Center For Unions Facts Is Right - Randi Weingarten Is Ruining Public Education

Lyndsey Layton reports the Center for Union Facts is attacking AFT President Randi Weingarten again:

The 11-page mailing, on expensive paper stock, was sent first class to 125,000 households across the country this week.

“I’m writing to you about Randi,” the letter began. “You probably don’t know who Randi is. Most people don’t. The terrible impact Randi has on America’s educational system is something that I hope you will give me a few minutes to explain.”

The writer, Richard Berman, is a D.C.-based corporate communications consultant who is waging a national campaign against Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers.

Berman has run a highly personal attack on Weingarten for the past year, paying for two billboards in Times Square that featured an unflattering two-story image of her, a full-page ad in the New York Times, radio spots and, now, lengthy mailings. He also paid workers to hand out anti-Weingarten flyers during Labor Day weekend in East Hampton, N.Y., where she has a home.

In the mailing, Berman refers to Weingarten as “a vicious individual” who is “on a crusade to stymie school reform and protect the jobs of incompetent teachers — the bad apples that drain so much of our tax resources and sabotage the efforts of parents and caring teachers.”

This is a nasty attack on Weingarten, just as the billboards and other attacks Berman and the Center for Union Facts have launched against her were nasty.

But to be frank, I agree with one part of Berman's attack:

Weingarten and the teachers unions are ruining public education - but for the exact opposite reason Berman gives.

Want to know why there are so many tests in public schools these days?

Because Weingarten and the teachers unions have embraced test-based accountability and the Endless Testing regime.

Want to know why teachers are evaluated using error-riddled value-added measurements based upon test scores?

Because Weingarten and the teachers unions embraced VAM a few years ago and haven't mounted much of a challenge to these accountability systems even now that they're claiming "VAM is sham!"

Indeed, in 2008 Weingarten happily okayed the Teacher Data Reports in NYC that saw 4th-8th grade ELA and math teachers rated using a value-added system with margins of error as high as 87%.

Those reports were published in the New York news media, exposing teachers who had been rated with this error-riddled data system Weingarten collaborated on to public humiliation.

Want to know why Common Core math is confusing children nation-wide and Common Core informational texts have replaced literature in ELA classrooms and children are crying at night over the Common Core homework they're given that doesn't make any freaking sense?

Because Weingarten and the teachers unions have embraced Common Core, have taken money from Common Core proponents like Bill Gates to shill for the Core and have threatened to punch anybody who opposes Common Core in the face.

Want to know why pro-ed deform teacher-hating politicians like Andrew Cuomo are in power and doing all the damage they're doing to public education and the teaching profession?

Because Weingarten and the teachers unions are backing them, engineering putschs when certain union leaders turn against them, then ensuring that there will be no third party candidates to run against them and making robocalls for them when it turns out a primary is closer than it was supposed to be.

Sure, Weingarten and the unions aren't solely responsible for these crimes against children, teachers and public education, but they certainly helped along the way and you can make a pretty good argument that without union collaboration from Randi and the other teachers union leaders, they wouldn't have happened at all.

So I agree with Berman and the Center for Union Facts - Weingarten is ruining education and teaching.

I just don't agree with Berman's rationale for how she's ruining it.

It's not because Randi is out to "stymie school reform."

It's because she is so willing help out the reformers, to collaborate with and shill for the corporate entities, NGO's, billionaires and politicians focused on privatizing the school system, standardizing the nation's curriculum and turning the teaching profession into at-will work with no job protections.

I can't get all worked up over this attack on Weingarten from the anti-union guy - she's done too much damage, engaged in too much duplicity and shilled for too many deform causes and entities for me to put up the barricades and defend her. 

Michael Mulgrew: More Than 32,000 NYC Teachers Have Quit In Last 11 Years

From State of Politics:

At 1 p.m., UFT President Mike Mulgrew releases a report showing that more than 32,000 teachers walked away from NYC classrooms in the last 11 years, with many going to suburban districts, 52 Broadway, Manhattan.

Yes, Bloomberg, along with his chancellor henchmen, were largely responsible for that.

So were Obama and Duncan.

But so too was the UFT leadership, which made deals with the devil over seniority, agreed to create the ATR pool, agreed to use test scores to evaluate teachers in the infamous Randi Weingarten/Chris Cerf Teacher Data Reports deal that eventually saw teachers' names in the papers tied to ratings with high margins of error.

The latest fiasco that has morale at its lowest level in my 13+ years teaching is the Danielson observation framework. The UFT signed off on Race to the Top, which first brought us the re-do in evaluations, then agreed to drop the lawsuit against the state when they changed the rules of the APPR teacher evaluation system on testing, then said it was swell when Cuomo gave Commissioner King the power to impose whatever the hell he wanted to impose on us.

Now everybody is so busy running around trying to come up with all the compliance paperwork, the seven pages lesson plans per class and all the other junk Danielson calls for that there is little time or energy to actually teach students or grade paperwork.

I can imagine Mulgrew will complain about Bloomberg today and will mention contract stuff and money and respect.

But what he won't mention is how he and Randi Weingarten are as culpable in those 32,000 walking off the job (with more going every day - we have lost at least 7 teachers in my school since the year started.)

And he probably won't mention how the evaluation system that was put into place by Cuomo is meant to do exactly this - burn and churn the labor force, move them in, burn them out, churn them out.

Fiscal Genius Bloomberg Spent $160,000 To Try And Shield Cathie Black Emails From Public

From Lisa Fleischer at the WSJ:

New York City's fight to shield emails about the appointment of former schools Chancellor Cathie Black cost taxpayers about $160,000 in legal fees.

The city agreed Friday to reimburse a former Village Voice intern's lawyers about $134,500 in legal fees, on top of at least $25,000 the city spent internally defending the case.

Sergio Hernandez, now an editor at the Week magazine, had requested emails between the Bloomberg administration and Ms. Black in the lead-up to her nomination in November 2010 as chancellor.

The emails showed aides to Mayor Michael Bloomberg coordinating support for the high-profile, surprise hire, trying to solicit endorsements from Oprah Winfrey, Caroline Kennedy and others. Ms. Black, the former Hearst Magazines chairwoman, resigned in April 2011 after about three months on the job, amid criticism over her lack of education experience and some remarks that were seen as blunders.

$160,000 to shield the emails from public scrutiny.

To be frank, there wasn't anything in those emails that we didn't already know.

Cathie Black was clueless.

The Bloomberg administration was desperately scrambling to push back against opposition to her being named chancellor.

They used all the contacts and associations they had to try and ratchet up support for her (this is, btw, exactly what they did to get term limits overturned too - it's an M.O. with Bloomberg.)

Yet they spent $160,000 trying to shield the emails from scrutiny even as they worked to make sure the public saw the Teacher Data Reports with the 52% media margins of error (75% maximum MOE for math; 87% maximum MOE for ELA.)

Shows you their priorities, doesn't it?

Bloomberg Releases "Edited" 911 Report That Still Shows How Woefully Unprepared City Is To Handle Emergencies

The edited report is really, really bad - what could be in the full report that Bloomberg refuses to release?

NEW YORK (AP) — The city's overhauled 911 system is beset by delays and errors that could leave callers without help for crucial seconds in an emergency, while the fire and police departments aren't collaborating on how to handle a surge in calls from a massive crisis such as a terrorist attack, a report said.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg's office released an edited version of a consultants' report on Friday. His administration is fighting legal efforts to force it to release earlier versions. When the New York Post first wrote about the report last month, it described a 216-page document, but the version released Friday had 133 pages.

Cas Holloway, the deputy mayor for operations, said the city would immediately adopt two of the report's 14 recommendations and would soon adopt others. Bloomberg will create a working group to consider the report's suggestions and will issue an executive order establishing an ongoing process to improve the system, Holloway said.

...

The report, initially prepared by outside consultants hired by the city, found that call operators waste time on duplicative questions and employ inconsistent questioning procedures. The system, it found, sends some responders to the wrong address and slows fire and medical dispatchers' efforts to give instructions to callers.

The report follows a yearslong overhaul of the system that included a new $680 million call center that combined the operations of police, fire and medical dispatchers. City officials have said the update improved response times, eliminated inefficiencies and reduced confusion for callers, but Friday's report seemed to call some of that into question.

