Cuomo's School Receivership Program Is "Stack Ranking" For Schools, Designed To Break Up The System

Fred LeBrun in the Times-Union dissects Cuomo's vaunted school receivership program:

In the Capital Region, only Albany's William S. Hackett Middle School is on the persistent list, but if a handful of schools in Albany, Troy, Schenectady and Amsterdam, including Albany High School, don't show appropriate progress, they will join Hackett next year.

What happens now for schools like Hackett is as complicated as directions to Atlantis, and about as reliable.

Albany school Superintendent Marguerite Vanden Wyngaard becomes the acting school receiver, with broad powers, for the next year. A required community engagement team composed of the principal, staff, teachers, parents and even students from Hackett will forward recommendations for improvements to the superintendent, who will use them to help create her intervention plan to turn the school around. The plan is due at State Ed for approval by the end of this month. Over the next year, the community team will look over her shoulder as the intervention plan unfolds.

In the meantime, the school receiver can do pretty much what she wants (with approval from State Ed): change the curriculum, replace teachers and administrators, increase salaries, reallocate the budget, expand the school day or year, turn Hackett into a community school, even convert to a charter school. Although there's enormous rigmarole attached to much of it, including going charter. Remember, the receiver in this case remains the superintendent for the rest of the district, so she is answerable for any wild and crazy ideas to the voters through the school board.

Anyway, to help start the process, Vanden Wyngaard can apply for a grant from a $75 million pot set up by the state, although she'll have plenty of competition from other "persistently struggling" school receivers in Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo, Yonkers, New York City and elsewhere. She has a year to do her turnaround. Or the hammer falls and we are off to Neverland.

Then the state would appoint an independent receiver who is answerable only to State Ed. At which time the process of community involvement, an intervention plan, and the rest are repeated, only now change is apt to be far more radical, with wholesale staff firings. An independent receiver can be a person from an approved list that doesn't yet exist, or an institution or charter school. Although charter schools upstate have been mostly a bust, as Albany well knows. Middle school charters in Albany could not save themselves, let alone others.

So. If you're getting the idea that this receivership idea seems like a plan designed to fail and thus prepare the way for school privatizers to make a bundle, move over.

For one thing, the state has yet to give school receivers a clear idea of what would constitute appropriate progress to avoid an independent receiver. Presumably, we'll know by the end of the month when intervention plans have to be approved. What is expected and how reasonable it is will answer a great deal.

Because just a year to show any marked improvement on any front for a school like Hackett, no matter how thoughtfully considered, broadly accepted by the community, or earnestly pursued, is absurd. Real change needs time for all stakeholders to become invested. Teachers at Hackett today are still complaining that attendance and discipline as major problems, just as it was when I substituted there, oh, a half century ago. These are, after all, manifestations of the poverty and despair underlying most of Hackett's problems; they don't go away. They are the community's problems, not just Hackett's.

The school can be taken over in a year if it doesn't "improve," but the state still hasn't explained what that "improvement" will look like.

Yeah, that's a plan designed to "fail" schools and hand them over to the privatizers, profiteers and/or charter operators.

LeBrun's writing about a school in Albany, but Mayor de Blasio and Chancellor Farina have a lot riding on this too, since the city has 62 schools in the receivership program, with six deemed "persistently struggling" and having only one year to improve (the seventh is already closing.)

As with Hackett, these schools don't know yet what will constitute "improvement," which is a problem since the deadline for that "improvement" is fast approaching.

The cynic in me wonders if a side benefit to declaring all these schools "failing" and handing them over to the privatizers, profiteers and/or charter operators isn't another opportunity for Governor Cuomo to declare his "friend" bill de Blasio a loser too.

Governor Cuomo promised the Daily News and a Forbes forum he would "break" the public school "monopoly" before his re-election in 2014 and it certainly looks like the receivership program is part of that plan.

After the state gets through privatizing these 144 schools, the next slate of so-called "struggling" schools will be added to the receivership list - this will be an ongoing program:

The program was one of several education reforms hammered out during budget negotiations this spring. Under the deal, schools are placed into two categories, “struggling schools,” those in the bottom 5 percent of schools in the state for three years, based on measures like test scores and graduation rates, and “persistently struggling schools,” which have been in that bracket since 2006.

What we have here is "stacking ranking" for schools, with the state playing rank and yank every year, adding schools to the privatization, er, receivership list, setting them up to "fail" and then handing them over to the privatizers, profiteers and/or charter operators.

