Who Cares If The Data Is Reliable?

Norm at Ed Notes:

The Judge said: “there is no requirement that data be reliable for it to be disclosed."

What can you say? How long can the union hide from the fact that they made the deal that Klein reneged on. Crying about him being a "liar" will only carry them so far. The leadership will one day get its comeuppance.

Indeed, this is the fault of the UFT leadership. They think they're so clever walking the reform tightrope, giving enough to make the corporate "reformers" happy but holding back enough to try and keep an increasingly scared and angry UFT membership still on board.

But when you do a deal with the devil, as the data deal with Klein was, you often get burned,

The UFT got burned.

Now unreliable data with margins of error of 25%-35% will be in the papers with teachers' names next to it.

Good teachers will be slandered as "bad" and Oprah or some other corporate shill will start the call for their firing.

Hell, Oprah has her own network - she can devote hours to this garbage.

I had a meeting today to talk about how we are going to grade tomorrow's ELA Regents exam.

If Obama gets his way with NCLB, if that test happy deputy chancellor who loves tests so much gets his way, if the murderous mayor who refuses to hold himself accountable for murdering people during the Bloomberg Blizzard of 2010 gets his way, the ELA Regents exam for high school will be just one test among a battery of other tests.

Students will take ELA tests every few weeks.

Teachers will be held accountable for those tests.

The "data" will be published after every year in the papers.

Schools will be closed, charters will be opened, teachers will be fired and the final death knell of a unionized public school system will ring.

For some reason, perhaps courage, perhaps because they're corrupt, the UFT leadership refuses to fight this stuff in any effective way.

They prefer to agree to the "reforms" that have DANGER! DANGER! written all over them, then sue when the DOE or Bloomberg screws them over on the deal.

And so, you get the kind of results we got today.

The UFT will appeal this decision and they will lose that appeal.

Names and ratings will appear in the paper.

The Post and many other papers will do a hammer job on some teachers and call for them to be fired. They will name names and put pictures in the paper. Who knows, maybe somebody will get hurt out of this or killed, as happened in LA.

And Murdoch and Bloomberg and Klein and Black and Zuckerman and Obama and Duncan and Gates and Broad and all the rest of the corporate scum who are promoting this value-added stuff won't care one way or the other if somebody does get hurt.

They just want to reform the system into a privatized playground for their EMO buddies.

This is very bad day for educators.

But it is also an epiphany.

It is time to let go of any attachment we have to this job.

It is time that we start a new movement: the DON'T BE A TEACHER MOVEMENT.

Yes, I love teaching and yes, I enjoy teaching my students very, very much, but I am sick of being treated like some criminal by the press and the politicians.

Why do a job that exposes you to public ridicule, chastisement from the corporate putz in the White House and the corporate putz in City Hall, and humiliation from the corporate media?

Seriously, why would ANYBODY in their right mind sign on for that kind of stuff for the measly pay they offer?

Why would anybody sign on for that for any amount?

UFT Loses TDR Ruling

Another loss for the UFT:

New York City’s teachers union lost its suit to block the city from releasing 12,000 teachers’ ratings and names that, for years, have been kept confidential.

State Supreme Court Justice Cynthia Kern ruled today to deny the United Federation of Teachers’ request that the city redact teachers’ names from the Teacher Data Reports. The reports measure a teacher’s effectiveness based on how good she is at improving her students’ test scores from the beginning of the year to the end.

Underpinning the union’s lawsuit was the claim that releasing teachers’ ratings with their names included constituted an unlawful invasion of privacy.

A spokesman for the union said that the union’s lawyers are reviewing the decision.

Now the War on Teachers goes into full swing.

Duncan Calls For Naming Names

Now we know where Obama stands on naming names - he just sent his secretary of education out to say what the LA Times did by ranking teachers by how their students did on test scores should be done all across the nation:

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan will call for all states and school districts to make public whether their instructors are doing enough to raise students' test scores and to share other school-level information with parents, according to a text of a speech he is scheduled to make Wednesday.

"The truth is always hard to swallow, but it can only make us better, stronger and smarter," according to remarks he plans to deliver in Little Rock, Ark. "That's what accountability is all about — facing the truth and taking responsibility."

I love being lectured about accountability from an administration that hasn't held ANYBODY accountable for the mess they created with the HAMP mortgage relief program, hasn't held ANY of the Wall Street criminals who nearly brought the economy down accountable, hasn't held either Larry Summers or Timmeh Geithner accountable for the mess they have made of the economy, and didn't hold BP accountable for the mess they created in the Gulf.

You know what, Arne?

Fuck you.

And you know what President Obama?

Fuck you too.

You want to push for the disclosure of data?

How about this data?

Unemployment stands at 9.5%.

Unemployment is heading back to 10% before the end of the year.

You guys said it would never get above 8% if your stimulus bill was passed and only hit 9% even if it wasn't.

Underemployment is currently at 19%

Underemployment is expected to hit 25% by next year.

GDP for Q2 is expected to fall to 1.3%

GDP for Q3 is expected to be somewhere between 0% and 1.2%.

The economy is heading back into NEGATIVE GDP territory.