"Statistical information provided to City Hall management to demonstrate the success of the (Unified Call Taking) project contained errors and does not provide a clear picture of the effectiveness of UCT related business processes," the report said. Holloway said that comment referred largely to the city's practice of not tracking how long it takes from the moment an emergency call is placed until the moment responders are dispatched.

The data is phonied up, the response times are phonied up - but the deputy mayor says fatalities are down 20%, so everything's good.

But do you trust them when they say fatalities are down?

They have phonied up the budget, phonied up the crime stats, phonied up the test scores and graduation rates - why should we believe anything - seriously, anything - a city official who works for Michael Bloomberg says?

In any case, given how bad this "edited" report is, the full report must be a doozy.

Hey Bloomberg - you couldn't wait to release the Teacher Data Reports with the 87% margins of error.

Release the damned 911 report - all of it.

Cuomo, Tisch, And King Remain AWOL On Pineapplegate And Other Testing Controversies

During the battle over re-doing the 2010 teacher evaluation legislation earlier this year, you couldn't miss Governor Cuomo, Regents Chancellor Tisch or NYSED Commissioner John King all over the news.

They all talked about the crisis in New York State's public schools that could only be solved by "strengthening" the state's evaluation of teachers - primarily by adding standardized tests to every subject in every grade and using those scores to evaluate teachers.

Cuomo himself hailed the deal with the following words:

“We are writing into law a new national model for teacher evaluations that will put our students first and put New York State at the front of the class when it comes to school accountability,” he said. “I commend the legislative leaders for taking this extraordinary step to create permanent and real evaluations in our schools.”

Tisch and King also hailed the deal in a joint statement to the state:

"This agreement is a significant improvement over the evaluation law passed in 2010," Chancellor Tisch said. "But our work is by no means over. The Regents have adopted a major education reform plan, and teacher and principal evaluations are just a part of that reform. Today is a good day, but the best day will be when we’ve fully implemented the Regents reforms and we’ve made sure all our students get the education they need to succeed in college and careers."

"The goal is and always has been to help students – to give them every opportunity to succeed in college and careers," Commissioner King. "To make that happen, we need to improve teaching and learning. We owe it to our students to make sure every classroom is led by an effective teacher and every school is led by an effective principal. Today, the Governor’s leadership and his commitment to our students have helped us take a strong step toward that goal."

And yet, in the first test period after this "significant improvement" in education here in New York State, we have critics, including parents and educators, denouncing the tests as badly designed, unfair, or prejudicial to certain populations.

Principal Elizabeth Phillips of PS 321 in Park Slope summed up the problems with the tests in a letter to Commissioner King, which the Post covered today:

(She) wrote that she was “genuinely shocked” by the poor quality of the exams — particularly given their high stakes.

She complained that the questions following the fifth-grade reading passages were “ridiculous” and seemed designed to trick students.

“There are so many more flawed questions than ever before,” she wrote. “The idea that teachers may lose their jobs and schools [at least in New York City] may be closed based on how children do on these problematic exams is incredibly upsetting and demoralizing to educators.”

The NY Post also notes that the tests were discriminatory toward deaf children:

State Education Department officials were blind to the feelings of deaf students on this week’s English exams — heartlessly asking them questions about sounds such as the clickety-clack of a woman’s high heels and the rustle of wind blowing on leaves, educators claimed.

One sixth-grade teacher of hearing-impaired kids said they were completely thrown off by a lengthy listening passage rife with references to environmental noises — such as a cupboard door creaking open or the roar of a jet engine.

The kids were then asked to write how a boy who hears those sounds as music in his head is like a typical sixth-grader.

“My kids were looking at us like we had 10 heads. They said they didn’t understand the story,” the teacher said, referring to herself and a sign-language interpreter.

“It was all based on music and sounds in the world they don’t know,” added the perturbed teacher. “They definitely were upset.”

The teacher’s sound criticism was among a host of complaints about the new exams administered to students in Grades 3 to 8 this week, part of a five-year, $32 million deal with the testing company Pearson.

And of course we have PineappleGate, which if you've been under a rock these past few days, you may not have heard about:

Education officials scratched a bizarre item about a race between a pineapple and a hare from the state’s high-stakes exams a day after the Daily News focused attention on the inscrutable puzzler.

State Education Commissioner John King said that the infamous question won’t be counted in New York's eighth-grade reading tests because of its “ambiguous nature” in a statement released Friday.

“It will not be counted against students in their scores,” said King.

The befuddling test item caused students and educators to scratch their heads in confusion - and gave ammunition to critics who say the state tests are flawed.

The story was a take-off on Aesop’s fable about the tortoise and the hare, this time written about a talking pineapple who challenges a rabbit to a race.

Other animals ponder whether the legless pineapple can win - and wonder if the fruit is trying to fool them by merely acting immobile.

When the pineapple doesn’t budge and the fleet-footed hare wins the race, the animals all join together to eat the pineapple.

Students who took the test were stumped by questions about why the animals ate the fruit and which animal was wisest.

...

Last year the state handed a $32 million contract to testing company Pearson to overhaul the exams after they had become too easy to pass.

The new exams are used in decisions to promote students and have higher stakes for principals and teachers, whose evaluations will be based in part on students’ test scores.

Critics have said that the pineapple question - which is the subject of a sarcastic Facebook page with nearly 11,500 “likes” - is proof the new exams are flawed.

The state Education Department finally agree to release the passage yesterday, and there were slight variations from the version printed in the Daily News. But critics still insist its unfathomable.

Other than a defensive statement posted on the NYSED website (which you can view here) that was quoted in all the papers, Commissioner King has been silent on the problems with his high stakes tests.

In addition, while he did pull the Pineapple and the Hare questions from the test, he insisted in his statement that passage and questions were sound (if so, why pull them?) and a committee of New York State teachers had signed off on all testing materials, so it was their fault anyway.

Governor Cuomo and Regents Chancellor Tisch have STILL not issued statements or made public comments about the testing controversies (and make no mistake, there is more controversy than just the Pineapple and the Hare story.)

During the teacher evaluation battle , you couldn't miss seeing these two public figures lambaste teachers and unions (Tisch is actually on record saying the public hates teachers, but once a "scientific, objective" teacher evaluation system based upon test scores is in place, the public will like them again), but now that the tests have been exposed as badly designed, unfair and prejudicial to some populations of students, you can't find them anywhere.

Even the NY Post, which cheerleads high stakes testing and teacher evaluations tied to test scores any time it can, noted that state officials are not responding to the controversy:

Four state Education Department press officers failed to respond to questions from The Post.

The same goes for Pearson, the designer of the tests and the owner of a brand new $32 million state testing contract.

It is disconcerting to students, parents, teachers and administrators to see these people who are in charge of "accountability" refuse any accountability for these tests.

This is particularly problematic because these tests are going to be used to make high stakes decisions on students, teachers, and schools.

In fact, King, Tisch and Cuomo were just bragging about that fact back in February when they steamrolled the changes to the statewide evaluation system.

Now all we here from the governor and the Regents chancellor is silence and from the NYSED commissioner defensiveness.

But they cannot ignore these testing controversies forever.

As the Times noted, those of us who have been pointing out the problems with using high stakes standardized tests for high stakes decisions on students, teachers and schools now have the proof that this system is flawed.

Let's here a response from the accountability advocates who so love to talk when the onus of accountability is on teachers and schools.

Judge Orders Mayor Data Report On 911 System Released

Mayor Bloomberg claims that a report on New York City's troubled 911 emergency system shouldn't be released to the public because it contains errors and is an unfinished document.

The report shows that response times for the city's emergency services have gotten longer even as the city has spent $2 billion dollars on the 911 system. The report also says that the city has misled the public on response times by cutting 33% of the total minutes from the overall response time.

Bloomberg says the report is not actually finished and the information contained within could mislead the public about the project, which has gone $1 billion dollars over budget.

But as Accountable Teacher pointed out here, this same mayor had no problem releasing the Teacher Data Reports for 18,000 NYC public school teachers even though those documents had a maximum margin of error of 87% and were used to mislead the public about the efficacy and skill of NYC schoolteachers.