Just as with stack ranking for employees, the program will disempower, demoralize and ultimately destroy the system (this is also the same rationale behind Cuomo's APPR teacher evaluation system, btw - ranking teachers every year and declaring 7% "ineffective" no matter what.)

Just ask Microsoft, which used stack ranking as its evaluation system for employees, how well that worked for them as Apple was kicking them to the wayside in competition.

But of course if you're Andrew Cuomo, you want to destroy the system - that's exactly what he promised to do in 2014 and that's the plan he's been carrying out since.

NY Times: APPR Teacher Evaluation System Complete Mess In NYC

Left another tweet for Sheriff Andy, this time with a link to a NY Times story chronicling the mess that it is his APPR teacher evaluation system:

@NYGovCuomo APPR eval system total madness. Time to change it or vote out pols who support it! http://t.co/BsOWZhNoeY
— realitybasededucator (@perdidostschool) December 23, 2013

On The Commons: Bll Gates Is Responsible For The Teacher Evaluation Mess

Nice post that puts all the pieces together - the VAM, the bell curve that ensures a certain number of "ineffectives" every year, how the new teacher evaluation systems are based on Microsoft's stack ranking system, how destructive stack ranking has been to Microsoft, how Microsoft just got rid of stack ranking because it is so destructive but how school districts all across the country are stuck with stack ranking for teacher evaluations:

Just as public school systems have widely adopted the Microsoft model in order to win the Race to the Top, it turns out that Microsoft now realizes that this model has pushed Microsoft itself into a Race to the Bottom.

 In a widely circulated 2012 article in Vanity award-winning reporter Fair Kurt Eichenwald concluded that stacked ranking “effectively crippled Microsoft’s ability to innovate. “Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees,” Eichenwald writes. “It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.”

This month Microsoft abandoned the hated system.

 On November 12 all Microsoft employees received a memo from Lisa Brummel, Executive Vice President for Human Resources announcing the company will be adopting “a fundamentally new approach to performance and development designed to promote new levels of teamwork and agility for breakthrough business impact.”

 Ms. Brummel listed four key elements in the company’s new policy.
 •More emphasis on teamwork and collaboration.
•More emphasis on employee growth and development.
•No more use of a Bell curve for evaluating employees.
•No more ratings of employees.

Sue Altman at EduShyster vividly sums up the frustration of a nation of educators at this new development. “So let me get this straight. The big business method of evaluation that now rules our schools is no longer the big business method of evaluation? And collaboration and teamwork, which have been abandoned by our schools in favor of the big business method of evaluation, is in?”

Big business can turn on a dime when the CEO orders it to do so. But changing policies embraced and internalized by dozens of states and thousands of public school districts will take far, far longer. Which means the legacy of Bill Gates will continue to handicap millions of students and hundreds of thousands of teachers even as the company Gates founded along with many other businesses, have thrown his pernicious performance model in the dustbin of history.

Once again, no accountability for the billionaire malanthropists who shove through their "innovations" and "solutions" to the ginned up "crisis" in public education in order to wreck the entire public school system and promote their free marketeer dream of so-called school choice, charterization and online schooling.

Amazon Does Stack Ranking Evaluations Too

The NY Times explains why Amazon is a nasty, nasty place to work:

But if Amazon aspired to reduce friction for customers, Mr. Stone suggests that it remained a high-friction place to work. He describes the in-house culture as “notoriously confrontational,” and writes that because managers in departments of 50 or more people are required to “top-grade” their subordinates along a curve (and dismiss the least effective performers), “many Amazon employees live in perpetual fear” of termination.

Nothing like having a job in a place where everyone is in "perpetual fear of termination.

This is exactly the kind of atmosphere that Gates, Bezos and these other corporate criminals/education reformers are bringing to schools.

Perpetual fear of termination - the 21st century disease brought to you by the corporate criminals.

Ironic thing is, it doesn't work for their own companies.

I used to buy lots of stuff from Amazon, as did my wife.

We both noticed more and more that items were coming damaged - torn books, broken cd cases, etc.

Doing a little research, I discovered that Amazon employees are timed on how many orders they fill per hour.

They must reach their quota on a consistent basis or they risk termination.

It doesn't take a genius to see that because of this evaluation system, the employees are forced to run around, throw items into a box, get the box ready for shipping, then head back to the next order so that they can meet their hourly quota in a mad frenzy of never-ending activity.