Foreclosures have increased every month for the last 13 months and more than 1 million homes will be repossessed by banks this year.

Your HAMP mortgage relief program made the problems WORSE.

Existing home sales fell the largest ever in the month of July.

Home values are dropping again.

Bankruptcy levels are the highest they have been since the bankruptcy laws were rewritten back in 2005.

The economic news these days is quite literally ALL BAD.

Well, not ALL the economic news is bad.

Barack Obama and family are on their SIXTH vacation this year.

But other than the vacationing Obama's the news is ALL bad.

So you want accountability from data disclosure?

Fine, there you go.

More accountability will be coming in November.

And the final measure of accountability will come in November 2012.

See you then, scumbags.

Naming Names

Create any old value-added assessment you want.

Use tests that were never meant to be used for value-added assessment.

Run the scores through a computer and come up with a list of "good teachers" and "bad teachers."

Publish those names in the LA Times on Sunday.

Have the Obama administration publicly endorse the publication through a statement by the Secretary of Education.

Never mind that the tests were not meant to judge teachers.

Never mind that they way the analysis was conducted leaves the end product open to a margin of error the size of Obama's ego.

They're going to go with this Naming Names strategy as a way to publicly shame "bad teachers" out of their jobs.

I think they hope parents will see the names in the paper and demand that the teachers be fired.

Or perhaps they hope parents will take justice into their own hands vigilante-style.

Because that's kind of what this is.

Okay, forget the "kind of" part.

That's what this is.

They publish the names of tax cheats in the papers.

They publish the names of deadbeat dads and parents not paying alimony and child support.

They publish the names of johns arrested for soliciting prostitutes.

They publish the names of people arrested for DWI.

They publish the names of sex offenders.

And now they publish the names of "bad teachers."

Who cares if the analysis used to come to those conclusions is flawed?

The point is to get "bad teachers" out of the system.

And now that the Obama administration has publicly endorsed this action, you can be sure we will see similar articles all around the country.

I bet the Wall Street Journal - exceedingly pro-charter and pro-"reform" since Rupert Murdoch took it over - is working on such an article about NYC right now.

Perhaps Zuckerman has his minions at either the Daily News or US News working on one (US News loves to publish lists - Best Colleges, Best Medical Schools, Best Graduation Schools...Worst Secondary School Teachers fits right in with the rest of the reductionism that passes for analysis at that rag.)

Whenever I have juniors or seniors talk about wanting to go into teaching these days, I always say you might want to rethink that career choice.

Teachers are under attack from all sides - from Bloomberg and Klein here at the city level to Paterson (and soon Cuomo) at the state level to Obama and Duncan at the federal level (and Bush and Spellings before them.)

Billionaire slave labor employers like Steve Jobs want to see us fired and the unions busted.

Predator philanthropists like Bill Gates and Eli Broad put up millions to bring that dream to fruition.

Hedge fund criminals like Whitney Tilson start "education reform" non-profits that work toward the hedge fundie wet dream of a completely privatized public school system open to billions of EMO profits.

And our unions, rather than fight these attacks with all they've got, either stick their heads in the sand and make believe they're not happening or actually collaborate and invite the enemy into the city (as Weingarten did by having Bill Gates speak at the AFT convention.)

These are bad times for the country at large.

The economy has been terrible and it's getting worse even as I write this post.

The unemployment rate is 9.5% and going higher by the end of the year.

The underemployment rate is 19% and going higher by the end of the year.

GDP is expected to slip to 1.2% or lower for Q2 and hover near 0% for the second half of the year.

Foreclosures have increased every month for the last thirteen months and with over a year's worth of housing inventory on the market and prices still needing to fall to get back to a historical home price/income ratio, the housing crisis is going to get worse before it gets better too.

What is being done about any of this?

Not much - other than to blame the public school system and public school teachers for not teaching the skills needed to survive this uber-corporate 21st century economy.

It's not our fault, of course.

The predator billionaires and hedge fund criminals run things on Wall Street and in Washington.

They steal as much as they can from the economy without putting anything back in the form of either investment or hiring.

They nearly brought about economic collapse in 2008 and rather than be punished for their crimes and hubris, they are bailed out by both Bush and Obama and allowed to continue to run the economy like a rigged casino.

And now, rather than just blame teachers for this mess they did NOT create, the powers that be have decided to name names and get some vigilante justice going.

Don't be surprised if that isn't the plan.

Do you think Michelle Rhee or Joel Klein would be sorry to see outraged parents take to a classroom to themselves "fire" a teacher rated "bad" by some newspaper through some jive value-added analysis story?

How about Duncan and Obama?

I don't know about you, but I could absolutely see Rhee shrugging if some crazy parent or parents, angry that their kid has been left back or is struggling below grade level, took to a classroom and punched some teacher exposed as "bad" by the local newspaper.

I could absolutely hear Rhee say "If bad teachers refuse to step down themselves and teachers unions try and protect bad teachers from firing, then maybe parents have to take action themselves."

The point, apparently, is just to get rid of "bad teachers."

Doesn't matter how you do it. Doesn't matter how you measure it.

Just that it happens.

These are bad times indeed.