But somehow what's good for teachers in this city isn't good for the mayor of this city.

Until today, that is:

Mayor Bloomberg was ordered yesterday to release a scathing analysis of the city’s trouble-plagued 911 and emergency-dispatch systems.

Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron, in a stinging rebuke to the mayor, told city lawyers they have one week to turn over a copy of the so-called “911 CPR” analysis and all drafts of the document.

Engoron said City Hall can’t keep the report from taxpayers who funded it.

The bombshell study, first reported last week by The Post, shows the city’s 911 and emergency-dispatch systems are getting worse at handling emergency calls despite $2 billion spent to improve them.

The judge actually compared Bloomberg to Nixon in his written statement:

The judge compared the mayor’s efforts to hide the document to former President Richard Nixon’s efforts to stonewall Watergate probers.

“Nixon kept claiming executive privilege . . . and the public and the courts didn’t buy it,” Justice Engoron declared. “We are talking about much the same thing.”

Engoron dismissed the city’s arguments, claiming the report, “belongs to everybody. I don’t think we have nuclear secrets here.”

Bloomberg certainly shows a Nixonian flair in how he runs this city - with an iron fist, bludgeoning his enemies with his money and his media empire (or the media empire of his fellow oligarchs, Zuckerman and Murdoch), using his police force as his "own army" to enforce his corporatist rule.

And just as Nixon lied about the Vietnam War, lied about Watergate, lied about pretty much everything, Bloomberg lies about the crime stats, the education stats, the recycling stats and now the response times of the FDNY and EMS services.

George Carlin once said that he believed not one thing his government told him - not one.

The same strategy should be used when viewing Bloomberg's public statements and city data.

Everything is skewed to make himself look good and make his "enemies" look bad.

And even when a judge orders him to release the report and compares his attempts to hide the data to Nixon's attempts to hide Watergate evidence, Bloomberg STILL defends his cover-up:

Later, Bloomberg again defended his stance. “I don’t know how any government would be able to function if you had to put out every single paper even at the beginning of a study and all through the study,” Bloomberg said.

The NY Post says the city's lawyers haven't decided whether to appeal.

I suspect there will be an appeal to this decision and Bloomberg will try and delay the release of the report for as long as he can so it does as little damage as possible to his legacy and reputation while he is still in office and people are paying attention to him.

But had this been Teacher Data Reports with a MOE of 87%, this report would have been released today, packaged in a bow and hand delivered to the hacks at the Times, News, Post, Observer, Wall Street Journal, et al.

Because this is a Mayor Data Report by an independent auditor, Bloomberg is trying to keep it from seeing the light of day.

What are you afraid of Mr. Mayor?

It seems you only believe in accountability for teachers and schools, not for yourself, not for your administration and not for the numerous projects you have wasted billions on - like CityTime, like the FDNY GPS systems, the NYC Housing Authority computer system, like the 911 upgrade.

What The Intractable Use Of Metrics On Teachers And Schools Will Do To Students

Michael Powell has a very powerful piece in the New York Times today about Bushwick Commnity High School - a "last chance" transfer school that has literally saved the lives of some teens, yet will faces closure this summer.

Here is how some see the school:

Aniah McAllister was a lost girl of New York, one of tens of thousands of children edging toward an adulthood drained of hope.

At 18, she possessed just 17 high school credits; she knew the streets and little more. She wandered, almost on a whim, into Bushwick Community High School in Brooklyn, a last-chance school for last-chance kids.

Two years later?

“I’m 20 years old, I have 46 credits, and I want to go to college.”

Ms. McAllister shakes her head, as if amazed to have just claimed that desire as her own. “This school made realize,” she says, “that I am much better than I thought I was.”

That’s a pretty fair bottom line for any school, although in the up-is-down world of public education in New York, it might just be an epitaph for this small marvel of a high school. Known as a transfer high school, Bushwick Community admits only those teenagers who have failed elsewhere. Most students enter at age 17 or 18, and most have fewer than 10 credits.

You can muck around quite a bit trying to find someone who has walked the school’s corridors, talked to its students and faculty, and come away unmoved. Most sound like Kathleen M. Cashin, a member of the State Board of Regents and a former superintendent. “They care for the neediest with love and rigor,” she said. “They are a tribute to public education.”

Here is how Bloomberg and the Tweedies see the school:

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, whose insistence that he has presided over an educational miracle recognizes few bounds of contrary fact, has proposed laying off the principal and half the teachers before it can reopen for the next school year. City officials complain that a majority of students fail to graduate in six years.

But the school is not getting students until they're already 17 or 18 years old, many lacking most of their credits, so of course they're not going to graduate in six years.

The question ought to be, what does the school do with these students once they get them? How do they help them academically? How do they help them emotionally?

According to the Times article, Bushwick Community High School does amazing work:

The Education Department’s report card compares this school with other transfer schools, and gives it a 95 percent grade in improving student attendance, 90 percent for passing the English Regents exam and 100 percent for the math Regents.

All of which is fine, though not nearly as moving as listening to these teenagers talk of lives adrift until they washed ashore here.

Justin Soto, short and muscular with a goatee, raises his hand. “I had not passed a class since junior high school,” he says, as tears roll down his cheeks and a girl rubs his neck. “I’m 21, but I’m not a man yet. This school has given me a life.”

Ms. McAllister raises her hand. A year ago, she asked her teacher if she was smart enough to graduate. He spent an hour talking to her. Next year, she will attend Medgar Evers College. She, too, is crying.

“Failure was all I knew,” she says.

What, I ask, would you like to be?

“A teacher, oddly,” she says. “I mean, it’s inspiring when you know what you were and see what you are now.”

But because Bloomberg and his Gates Foundation functionaries at the NYCDOE only trust data, they have decided this school needs to be closed and the principal and 50% of the teachers need to be fired.

Michael Powell is the writer of this Times piece and he indicts the current reliance on metrics and numbers as the only thing that matters in education:

Public education across the nation has sunk deep into a bog of metrics. We presume to measure teaching and achievement as a chemist does a proper mixture of chemicals. To this conceit, you can add the draconian demands of the federal No Child Left Behind law, which offers millions of dollars in help for poor urban schools only if city officials adhere to the same unyielding metrics.

This is a particular problem for a transfer high school, whose faculty takes children bruised by years of neglect. Bushwick Community is run, in part, by its faculty members, who offer the usual collection of the smart, the eccentric and the deeply committed found in most schools that work.

To sit with a dozen of the students at a community center not far from the high school was to watch as one girl nursed a baby and another spoke of living with her child in a shelter. Two had been tossed out of their family homes. Another lived with her grandmother on Coney Island — she commutes one and a half hours each way to this high school in Bushwick.

These are nonlinear kids with nonlinear lives.

And yet, the school is going to be closed and 50% of the staff and the principal are going to be fired - all based on a unyielding set of metrics that doesn't really measure what the data people say it measures.

With the advent of a new teacher evaluation system based upon student test scores, with value-added measurements to be used on all teachers starting next year, with the addition of nine new state ELA and math tests, four new city math and ELA tests, and four tests each in social studies, science, foreign language and physical education in order to pull off these "metric-based teacher evaluations," you can be sure that there are going to be plenty more stories like this where teachers are going to be fired based upon "unyielding data."

What's worse, since the New York State legislature and the governor refuse to shield the new teacher evaluation system from FOILing, teachers will not only be fired for the unyielding, inflexible, error-riddled data, they're going to be publicly humiliated in the media as well, with names, photos and evaluation rankings published yearly.

Who do the politicians think is going to work at a school like Bushwick Community High School and try and help kids who need a "last chance" when the consequence will likely be public humiliation in the Post and News as they publish the names and photos of the CITY'S WORST TEACHERS and then firing courtesy of Cuomo, King, and Tisch?

Any teacher who stay in a system where only metrics and test scores matter is going to have to value only metrics and test scores.

As Arthur Goldstein pointed out in this New York Times piece yesterday, that means teachers will be less likely to help students who need help because every student will be seen as nothing more than another point in a data set.

Is this what the pols want?

Is this what parents want?

Is this what students want?

Aniah McAllister says at the end of the Powell piece from the Times that she wants to be teacher now that she has seen the power that teachers have in transforming lives.