Is that when the items are getting damaged?  Or ar they damaged beforehand?

Hard to say without access to the Amazon warehouses, but clearly this is a company that doesn't give a whit how it treats its employees and increasingly it is a company that doesn't give a whit how it treats it's customers.

After calling and complaining about damaged items and being told we have to send them back in order to get new items, my wife and I decided to stop ordering from Amazon.

I try and use Ebay sellers for my music purchases, she uses B&N for book purchases.

Bezos won't care about losing two customers but I bet we're not the only two who have had this experience and as Amazon puts more and more companies out of business and becomes the sole seller of items like music cds and dvds, they will give a whit less and less in how they treat their customers.

It all goes back to how they treat their employees - any company that prides itself on having employees in "perpetual fear of termination" is an evil company owned by an evil man and frankly, not enough bad stuff can happen to that company.

It's hard to find other retailers these days for purchases like books and music cds, but I am trying to do my best to order as little as possibel from Amazon, to purchase from smaller sellers and local merchants even if that means paying more.

Bill Gates Is Wrong - We Do Know Whether His Reforms Will Work

Valerie Strauss in the Washington Post:

“It would be great if our education stuff worked, but that we won’t know for probably a decade.”

That’s what Bill Gates said on Sept. 21 (see video below) about the billions of dollars his foundation has plowed into education reform during a nearly hour-long interview he gave at Harvard University. He repeated the “we don’t know if it will work” refrain about his reform efforts a few days later during a panel discussion at the Clinton Global Initiative.

Hmmm. Teachers around the country are saddled every single year with teacher evaluation systems that his foundation has funded, based on no record of success and highly questionable “research.” And now Gates says he won’t know if the reforms he is funding will work for another decade. But teachers can lose their jobs now because of reforms he is funding.

In the past he sounded pretty sure of what he was doing. In this 2011 oped in The Washington Post, he wrote:

What should policymakers do? One approach is to get more students in front of top teachers by identifying the top 25 percent of teachers and asking them to take on four or five more students.

Actually, that’s not an approach any educator I know would think is a good idea, but Gates had decided that class size doesn’t really matter. Earlier, he had put some $2 billion into forming small schools out of large high schools, on the theory that small schools would better serve students. When the initiative didn’t work out as he hoped, he moved on by spending hundreds of millions of dollars on teacher evaluation systems that in part linked teacher assessments to student standardized test scores, an approach that many assessment experts have warned against.

Now he says that the success of his experiments on public education won’t be known for a decade, but we already know that evaluating teachers by student test scores is a bad idea.

These same rank and yank evaluation systems Gates helped bring to public education systems have not worked when Microsoft used them.

As this Slate article reported, that evaluation system very well may have been the biggest thing to do Microsoft in as a company.

And yet this arrogant Gates is insistent that he is going to take the same evaluation system that split Microsoft apart, with different departements operating as private fiefdoms at war with each other and employees in the same department sticking knives in each other's backs so they won't end up at the bottom of the stack ranking, and brought it to public education.

And now he admits, "Yeah, we need about 10 years to see if it works or not..."

It's Time For Bill Gates To Get Out Of His Public Education Work And Go Save Microsoft

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced his retirement on Friday, though it seems he was pushed from the company for his many failures:

The company portrayed the departure as voluntary, but it comes amid rising complaints among investors and a month after a disappointing earnings report sent the company’s share price down by 11 percent.

Among the problems was a $900 million write-off related to poor sales of the Surface tablet computer, praised by reviewers but largely ignored by consumers. Microsoft has struggled as well with the rollout of the Windows Phone and its latest PC operating system, Windows 8.

...

 The product misfires, analysts say, fell into a familiar pattern, with Microsoft moving into markets after other companies already had established loyalty among customers. Its Zune music player lost out to Apple’s iPod. The Windows line of phones has made little dent in a market dominated by the iPhone and several Android devices. Microsoft’s Bing search engine lags far behind Google

Not exactly a track record of accomplishments to be proud of, is it?

No wonder Wall Street cheered Ballmer's retirement announcement by bidding up the stock 7 percent.

Just how did Microsoft get to be in such trouble?

Let's start and end with how the company is set up because therein lies many of their problems.

Microsoft is famous for having its divisions set up as independent fiefdoms at war with each other:

Organizationally, Microsoft has suffered from years of operating as a collection of silo-like divisions — some would say warring fiefdoms. The company has come under fire for failing both to develop fresh, creative products and to successfully follow others into exciting new markets.

