SUNY Professors: Cuomo, NYSED Setting Up Teachers To Fail

 From the Capital New York Education update:

UNION: CUOMO SABOTAGING PROSPECTIVE TEACHERS—Capital’s Jessica Bakeman: “A union representing SUNY professors, along with a member of the Board of Regents, accused Governor Andrew Cuomo and the State Education Department on Thursday of intentionally sabotaging prospective teachers in order to justify shutting down colleges’ teacher preparation programs.

“Fred Kowal, president of the United University Professions, which represents professors and other employees at SUNY’s 29 state-operated campuses, 17 of which have teacher preparation programs, [said,] ‘S.E.D.’s certification exams are invalid and deeply flawed ... There is a reason why: it was done on purpose. This is failure by design. Simply put, New York’s student teachers have been set up to fail by S.E.D. and Governor Cuomo. The governor has made no secret of the fact that he wants to close teacher preparation programs. Now he wants to justify that decision.’” [PRO] http://bit.ly/1AMjEOG

This is of course the strategy of the reform movement - to undercut what is "public" in order to eventually "privatize."  

To that end, they've created the public school crisis by cutting funding, increasing mandates, rolling out new standards before there was any curricula for them, tying those new standards to tests that nobody was prepared for, then setting the failure rates for those tests at 70% in order to be able to declare the public education system in "crisis" and in need of "dramatic reform."

Now they're aiming at teacher preparation programs too in order to prove those "failures" and impose "dramatic reform" on that sector of education.

It's a classic neoliberal blueprint being carried out here in New York State, one of the so-called "bluest" states in the nation, but really, just a playground for the Milton Friedman acolytes at this point.

Fifth Grader Reads Letter Addressed To NYSED Commissioner King

At a Common Core forum organized by State Senator Greg Ball:

Olivia Vataj, a fifth-grade student at Austin Road Elementary School in Mahopac, read out a letter addressed to King.


“Are you the musher and are the students just dogs pulling the sled, trying to get to the finish line of knowledge which we will never cross?” she asked. “We are too tired of the Common Core to keep pulling.”


“I have so many more things to say to you, but unfortunately I have to go back to the drudgery of my Common Core homework,” she added.

Olivia Vataj hit the nail right on the head - King along with Tisch and Cuomo see themselves as the "mushers" driving along the rest of we beasts of burden to their desired finish line.

But as Olivia also noted, that finish line is one we'll never cross because they'll keep moving it.

NYSED, Regents Set Students Up To Fail

No way to frame this other than, it was a set-up:

If students post low scores on the sections of the state reading test administered today, it might be in part because many could not finish in the allotted time.

...

“Crushed by time today. My students CAN do this level of work but many barely got to the essay or had to rush through it,” tweeted teacher Mike Locker, who estimated that only a few of his students completed the entire test.

“Perhaps 50% ‘finished’ the test, if you count rushing through an essay in ten minutes,” Locker wrote. “About 10% seemed to legitimately finish.”

...


Binh Thai, an eighth-grade teacher at University Neighborhood Middle School, reported that students he proctored were crying themselves. On Twitter, he wrote that the amount of work students were asked to do in 90 minutes was “absurd.”

Annie Annunziato estimated that 60 percent of her sixth-grade students completed their tests. For Emily Aptekar, another sixth-grade teacher, that rate was “a little more than half.” A “popular question” today, Aptekar wrote on Twitter, was “Will I have to repeat sixth grade if I didn’t finish my essay?” And another teacher, Katherine

Hernandez, wrote, “We had a lot of 8th graders doing the 10 minute rush essay.”

Gotham Schools reports Regents Chancellor Tisch heard directly from students who told her there wasn't enough time to complete the test.

She didn't apologize to students for this.

But why should she?

The lack of time, along with the ratcheted up difficulty, is all part of the plan to destroy schools.

When these scores come out and they fall dramatically because students couldn't finish the freaking tests, Tisch and her partner in education reform crime, John King, are going to use these scores to bludgeon "bad teachers" and "failing schools."

Meanwhile the fix was in here - they set the kids up to fail.

Not only didn't they provide the resources necessary for teachers to get their students ready for these exams, they created the exams so that half the students wouldn't be able to finish them.

Of course they'll never be called to account for the test development and time management because accountability is only for the little people, like students and teachers.

Big people like NYSED Commissioners and Regents Chancellors are never held accountable for mistakes, poor performance or, indeed, even criminal activity.

If they were, then the previous NYSED Commissioner David Steiner would be in jail for taking bribes from Pearson and the previous Regents Chancellor Richard Mills would be in jail for grade inflation and fraud.

Nope, this will all be the fault of "bad teachers" and "failing schools" - the self-fulfilling mythology narrative of the education reform movement.