But in the Brave New System developed by Obama, Duncan, Bloomberg, Klein, Cuomo, Tisch, King, Gates, et al., teachers will not have that power anymore.

They will simply have to yield to the intractable data or be crushed.

New York State Teacher Evaluations Will Be Published In Media

Even Tennessee, not exactly a paragon of progressive thinking, is looking to shield teacher evaluations from the newspapers.

But not New York State.

Neither Governor Cuomo nor the Senate Republicans want to shield teachers from having their names, pictures and eval ratings in the papers:

State Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos said Monday there will be no restrictions on the public release of teacher evaluations.

The Daily News reported today that the issue of whether to limit public access to the teacher evaluations popped up in the last-minute budget negotiations over the weekend.

“There were discussions in terms of seeing if there was a way you could balance the parents’ right to know and some sort of [teacher] privacy rights, but there’s no resolution of that, so it will stay as it is,” Skelos just said outside the Senate chamber.

The information will be required to be made available under state Freedom of Information laws, he said.

He also doesn’t expect the matter to be revisited.

“I don’t see it in the budget; I don’t see it down the road,” Skelos said.

What do these politicians think is going to happen when the evaluations based upon a flawed VAM get published every year in the media?

Do they think this is going to improve teaching and learning?

Do they think this is going to improve schools?

Do they think this is going to bring an influx of quality people looking to be teachers?

Do they care about any of that?

Or do they simply want to scapegoat as many teachers as possible, fire as many as possible, and finish off privatizing the system?

Daily News: Superintendents Warned By The DOE That The Teacher Data Reports Were Unreliable For Tenure Decisions

Okay, I think this ought to rank as a bombshell considering how Bloomberg and Tweed were happy to have the news media publish these TDR's with names and photos attached:

Education officials lacked confidence in the controversial ratings of teachers who oversaw the city’s highest- and lowest-performing students, cautioning schools about considering them in tenure decisions, the Daily News has learned.

The city Education Department called superintendents last spring about the shakiness of ratings for teachers at the very top and bottom of the spectrum, which 33% of all ratings, including those of teachers not up for tenure, fell into.

And all of the teachers at more than 30 schools fell into this category, a News analysis finds.

Officials said the ratings were unreliable for teachers whose classes had an average score above 3.4 or below 1.68 out of 4 on the state math and reading exams, because the tests are meant to measure students in the middle and not subtle changes among the highest and lowest performers.

For teachers with classes at the top or bottom, ratings could increase or decrease by 20 points if a class of students, on average, got one more question right or wrong.

Nearly 3,900 of 11,800 multiyear ratings for all teachers in 2009-10 were based on these classes — meaning they were outside the range the city deemed reliable.

Education Department spokeswoman Barbara Morgan warned superintendents of the 27 teachers in this category who were up for tenure last year.

“We shared this lesson with our schools and with the state as it creates a new model for teacher evaluations,” she said.

And yet they still provided those TDR's to the media to publish with names and photos attached under headlines like NEW YORK'S WORST TEACHERS.

So will the the state do any better with this VAM voodoo?

Doubtful.

And under this new Cuomo-driven evaluation system, teachers will be fired if they come up rated "ineffective" on a value-added measurement PLUS they'll get their names and photo in the paper under headlines like NEW YORK'S WORST TEACHERS.

I'm sure this "scientific" and "objective" system of evaluation will improve education.

I'm sure it will bring in many quality teachers to the state as well.

I mean, who wouldn't want to subject themselves to a voodoo VAM system with high margins of error (as high as 87% in the TDR's) and wide swings in variability and educrats happy to give these numbers out the media and base high stakes personnel decisions on them even though they know they are garbage?

Bloomberg Outraged By NY Times Publishing Goldman Sachs Resignation Letter

The Mayor of the 1% criticized the New York Times for publishing Greg Smith's resignation letter to Goldman Sachs this week:

Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York City, said on Friday that not even God could lead Goldman Sachs without criticism, as he defended the investment bank’s head after a rare attack from within its own ranks.

Goldman has been battling a stream of negative press since Greg Smith, a middle-ranking derivatives salesman, resigned on Tuesday, publicly accusing Lloyd Blankfein, chief executive, of presiding over a “toxic” culture in which bankers were “ripping off clients” and referring to customers as “muppets”.


Mr Bloomberg said the attack on Mr Blankfein was ridiculous. “He’s trying to lead this firm at a time when God couldn’t lead it without being criticised,” the billionaire mayor, who started his own career as an investment banker, told the Financial Times.

...

The New York mayor, who founded one of the world’s biggest financial news and data organisations which counts Goldman among its clients, said “someday you can tell me” why The New York Times published the article, adding that it was “beyond me”.

That view was echoed by James Gorman, chief executive of Goldman rival Morgan Stanley, who also attacked the newspaper for publishing Mr Smith’s unsolicited article.

“To pick a random employee, I just don’t think it’s fair and I didn’t think it was balanced,” he said at an event hosted by Fortune magazine. “There but for the grace of God go us.”

Ah yes, these paragons of capitalism are so offended by the Times publishing Smith's resignation letter and making Goldman look like the evil company it is, but somehow they're not offended by New York City going back on its word by releasing the Teacher Data Reports that use a value-added measurement with a maximum margin of error of 87% to the press so that the NY Post and other papers could slander individual teachers with headlines like NEW YORK'S WORST TEACHERS.

Hypocrites.

It's also not a surprise that the Masters of the Universe who like to dish the abuse out can't take it when it's leveled back at them - in this case, quite fairly.

As the Bloomberg-owned Businessweek reported on March 15, Goldman Sachs is scummy at best in it's business practices.

Nothing Smith said was out of line and hasn't been reported before about Goldman.

It wasn't like his letter has a margin of error in it, let alone a MOE of 87%.

Yet somehow Bloomberg and Blankfein and the crook running Morgan Stanley are offended by the truth showing up in the Times.

Mayor Bloomberg Visits Goldman To Lift Spirits Of Crooked Bankers

Is he the Mayor of New York City or the Mayor of Goldman Sachs?

On Wednesday, accomplished table tennis player Greg Smith announced in a New York Times Op-Ed that he was quitting his job at investment firm Goldman Sachs, because the firm’s “culture” has become, at some point in the last 12 years, “toxic.” Goldman Sachs responded with a spirited P.R. campaign in which it claimed that Smith was not actually a very important person to the firm, and a leaked memo from Lloyd Blankfein in which he argued that Goldman could not possibly be evil because a recent internal survey proved that Goldman employees enjoy working at Goldman.

Despite that very good spin, Goldman Sachs lost $2 billion worth of market value as its shares fell 3.4 in trading over the course of the day (“oh man, some guy says Goldman Sachs is evil? I HAD NO IDEA” — the market). Thankfully, one hero stands ready to defend Goldman Sachs from public scorn: New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Bloomberg actually visited Goldman Sachs headquarters today to personally cheer up very sad bankers. Bloomberg met with Goldman head Blankfein and various other members of the 1 percent, in order to reassure them that they are good people who do good work, even though that is a ridiculous delusion that only fellow members of that class still believe.

“The mayor stopped by to make clear that the company is a vital part of the city’s economy, and the kind of unfair attacks that we’re seeing can eventually hurt all New Yorkers,” Bloomberg’s spokesman said. Bloomberg is a billionaire mogul who owns a financial information company, so Goldman Sachs and other major financial institutions are a vital part of his economy.

Bloomberg continued to defend Goldman Sachs on his radio program:

“I don’t know whoever said what,” Bloomberg said on WOR Radio’s John Gambling Show.

“But even if it was said, it’s a few people and, you know, Goldman Sachs is a firm that’s been around for well over a hundred years and it’s a great firm.”

“It’s my job to stand up and support companies that are here in the city that bring us a tax base that employ our people and I’m going to do that.”

He called news coverage of the letter “ridiculous” and “not something we should do.”

There you have it - Bloomberg defends news organizations printing Teacher Data Reports that use a value-added measurement for evaluations with a maximum margin of error of 87% but says there's no way the NY Times should have published Smith's resignation letter and harsh criticism of Goldman or the media should have covered the story.

