My Response To Newsday's Pro-Charter Editorial

Not sure my comment on this piece of pro-charter Newsday claptrap will survive because I put a link in it, so wanted to save it for posterity:

Charters often do no better than traditional public schools on test measurements, often do worse.  The lie you op-ed writers perpetrate in the corporate media about this is a zombie lie that just won't die.  Doesn't matter if it's the News, the Post, the WSJ, the Times, Newsday - same lie told over and over.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/charters-not-outperforming-nations-traditional-public-schools-report-says/2013/06/24/23f19bb8-dd0c-11e2-bd83-e99e43c336ed_story.html

Too bad you're too busy writing you're anti-union propaganda to tell the truth.

Compare And Contrast the DN Treatment of John King To Newsday's Treatment

The Daily News ran with a pro-King editorial entitled "Lomg Live The King!" yesterday.

The title tells you everything you need to know about what tack they took in the King/Common Core meeting controversy.

Leaving aside that it took them 11 days to come out and defend him (though we will note that they waited for the announcement of new parent forums before they finally took a public stance on the controversy), the neo-cons at the DN made excuses for why King canceled the state PTA-sponsored town hall meetings and then said they're glad that Commissioner King has said there will be no substantive changes to the state's reform agenda:

And so, opponents are standing athwart education reform history, yelling “stop.”

The national, state and city teachers unions want a three-year “moratorium” on connecting the new Common Core tests to any stakes for parents and students.

That’s code for stalling a necessary reform in order to kill it entirely once it has been weakened.

They are demanding that King halt full rollout of a teacher evaluation system that offers, for the first time, the chance to make objective distinctions between fantastic teachers and awful ones.

A parent group called New York State Allies for Public Education (allied in New York City with the radical anti-testing group Class Size Matters), seconded by state Sen. Jack Martins (R-Mineola), has gone so far as to call for King to resign.

They watched King get crudely lambasted at a town hall meeting on the Common Core — with one parent shouting that her child was being taught curriculum “like a little Nazi.”

After intially (and understandably) nixing four planned town halls as a result, King said Friday he would tour the state, making 16 stops to hear concerns, including four to be broadcast on TV.

We say: Good for King for answering critics head-on. We also say: Good for state Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch, who set the Common Core policy that King is carrying out and is standing foursquare with him.

“John has a unique voice for educational reform that includes every child in every school district in every school building in New York State,” Tisch said on Friday, adding for emphasis:

“I’m not backing down here.”

Excellent. Not one inch.

Now here's Newsday's more measured approach to the King controversy.

 

Newsday continues to support the Common Core and APPR teacher evaluation system but notes that parents and teachers have the right to have their concerns heard:

 

Earlier this month, state Education Commissioner John B. King Jr. thought he could back out of public forums on the state's new education standards and testing after the first meeting became a shouting match. According to media accounts, the event in Poughkeepsie was so acrimonious that a person who pleaded with the crowd to settle down was himself shouted down. Two days after that meeting, King canceled four upcoming events, including one in Garden City.

If King thought he stumbled into a brawl when he exchanged ideas with parents and educators about the new Common Core curriculum, it was nothing compared to the brouhaha that erupted when he canceled further exchanges. The response was so explosive that King had to replace the four canceled appearances with 12 new ones, including four on Long Island. They will be moderated by legislators. He also is adding another four that will be televised.

King's decision to cancel meetings without a plan for alternative forums came off as a whiny, embarrassing error. Parents and teachers are upset and fearful: That's why these meetings have to happen. It's not an excuse to cancel them. But calls for King's resignation from legislators and educators are overblown. Test scores of third- through eighth-graders across the state plummeted about 30 percent compared with the previous year because the standards got tougher and the curriculum is new. The curriculum and its toughness are steps in the right direction. But parents are rightfully anxious about the changes

.Listening to and understanding what King is trying to do, and in response, offering suggestions and alternatives that could make the adoption of the new curriculum smoother, should be the point of these forums. But if people want to scream and shout, then King, who works for these taxpayers and has admitted the Common Core rollout was clumsy and poorly explained, needs to sit there and take it.

In short: 

 

Daily News - parents and teachers need to shut and listen to the King.

Newsday - parents and teachers have the right to express their concerns to King, Tisch and the rest of the SED/Regents reformers.

Daily News - ooh, King is so strong and manly.

Newsday - King is a whiny little embarrassment.  He needs to sit down, shut up and listen to the public even if they're only there to scream and shout.

The neo-cons at the DN do love their authoritarianism, don't they?

Alas for them, John King, like most strong men, was exposed as a coward when parents really took it to him.

NEWSDAY Calls New Teacher Evaluation System "State Of The Art"

The geniuses at NEWSDAY write the following about the new teacher evaluation system in New York State known as APPR:

The other problem, one that won't ever be solved perfectly, is that principals are seeing growth scores that occasionally defy what they personally know about the skills of certain teachers. That's going to happen with sample sizes as small as single classrooms, but hopefully not too often, and teachers who do well on the other 60 to 80 percent of their evaluation shouldn't have much to fear from it. Experts, even those who aren't big on judging teachers this way, agree the system New York is putting in place to measure student achievement year-over-year is "state of the art."

"State of the art?"

Based on what?

The tests they're using for this system are an error-riddled embarrassment.

The system is set up on a bell curve so that every year, 10%-20% of teachers are going to be ranked substandard no matter what.

And as the geniuses at NEWSDAY themselves even note, there are teachers coming up substandard on the "performance-based" part of the evaluation system who administrators, students, parents and other teachers know to be excellent educators.

The same happened with New York City's vaunted TDR system - teachers who were known by administrators, students, parents and other teachers to be excellent educators came up "ineffective."

Michael Winerip covered the story of one last year in his Times column, actually.

Under the new APPR system, this kind of teacher will be slated to be fired after two years of "I" ratings.

Gary Rubenstein pointed out that the VAM the city used on 4th-8th grade ELA and math teachers was essentially random - one third came up "effective," one third above, one third below. But the clicker was, many teachers switched where they came up each year, so that an "effective" teacher often came up "ineffective" the year after and vice versa for the teacher found "ineffective" the year before.

And as Carol Burris has pointed out, the system is set up so that you can be ranked "effective" on the three different evaluation parts - the state assessment, the local assessment and the classroom observations - and STILL be given an "I" rating.

Whether you are talking about the state's APPR system or the city's TDR system, there is nothing "state of the art" here, unless by state of the art, you mean how ingeniously dishonest these systems are.

They are rigged against teachers.

They are meant to be rigged.

That's why they've set it up on a bell curve, that's why they're hiding the tests used to generate the "performance data," that's why the governor, the Regents and the NYSED made it so that a teacher whose students show no growth on the tests must be rated "ineffective" automatically no matter how she/he scores on the rest.

They want to fire teachers - lots of them - and now they've got a couple of systems in place (the state APPR and the local assessment data systems) that will provide them with the "data" to support the firings.

Even though the data generated from these systems has large margins of error, wide swings in stability and is based upon error-riddled tests.

The only thing "state of the art" here is the dishonesty with which the governor, the NYSED. the Regents and the editorial writers at the Times, the Post, the News, Newsday and the Journal cheer this evaluation system while claiming it is so "scientific" and excellent.

They know this thing is half-baked (as even NEWSDAY admitted today) they know it's untested, they know it's rigged to smear a certain percentage of teachers as "ineffective" every year no matter what - but they're going to use it on teachers and fire the "bad" ones anyway.