in the evaluations don’t affect the students grades.
“The grades are meaningless to the students,” Cuomo said in a brief press gaggle following an Association for a Better New York breakfast event in New York City.
...
Cuomo said he believes they haven’t done a good job of publicizing the fact that the tests, for at least the next five years, won’t count at all for the students.
Michael Fiorillo responded:
Wait, if "the grades are meaningless to the students," as our Reptilian Governor contends, then how can they also be a vehicle for "the civil rights movement of our time?"
The legacy civil rights organizations, leaning on Gates Foundation money, preposterously claim that high stakes tests are necessary to illuminate "the achievement gap," a propaganda term used to scapegoat teachers and public education, while ignoring systemic inequality and poverty. They do this despite the origins and long history of these exams being used to "prove" the "inferiority" of darker races.
This so-called education reform is one leaky boat, with everyone expected to maintain a perpetual state of Doublethink, whereby the tests are meaningless, except when they are integral to civil rights.
Someday, when the so-called reformers have been driven back under their rocks, historians and teachers will use the entire sorry episode of the past 20+ years to instruct their students about the dangers of propaganda and fallacies.
Unless, of course, the so-called reformers win, in which case the brutal Common Core/Testing regime will not permit that kind of teaching.
Michael's right - you have to be in a perpetual state of Doublethink in order to buy education reform tenets.
The test scores are "meaningless" for students, but they're also the "civil rights movement of our time" and essential for ensuring teacher and school quality.
Horse hockey.
If the test scores are"meaningless," then the test-taking exercise is meaningless and so are the tests.