Alex Pareene at Salon points out that Bloomberg Views, the propaganda wing of Bloomberg News that hired Jonathan Alter and a bunch of other public relations specialists for the 1%, also defended Goldman Sachs while attacking Smith:

“Bloomberg View,” the opinion arm of Mr. Bloomberg’s media company that operates out of the offices of his charity, also defended Goldman in an unsigned editorial mocking Smith for failing to realize that Goldman exists to make money by any means necessary, which is obviously a self-evident Good Thing for The Economy and The Country. “If you want to dedicate your life to serving humanity, do not go to work for Goldman Sachs,” the Editors write. Then: “Goldman and other investment banks do perform an important role in our economy, and Goldman bankers — most of them, at least — can hold their heads up high.” I am sure they are relieved to hear they have Bloomberg View’s vote of confidence.

But Bloomberg Businessweek took Goldman to task for being, you know, crooks:

During the Great Depression, the then-small partnership on Pine Street became a target of national ridicule because of a scandal involving the Goldman Sachs Trading Corp., a publicly traded investment trust that blew up after the stock market crash of 1929.

For years, comedian Eddie Cantor, who had lost $100,000 and sued Goldman Sachs for $100 million, made the firm a running joke in his stand-up routines. In one of his bits, Cantor would appear onstage with a stooge who tried to squeeze juice from a dry lemon.

“Who are you?” Cantor would ask. Without missing a beat, the stooge would say, “The margin clerk for Goldman Sachs.”

Ever since being subjected to Cantor’s barbs, Goldman Sachs has cultivated an image not just as Wall Street’s preeminent firm but also as a paragon of financial virtue. But Goldman’s supposedly pristine reputation has always been more invented than earned, Bloomberg Businessweek reports in its March 19 issue.

Read the rest of the Bloomberg Businessweek article - it shows you exactly the kind of crooked culture Smith was talking about at Goldman.

Perhaps Mayor Bloomberg needs to go to the Bloomberg Businessweek offices and give a stern warning to the editors there to stop saying nasty things about poor Goldman Sachs and it's merry men.

Or maybe Bloomberg can mind his own business and stop defending crooked behavior on Wall Street.

Nah - that'll never happen.

Instead he'll launch unfair attacks on teachers by giving error-riddled test score data with a MOE of 87% to the media to publish and fire 50% of teachers and close as many schools as he can before he leaves office.

Yeah, that's Mayor Bloomberg all right - the Mayor of Goldman Sachs, the Mayor of the 1%.

Bash teachers, defend crooked bankers.

New Yorkers ought to start giving Bloomberg the approval they gave him after the Bloomberg Blizzard of 2010.

Or the greeting they gave him in Rockaway.

Or the one in Harlem on MLK Jr. Day.

Frankly, this arrogant oligarch deserves nothing less.

Teacher Saves Overdose Victim

One of the few positive stories about teachers in the press these days:

Brooklyn teacher Cassandra Byrd-Scolaro can offer help in reading, writing — and resuscitation.

The heroic Public School 17 instructor used her Wednesday lunch break to revive a suspected overdose victim after finding the lifeless woman inside a restaurant bathroom.

“She looked dead,” said Byrd-Scolaro, 34, who flew into action before emergency medical workers arrived. “She had no pulse. I immediately began giving her compressions.”

Three minutes later, with EMS workers on the scene, the unidentified woman was breathing and her heart was once again beating.

“We heard a gurgling,” the teacher recounted. “She was coming back.”

But the drug-addled victim didn’t use her second chance to say thank you: She instead flipped the bird at Byrd-Scolaro and the medical workers.

Most others gave the 10-year teaching veteran an A-plus for her life-saving effort inside the S&B Restaurant at 194 Bedford Ave. in Williamsburg.

Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott called Byrd-Scolaro to compliment her quickness under pressure and her ability to administer CPR.

And her principal, Dr. Robert Marchi, said he was hardly surprised to learn there was a hero on his staff.

“To me, she represents the very best in what a teacher ought to be,” Marchi said of Byrd-Scolaro. “I can’t think of another person you’d rather have at your side in distress than this lady.”
The fourth-grade teacher, one of 11 PS 17 staffers to volunteer for CPR training, proved that she was an attentive student during her first opportunity to use those skills.

“It was a great feeling,” she said before heading back to afternoon classes

Ah, yes - heroics from the 4th grade teacher at PS 17.

But before we definitely say that she "can offer help in reading, writing and resuscitation" - as the teacher-bashing Daily News said this morning - we need to look up her value-added score on her Teacher Data Report.

Because if that score is below average, the teacher-bashing New York Daily News normally would be calling for this teacher to be fired for being a "bad teacher."

Doesn't matter that the TDR's have a maximum margin of error in math of 75% and a maximum margin of error in ELA of 87%.

The total measure of a teacher these days is the TDR based upon student gains on test scores.

This is about accountability and performance, people - who cares if this woman saved somebody's life?

If she can't raise student test scores as measured by an error-riddled algorithm, she needs to be fired.

And now back to our regularly scheduled media teacher bashing - NY1's top education story is another tale of a DOE arrested for allegedly perpetrating a sex crime...

Why The Cuomo Teacher Evaluation System Will Result In The Firing Of Tens Of Thousands Of Excellent Teachers

Quite frankly, good teaching gets punished by value added measurements based upon test scores.

Or, as Michael Winerip put it, numbers lie.

Just wait until this system goes into effect statewide.

Cuomo calls it "scientific" and "objective."

It will be anything but.

A staff member for a state senator I spoke to last week told me she hopes that after a year or two, the public will see the new evaluation system for the madness it is and call for it to be dismantled.

I hope for that too.

But I also hope that the governor who put this into place, along with the NYSED Commissioner and Regents Chancellor, are held "accountable" for the nightmare to come.

And made no mistake, no matter what Leo Casey says, this is going to be a nightmare that will result in tens of thousands of excellent teachers being fired.

NY Post Goes After Celebrity Charter School Teacher

The NY Post took a break from beating up on unionized New York City public school teachers at traditional public schools over the error-laden Teacher Data Reports to take aim at a famous charter school teacher working at a famous charter school run by an even more famous (or infamous) charter school operator/huckster:

She has appeared on “60 Minutes,” starred in the documentary “American Teacher” — and makes $125,000 at an unusual Washington Heights charter school.

But celebrity teacher Rhena Jasey, 32, scored a low 18 — on a scale of 0 to 100 — in the recently released Department of Education teacher ratings.

Jasey, a 32-year-old Harvard grad, works at The Equity Project, a publicly funded but privately run charter school that has garnered nationwide attention for its huge teacher salaries — $125,000 a year, plus performance bonuses up to $25,000.

That’s well above the DOE’s top salary to its most educated and veteran teachers — $100,049. But at The Equity Project, teachers don’t get tenure, and can be fired on the spot if they don’t measure up.

It’s a closely watched educational experiment.

“If you want to attract and retain talent, you have to pay for it,” founder and principal Zeke Vanderhoek, a Yale grad who was featured in The New York Times before his school opened and soon after, told “60 Minutes."

So how is Vanderhoek's charter school experiment going?

Not so well:

So far, results at the 480-student middle school have fallen short compared to other district schools, with 31 percent of TEP’s fifth-graders passing state tests.

And how is Vanderhoek, who dealt quite well with the positive press about his Equity Project in the past, dealing with the negative press now?

Not so well with that either:

Vanderhoek refused to speak to The Post, and screamed at a reporter who visited the Audubon Avenue school Friday.

He also would not discuss Jasey, saying in an e-mail, “I do not publicly comment on the specific data reports of any individual teacher.”

Ah, how the tables have turned for this charter school entrepreneur who never misses an opportunity to point out how "bad" the traditional public school system is and uses test score data to back up his point but doesn't want to defend his own performance or the performance of his teachers using that same data set.

In fact, Vanderhoek told the Post reporter through email that he rejects the Teacher Data Reports as reductionist:

Vanderhoek said his teachers are judged on student data and their work, classroom observations and other factors.

“We believe this comprehensive evaluation portfolio is a much more accurate picture of a teacher’s impact on student growth” than the DOE ratings, he said.

Hey, it's good to hear that Vanderhoek believes teachers ought to be judged by a criteria other than test scores.