Because divisions within the company would try and undercut other divisions in the company to protect their own turf, Microsoft was unable to capitalize on any of these exciting new markets.

For example, Microsoft had actually developed a tablet before Apple brought the iPad to market, but fighting within the company put that tablet work on hold until well after the iPad grabbed a huge part of the market share.  By the time Microsoft released its Surface tablet this year, there was little market left to grab and the move was a failure.

In addition to divisions set up as independent fiefdoms at war with each other, employees within divisions are also at war with each other under the infamous Microsoft rank-and-yank employee evaluation system:

At the center of the cultural problems was a management system called “stack ranking.” Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees. The system—also referred to as “the performance model,” “the bell curve,” or just “the employee review”—has, with certain variations over the years, worked like this: every unit was forced to declare a certain percentage of employees as top performers, then good performers, then average, then below average, then poor. …

For that reason, executives said, a lot of Microsoft superstars did everything they could to avoid working alongside other top-notch developers, out of fear that they would be hurt in the rankings. And the reviews had real-world consequences: those at the top received bonuses and promotions; those at the bottom usually received no cash or were shown the door. …

“The behavior this engenders, people do everything they can to stay out of the bottom bucket,” one Microsoft engineer said. “People responsible for features will openly sabotage other people’s efforts. One of the most valuable things I learned was to give the appearance of being courteous while withholding just enough information from colleagues to ensure they didn’t get ahead of me on the rankings.” Worse, because the reviews came every six months, employees and their supervisors—who were also ranked—focused on their short-term performance, rather than on longer efforts to innovate. …

Will Oremus at Slate notes how other companies have also used rank-and-yank systems to poisonous effect but eventually shelved those systems while Microsoft has stuck with it:

Microsoft wasn’t the first company to adopt this sort of ranking system. It was actually popularized by Jack Welch at GE, where it was known as “rank and yank.” Welch defended the practice to the Wall Street Journal in a January 2012 article, saying, “This is not some mean system—this is the kindest form of management. [Low performers] are given a chance to improve, and if they don't in a year or so, you move them out. "

As the Journal and others have noted, what seemed to work for Welch—for a time, anyway—has produced some ugly results elsewhere. Even GE phased the system out following Welch’s departure. But in an interview with the Seattle Times just last month, Ballmer indicate that he was sticking with it. From the Seattle Times:

Q: A lot of people have slammed Microsoft’s stack ranking review system as contributing to a noncollaborative atmosphere. Is the kind of cultural change you want to effect possible with that stacked ranking system still in place?

A: We’re doing our performance reviews now. We’re finishing up our year (and there are) no changes to—no—I’ll say minor changes to our system. I think everybody wants to work in a high-performance culture where we reward people who are doing fantastic work, and we help people who are having a hard time find something else to do. Now, whether our existing performance-management system needs to change to meet the goal of fostering collaboration is something that Lisa Brummel [head of human resources] would take up.

This rank-and-yank system, btw, has been brought to public education via teacher evaluation systems promoted by old Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, so it seems that not only is Microsoft going to stick with a poisonous ranking system that has driven the company onto the rocks, the founder of the company is looking to take that system elsewhere and destroy even more with it.

Speaking of Mr. Gates, some are calling for Bill to return to his old company and right the sinking ship:

Jack Gold, a tech analyst at Gold Associates, is among many who believe Microsoft needs the type of jolt that can best be provided by someone outside of the company.

"They need a proven innovator with a track record of turning around big, sometimes unwieldy companies," says Gold, who suggests poaching someone from Google. If that doesn't work out, perhaps Microsoft can reach back into its recent past, he says.

"Maybe it's time," Gold says, "for Bill Gates to come back on a temporary basis."

I concur - it's time for Bill Gates to get out of public education "malanthropy" work, get out of bringing GMO's to the world, get out of cloud whitening to save the environment from global warming and galvanic skin bracelets to measure teacher effectiveness and get back to showing the world what a ruthless genius he is at navigating the technology industry waters.

Even better, since he's been promoting rank-and-yank teacher effectiveness evaluation systems all over the country, he can show us how it's done by continuing to use this poisonous ranking system at Microsoft while trying to right his sinking ship.

If Big Bill can fix Microsoft while continuing to rank employees on a bell curve and having the bottom 10% fired every year, then surely pubic school systems can do the same.

So go back to the old company, Bill, and show us all how it's done.

It's time.