Too bad he didn't tell that to "60 Minutes."

Too bad, too, that the fawning "60 Minutes" crew wasn't there the other day to capture Vanderhoek screaming at the Post reporter who had the audacity to ask Vanderhoek about his famed teacher's less-than-stellar Teacher Data Report.

As for Jasey, the famous teacher and Harvard grad, just the kind of person the education reformers want to bring into the public school system, a certified member of the "Best and Brightest," how did she handle the scrutiny over her TDR's?

Sigh - not so well:

Jasey’s score of 18 for fifth-grade math in 2009-10 had a range of error placing her between 4 and 32. She did not return messages seeking comment

Ah, yes - here is a certified member of the Best and Brightest, a woman who relished the spotlight in American Teacher, who now won't return comment to the press when questioned about her TDR.

Too bad the fawning "60 Minutes" crew wasn't there to capture that too.

What Jasey should have done is taken the reporter's call and told her what jive the Teacher Data Reports are, what jive basing a teacher's evaluation on student test scores is.

She has had a national platform in a movie narrated by Matt Damon, she works at a school with notoriety even outside the education world

And it's not like she's been shy about the spotlight before.

In fact, she seems to seek it out.

This was a teachable moment for us all, when a member of the certified Best and Brightest with a penchant for the spotlight could have put to rest the notion that value-added measurements of high stakes standardized tests correlate to teacher quality.

She could have used her own TDR as evidence.

Instead she chose to hide out in her apartment.

But that is often the way with these reformy folks, who love the spotlight and the glory when the press is fawning over them but just don't have the courage to answer the really tough questions when their own records are scrutinized.

The Unbearable Randomness Of VAM

GF Brandenburg does a great job of succinctly summing up Gary Rubenstein's two part analysis of the value-added measurements that were used in the Teacher Data Reports:

He discovered several very important things:

(1) There is almost no correlation between a teacher’s score in 2009 to that for the following year.

(2) There is almost no correlation between a teacher’s score when teaching math and when teaching reading – to the same kids, the same year, and in the same elementary class.

(3) There is almost no correlation between a teacher’s score when teaching different grade levels of the same subject (i.e., Math 6 versus Math 7, and so on).

In other words, the Value Added Methodology is very close to being a true random number generator — which would be great if we were playing some sort of fantasy role-playing game or a board game like Monopoly or Yahtzee. But it’s an utterly ridiculous way to run a school system and to evaluate teachers.

I highly recommend reading his two blogs on this topic, which are here (for the first part) and here (for the second part).

After you read them, you need to pass the word (email, word of mouth, twitter, Like, facebook, whatever).

We need to kill this value-added mysticism and drive a special wooden stake through its evil, twisted heart.

The NY Times reports that the VAM rankings released for charter school teachers yesterday had an even higher margin of error than the ones released for traditional public school teachers last Friday.

Nothing like using an evaluation system with a maximum margin of error of 75% in math and a maximum margin of error of 87% in English to publicly humiliate teachers.

Of course the Mayor of Money says he has no problem with this - no evaluation system is perfect, but we need to evaluate teachers, this is the best we can do, and the data must be made public.

Would Bloomberg trust a political poll with a MOE of 87%?

Would Bloomberg trust a company that had a 75% MOE on its reported earnings?

Nope - but he trusts an eval system with that kind of MOE.

It's time to send the Little Autocrat back to Bermuda and take away his control of the NYC school system.

Seriously - he's not trying to improve public schools.

He's trying to destroy them - and teachers too.

If Merryl Tisch Is For It, It Must Be Bad

The Wall Street Journal reports that Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch wants to shield the new teacher evaluations New York State will be using next year from disclosure to the press:

As New York City parents and teachers struggled Monday to make sense of recently published schoolteacher rankings, education officials considered whether future releases should be illegal to protect a fragile truce on a new statewide system.

Legal experts said a series of court rulings have made it increasingly clear that statistics-based portions of teacher evaluations are public information, unlike those of police officers, firefighters and other public workers specifically protected under state law.

Only a change in law, experts said, would change that. Shielding teacher rankings from public view is likely to become a new pressure point in the debate over how to measure the effectiveness of teachers, lawmakers and officials said Monday.

Merryl Tisch, chancellor of the New York State Board of Regents, which sets education policy, said that while she backs using tests scores to hold teachers accountable, she would support changing state law to hide their rankings from public view.

"If that's what it's going to take, I think that we have to really consider a remedy here," Ms. Tisch said.

You'll recall Tisch, along with other so-called education reformers like Bill Gates, Michelle Rhee and Wendy Kopp, was against the publication of the Teacher Data Reports in New York City.

Why were all these reformers against the publication of the TDR's?

Did they want to shield teachers from publication humiliation?

Unlikely - Gates has made his philanthropy bones demonizing teachers as THE problem in public education and Merryl Tisch said late least year that the public hates teachers but once a scientific, objective teacher evaluation law was put into place, they wouldn't dislike them so much.

You know, like the one with the maximum margin of error of 87% in English and 75% in math that the city used for 4th-8th ELA and math teachers.

Never mind that poll after poll shows the public actually likes and respects teachers (here is the latest one) - in Tisch's mind, teachers suck, many need to be fired and an evaluation based upon a flawed VAM model is the way to get this goal accomplished.

So no wonder she wants to shield the new teacher evaluations from public disclosure.

Because it has been public disclosure of the VAM used in the Teacher Data Reports that has even parents who share the view that teachers should be held accountable by using test scores wondering if evaluations based upon test scores makes any sense:

How useful are the city’s newly released teacher-evaluation scores? Let’s say you’re a hypothetical parent—maybe me. You go to the Times’ summation of the ratings for your child’s school, and find that they look pretty bad. In English, none of the teachers managed to score above average; only a small minority of the math teachers did. A teacher your child loves and seems to be learning a lot from was in the high single digits, percentile-wise. This is surprising, if not alarming, because your child’s school, as evidenced by a brutal middle-school admissions process, is one of the more highly regarded in Manhattan, a reputation that is backed up by other statistics. Its scores on the state English and math tests are well above average; so are its admissions to specialized high schools. On the city’s other arcane customized statistical product, the school report card, it has received an A five years in a row. The city just gave your child’s principal a twenty-five-thousand-dollar performance bonus. If you believe in statistics, you are presented with a terrific school with terrible teachers—except that the importance of teachers is what underlies this whole exercise and, as far as your amateur eye can tell, has been a key part of its success. You also learn that there are similar contradictory numbers at other good—or is that “good”—schools, including the elementary school your child just graduated from, toward which you feel unmitigated gratitude. You might be a parent who really does believe that tests are meaningful, and knows for a fact that teachers are. And then you’re just confused.

Look a little further and you’ll find a Times article—maybe it’s about your child’s own school, and a teacher in an upper grade there who, once you read about what she does for her students, many of whom have gone on to great high schools, you feel your own child would be lucky to have. She’s the subject of an article, though, because she’s probably going to be denied tenure and is thinking of leaving teaching: she has been statistically designated as being in the lowest seven per cent of teachers, according to the ratings. Why? The Times throws up its hands, referring to a formula that turns on what students are expected to do, involving thirty-two variables “plugged into a statistical model that looks like one of those equations that in ‘Good Will Hunting’ only Matt Damon was capable of solving.”

That formula, it turns out, is especially bad at dealing with both terrific and terrible:

The city acknowledged that the model was “too sensitive” among teachers whose students did either very well or very poorly. That lesson was shared with schools and the state “as it creates a new model for teacher evaluations,” said Matthew Mittenthal, an Education Department spokesman.

So should we make choices based on the current model or not? The city already does, in terms of tenure. The ratings were released as part of a lawsuit, but with what was reportedly the Bloomberg Administration’s tacit encouragement. Teachers ought to be held accountable. I went to a public elementary school in Brooklyn where I had a third-grade teacher who kept the shades drawn and had us fill the time coloring things in, as she sat at her desk in some sort of jittery daze; she should have been fired, just as the first-grade teacher who encouraged me should, in my book, have been given not only bonuses but baskets of flowers. And statistics are great, if they make sense. They are powerful both politically and rhetorically; if the city is going to play this game, it has to do a lot better. Otherwise, it is going to lose even the parents who share its goals.

So if even parents who like the idea of using test scores to "hold teachers accountable" are starting to rethink their support of that position, you can bet how parents who do not support using test scores to grade teachers are going to feel about the issue.

The reformers are afraid the TDR publication has torn back the curtain on the mess that is VAM and given the opposition some very powerful ammunition in the fight to prove using VAM to grade individual teachers is crap.

No wonder Merryl Tisch is now calling for the new evaluations - 40% of which will be tied to state and local tests evaluated through different value-added measurements - to be hidden from public view.

Clearly Ms. Tisch, who never met a teacher she didn't want to bash, isn't concerned for the reputations or feelings of teachers or she wouldn't say the insulting things she says about teachers on a regular basis.

So the motivation is more devious.

Simply put, she wants to hide just how error-riddled the new statewide evaluation system is going to be and what better way to do that than make it unFOILable.

In the end, I don't want my evaluation to show up in the NY Post every year, but I also don't want the NYSED, the Regents, and the NYCDOE to be able to do their value-added machinations in the dark away from public view.

Because you can bet a mayor who says he wants to fire 50% of teachers and a Regents Chancellor who thinks the public hates teachers despite a multitude of evidence that they actually like teachers are going to try and rig the evaluation system to scapegoat teachers and fire as many as they can.

So I'm torn on this.

And the thing that keeps coming back to my mind is, if Merryl Tisch and Bill Gates are for something, it must be really, really bad...

Mulgrew Needs To Withdraw The Agreement The NYSUT/UFT Made With The State

The Times takes a look at the fallout from the publication of the Teacher Data Reports and comes to this conclusion - Mulgrew must either justify his support for the new state evaluation system that is just like the one the city used for the TDR's or withdraw his support for it:

In the days leading up to the release of ratings for thousands of New York City public-school teachers on Friday, hundreds of e-mails poured into the in-box of Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers.

“Enough of cooperation,” one member of the union wrote to his leader. Others prodded Mr. Mulgrew to stand up against Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, describing him as “untrustworthy,” in what he said was a call to arms of unparalleled intensity.

“How many times do we have to get kicked in the teeth before we realize we can’t work with these people?” John Elfrank-Dana, a union chapter leader at Murry Bergtraum High School in Lower Manhattan, asked during an interview, echoing what many of his fellow teachers have said in recent days on Twitter and on various blogs.

Mr. Mulgrew and his comrades had fought for more than a year to block release of the ratings, known as teacher data reports, which try to calculate how much value individual teachers add by predicting their students’ test scores and then measuring how much they exceed or fall short of those expectations. But the legal defeat a court dealt the union, by green-lighting the release, may yet be a political victory for the union — by galvanizing members and mobilizing allies on the left, including the Occupy movement and Change.org, through which scores of people signed petitions and sent letters to news organizations last week protesting the publication of the ratings.

...

In New York, the state’s new evaluation system would use similar measures to calculate at least 20 percent of a teacher’s score; it took more than a year of fighting in court and at the negotiating table for state officials and union leaders to agree on the value-added weight. Mr. Cuomo had to intervene, and he ended up drafting Mr. Mulgrew to help bridge the differences between both sides.

When the deal was announced in Albany on Feb. 16, praise for Mr. Cuomo came from all corners, including Mr. Mulgrew and some of the same mayoral hopefuls who are now criticizing the rankings’ release.

Now, amid the controversy of last week, more questions are stirring about the reliability of the new system, which was written into Mr. Cuomo’s budget but still has to be signed into law.

Merryl H. Tisch, chancellor of the Board of Regents, said publication made it “more complicated to go back and negotiate at the local level,” a requirement for the new system’s adoption statewide. Mr. Mulgrew’s predecessor, Randi Weingarten, who is now president of the American Federation of Teachers, said it “couldn’t have come at a worse time.”

The outcome largely depends on Mr. Mulgrew’s next move. He will have to either figure out a way to justify his support for the new system to the union’s angry membership, or withdraw it.

You know where I stand on this. Indeed, you know where I stood before the union agreed to the new eval system on February 16.

VAM is crap.

The evaluation system the state put into motion is a nightmare, the extent of which will become apparent verym very soon.

Any evaluation system that relies on adding 20+ standardized tests a year to each grade so that students do nothing but either prep for tests or take tests and evaluates teachers using a value-added score derived from those scores with large margins of error and wide swings in variability is damaging to children, teachers and schools.

I criticized Mulgrew last week for fighting the release of the TDR's even as he was supporting the development of a similar eval system for the whole state.

Mulgrew has already admitted he doesn't have confidence that the state VAM for the new eval system is going to be any more reliable than the city VAM.

Now I call for Mulgrew at the UFT and Iannuzzi at the NYSUT to withdraw their support for the new system.

The publication of the TDR's shows the reformers cannot be trust to keep their promises, but even more importantly, the publication of the TDR's shows what a load of garbage VAM is and gives a glimpse into the future if the state goes ahead with the new evaluation system.

A Question For Teachers

Carol Corbett Burris asks it at The Answer Sheet:

Should my professional work be reduced to a number that is public and thus will affect my relationship with my community, students and their families?

This is exactly what the new evaluation law in New York State does:

The reality is that the release of teacher scores based in student test data will exacerbate all of the bad consequences of using test scores to evaluate teachers. Teachers will be even more likely to teach to the test, to resent uncooperative students, and to see fellow teachers as rivals not colleagues. They will hesitate to take on student teachers, who might depress their score. (This is already being reported by some Long Island schools of education). They will be confused as their scores go up and down each year, even as those teachers work harder and harder to prepare students for tests. For evidence regarding the unreliability of VAM scores, see here.

...

I could present other examples but there is no need to depress the reader further. There is every reason, however, for the educators of the nation to stand up and say “no more.” No more to systems that are planes being built in the air with parachutes for the builders but not for the child inside. No more to evaluation systems created by economists that result in the public ridicule of teachers. No more to systems which in any manner or part place teachers on a bell curve and rank them by student scores.

Indeed.

Unfortunately the momentum of this teacher evaluation plane that is being built in the air is too strong for this to be stopped.

My feeling is, this system will come to fruition and will play out in New York State for a number of years before it is changed.

Just as it wasn't until the TDR's were publishing that the public got a glimpse into the unreliable nonsense that is VAM, it won't be until we get the stories of teachers going from 87th percentile one year to 7th percentile the next year to 75 percentile the year after that people may come to realize VAM used on individual teachers is subject to wide swings in variability and therefore mostly useless.

It won't be until we get stories of the 21 new city and state tests added to the curriculum that turn schools into nothing but test prep and test-taking factories that the public will have to confront the madness of placing all of this emphasis on high stakes tests for teachers.

It won't be until teachers that parents know to be excellent are fired as "ineffective" that there will be political pressure from people to fight this nonsense and put some sensible and practical system into place.

Until then, I think we have some very dark, dark days to come.

And I think just as there were innocent people hurt by the publishing of the TDR's, there will be plenty of innocents harmed by Cuomo's "scientific" and "objective" evaluation system.

It would have been nice if the unions had called this system the crap it is and forced Cuomo to impose it, making Little Andy and the Regents and the NYSED have sole ownership of it.

But that hasn't happened.

Instead we have the UFT sending out Leo Casey to defend this piece of garbage and to attack principled opposition to it coming from principled people like Carol Corbett Burris and Diane Ravitch and Aaron Pallas.

And so the battle against this will have to be fought by the rank and file teacher, by the principals who have been at the barricades already fighting this mess, by the parents who now see the damage the new evaluation system brought to us by Obama, Duncan, Cuomo, Tisch, King, Gates, et al. is going to do their children and their schools.

No Wonder Reformers Like Gates, Kopp and Rhee Didn't Want The TDR's Released Publicly

Because they expose value added measurements for the jive they are:


You would get the same kind of rankings through a random sample.

Which is basically what these TDR's based upon value-added are.

Can't wait until we're all evaluated each year with this stuff.

The DOE Couldn't Wait To Release The TDR's

The Columbia Journalism Review dispenses with the lie that the DOE was forced to release the TDR's or that journalists had to publish this stuff:

Eleven New York City education reporters were huddling on e-mail last October 20, musing over ways to collectively pry a schedule of school closings out of a stubborn press office, when the chatter stopped cold. Word had filtered into their message bins that the city was about to release a set of spreadsheets showing performance scores for 12,000 of the city’s 80,000 teachers—names included. Few understood better than the beat reporters that this wonky-sounding database was a game changer.

The Los Angeles Times already had jolted newsrooms across the country back in August, when it published 6,000 public school teachers’ names next to its own performance calculations. New York education reporters, though, were considerably more reluctant to leap on this bandwagon. They found themselves with twenty-four hours to explain a complex and controversial statistical analysis, first to their editors and then to the public, while attempting to fend off the inevitable political and competitive pressure to print the names next to the numbers, something nearly every one of them opposed. “I stayed up all night kind of panicked,” said Lindsey Christ, the education reporter for the local NY1 television station, “writing a memo to everyone in the newsroom explaining what was coming and what was at stake.”

...

On October 20, reporters from the Times, the New York Post, the New York Daily News, The Wall Street Journal, GothamSchools.org, NY1 television, and WNYC public radio found themselves in an awkward spot. Some were so angry at what looked like a blatant attempt by the city to use reporters in its fight with the UFT that they quietly threatened to quit if their editors insisted on publishing names. Others were torn between the power of the data to inform—who are we to second guess readers’ ability to process all this complexity, they asked—and their power to distort. On top of all the other distortions, the skeptics pointed out, the tests used to calculate these evaluations had been found to be flawed. The state had been forced to recalibrate the results because the tests had become too easy to pass. The next day, reporters took a collective breath. The union filed suit in New York State Supreme Court, claiming the rankings were riddled with errors that would unfairly harm teachers. “Just because it’s a number,” the union’s lawyer, Charles Moerdler, argued later, “doesn’t mean it’s suddenly objective.” Nothing would be released until the case was settled.

The delay allowed time for news organizations to compare notes. On Thursday evening, October 21, many of the reporters found themselves at a midtown Manhattan bar, sharing drinks with the same teachers union and Department of Education staff they had encountered in court earlier. The occasion was a farewell party for New York Times education reporter Jennifer Medina, who was moving to the paper’s Los Angeles bureau. A guest from the union parked his oversized protest poster—displaying the city’s confounding-looking mathematical formula for value-added numbers—against the bar. The debate from the courtroom spilled over into the festivities. School reps shrugged off complaints, reminding reporters it was they who had filed Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) requests for the data. Weren’t they in the business of printing information?

But the Department of Education had privately dropped hints to some reporters that their competitors had already submitted foils, some journalists countered. Suspicions had been raised when the department responded to the foils with uncharacteristic speed. Normally, such requests took months, with layers of negotiations, said Maura Walz, a reporter for GothamSchools.org, an independent online news service. This time, it was service with a smile. “The Department of Education wants this out,” said Ian Trontz, a New York Times metro editor. “They have a lot of faith in these reports. They believe they are trustworthy enough to educate and empower parents.”

Still, empowering parents had not seemed to be a top goal in the past for this administration. To the most skeptical reporters, it appeared as if the city was using them.

...

By December, frustration was mounting among the New York reporters as they waited for the State Supreme Court judge to decide whether the teacher data should be released or not. Reporters described “a spirited debate” that erupted during an off-the-record pizza and wine farewell party for outgoing Chancellor Klein before Christmas. Several in attendance said reporters bombarded him with pointed questions about the data, and Klein defended their release, for the sake of parents’ right to know.

Meanwhile, some reporters produced stories that attempted to add context to the controversy over the data. WNYC ran a story that examined what school districts in Denver, the District of Columbia, and Tennessee were doing with their value-added reports. Meredith Kolodner at the Daily News found a Manhattan middle school teacher who received a “zero” rating for her performance as an English teacher. The problem? Pamela Flanagan had never taught English, only math and science. Sharon Otterman of the Times wrote a thoughtful piece that dug into some of the research. She reported on a 2010 Mathematica Policy Research institute study that warned the city’s error rate was probably very large. That’s because the Department of Education was using only four years’ worth of students’ tests to analyze each teacher (Los Angeles used seven years’ worth). The study found that with only three years of data, the results were wrong 25 percent of the time. Parents and community members remained off the radar, however. In New York, 5,000 parents sent protest letters to the Department of Education in December opposing the release of the teacher-data reports. “We believe there must be meaningful teacher evaluations in our children’s schools,” said Martha Foote, a Brooklyn PS 321 parent, “but humiliating teachers with unreliable information will only hurt them.” Their letters did not make the news.

In November, reporters got another surprise. Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced he would replace Klein with Cathie Black, a Hearst magazine executive who had neither government service nor education experience. The New York Times went on a rare offensive against the mayor’s choice. Reporters continued to wait for the teachers union’s case to be resolved, but by this time, the Times, the Daily News, the New York Post, and WNYC had all decided to print the data when it does arrive—names included. (The Wall Street Journal refused to disclose its plans.)

On January 10, State Supreme Court Judge Cynthia Kern ruled in favor of the city and the news organizations, saying that “there is no requirement that data be reliable for it to be disclosed.” The union quickly filed an appeal. And at press time the data was stalled in court, again.

But as they waited, the news outlets were constructing databases to collect and report the numbers, which will be searchable by teacher’s name, by school, and by district. WNYC, for example, is building an interactive tool that will try to provide context for individual teachers and caveats for the wide swath of statistical errors.

It was probably inevitable. Journalists by instinct and trade are usually in the role of arguing for full disclosure of public information, fending off cautious government arguments for moderation and restraint, not the other way around. That instinct, and the pressure of competition, eventually won out. After all, the information is public, some reporters noted, and the city is using it for tenure decisions and evaluations. “It’s in the public interest,” said Trontz of The New York Times. “If we find the data is so completely botched, or riddled with errors that it would be unfair to release it, then we would have to think very long and hard about releasing it.”

The only holdout so far appears to be GothamSchools.org. “We plan to run a message saying why we are opposed to using the names,” said Elizabeth Green, editor of the site and author of a forthcoming book, Building a Better Teacher. “I want to treat schools with as much dignity as we treat restaurants. We don’t just splash grades A through F about restaurants in the paper without explanation. We do individual stories. To be fair.”

Perfection of the data is not the point, argues Arthur Browne, editorial page editor of the Daily News. The numbers, he said, will be “a net positive in terms of adding to the conversation about quality of teachers.” But what about the quality of that conversation?

In New York City, schools coverage has been largely tethered to the corporate reformers’ agenda—mostly to a measuring tool for firing incompetents. Inadequate classroom teachers are without question a serious problem, as are the rules and systems that protect them. But it’s unwise to think that weeding out the weak will address other pressing challenges facing teachers and schools and students across the city—the huge dropout rate among a rapidly growing Hispanic population, for one example, or the absence of good preschools for the rising number of poor children, or state budget cuts that are gutting core services to schools, and on and on.

I don’t happen to know any education reporters who were drawn to this complex beat in order to pore over spreadsheets, or score an interview with Bill Gates as an education expert. Most pine for more time to spend in classrooms, in science projects with preschoolers, in rapt discussions with teachers or principals or parents. Most are inspired by education’s expansive connections to culture, science, politics, and the world of ideas. The best education reporters are skilled at the invaluable art of connecting the dots for readers between policy from on high and reality in the classroom. Yet education reporters have increasingly found themselves herded toward a narrow agenda that reflects the corporate-style views of the new reformers, pulling them farther and farther away from the rich and messy heart and soul of education.

Unfortunately, most of the reporting these days has done the same for teaching by reinforcing the corporate education reform meme that the only things that matter in education are tests, test scores, and teacher ratings derived from those.

That reporters have named names in the paper using data that they know to be flawed and error-ridden is unconscionable and nothing they try and say in their defense can justify allowing themselves to be used in the political game the powers that be in both the private and government sector are playing to destroy teachers.

Sorry, doesn't matter how much "context" you give it.

These reporter KNEW the NYCDOE was using them.

And they allowed it anyway.

Unconscionable.

But they reached out and asked teachers to correct the record themselves.

Yeah, that should assuage their guilt.

Or cover them in a court of law.

Reminds me of a movie I saw once: