Cuomo's Evaluation System - Nearly Everything's Prescribed In Law

Jessica Bakeman at Capital NY has a piece out this morning reporting that legislators claims that the Board of Regents and NYSED will have some latitude to set the new evaluation system is wrong - it's mostly prescribed and set in the budget:

ALBANY—To hear many lawmakers tell it, the big education-related news after last week's budget agreement between Governor Andrew Cuomo and the Legislature was the unprecedented role of state education officials in the implementation of a new teacher-evaluation system.

Evaluations would be left to the relatively apolitical professionals at the state Board of Regents and state education department. This would in turn address concerns—particularly among teachers—over the consequences of a grand bargain with Cuomo, who is pushing for more emphasis on testing and a more aggressive role for his office in setting school policy.

But that interpretation was premature, if not misleading: The ostensibly empowered education leaders don't know what power they'll have to influence the rating system, if they have any at all.

“We are going to look at the language very carefully and figure out what it all means,” Board of Regents chancellor Merryl Tisch told Capital last week. “The governor says it’s administrative. The Legislature says it’s a vast level of authority. Somewhere between the two of those, I’m sure, lies reality.”

Actually, no:

The budget, which included a new system for rating the performance of teachers and principals, does, in fact, task the state education commissioner with figuring out how to translate students’ scores on standardized tests into educators’ ratings on a scale of “ineffective,” “developing,” “effective” and ineffective”—a job the department is already doing under the current system. The law also directs the commissioner to determine how to weight the required and optional components of the rating system.

But how the two main measures of teacher performance, student test scores and classroom observations, are combined in order to yield an overall rating is strictly prescribed under the new state law. And in that regard, the claims by lawmakers, especially union-aligned Assembly Democrats, look like an attempt to distract from the more controversial aspects of the evaluation system that they had just affirmed.

The "Heavy Hearts Clubs" - Assembly Dems who passed the education bill with "heavy hearts" despite all the awful proposals in it - kept saying the Board of Regents and/or SED would have some say in how the evaluation system was developed.

But other than developing the growth scores for the testing component, developing the statewide "Student Learning Objectives" for teachers who don't teach subjects that end in state tests and figuring out how Cuomo's "matrix" comes together (test scores on one side, observations on the other), there isn't much either the Regents or SED can do to change the system according to the Bakeman article.

Perhaps that's just as well, considering the geniuses at the Board of Regents and SED were responsible for the miserable Common Core rollout that Cuomo himself criticized multiple times.

In any case, lawmakers were either misinformed or misinforming others when they made claims that the Regents and SED would have some latitude to develop the new evaluation system.

This system was developed by Cuomo's staff and it gives very little power to the Regents or SED to change much.

Cuomo won his budget battle over the evaluation system, that's for sure.

That said, he now will own this system, since his staff developed it and the Regents and SED have little say in changing it.

When it goes off the rails - and make no mistake, it will go off the rails sooner rather than later - Cuomo cannot come back and blame the Regents or SED for the problems.

Not that he won't try, but you can bet all the enemies he now has in Albany, from members of the legislature to members of the Board of Regents to SED, will push back and make him own it.

Certainly teachers and parents will.

Cuomo thinks he's very smart with how he played the budget, getting pretty much everything he wanted on education policy and sticking it to teachers and the teachers unions at the same time.

But he will come to rue to the day he got his way.

Every problem that arises because of this system will be his.

Every dollar that gets taken away from the classroom and put toward compliance will be because of him.

He will figure prominently in every future story that chronicles what a mess the new system is.

This is now the Andrew M. Cuomo teacher evaluation system through and through.

Add The SLO's And The City Tests To Next Year's Battery Of State Tests

A parent made the following comment on the Newsday article about the Opt Out movement:

My son gets almost 90's on every one of his "real" tests. He doesn't need to sit for 420 minutes of standardized testing in April, nor countless dozens of other hours for SLOs, benchmarks, field test questions and what every else they throw at these kids that is NOT used to determine a report card grade.

While outrage is beginning to grow over the state tests, let's not forget that this coming school year children may have to sit for city "assessments" as well as the state standardized tests.

The city "assessments" will be used to grade not children but their teachers, as required by APPR.

Not every school will be using the city "assessments."

Some may choose to develop their own "assessments" or may use some variable of the state tests that have not been used to calculate the state testing component of teacher evaluations.

But the point still stands: Students will be facing multiple standardized "assessments" in every grade in every subject so that their teachers can be evaluated per the new APPR system imposed by John King and hailed by Michael Mulgrew and the UFT.

If anything, the APPR insanity that requires teachers to be evaluated by both state measures and local measures adds strength to the Opt Out movement.

If parents are already upset over what the state has done to state testing regime, wait until they see city "assessments" added to the school year, along with the Pearson field testing, the state standardized tests, and the various other reformy measures like Student Learning Objectives (SLO's) that kids will be toiling away at not to improve their knowledge or skills but simply so their teachers can be evaluated and the NYSED and the Regents can expand their school privatization agenda.

How Long Will This Evaluation System Last?

James Eterno described King's imposed system as an incoherent bureaucratic mess and I think that's exactly right.

So much of this system is unworkable in practice and won't improve either teaching or learning.

Of course it's not meant to improve teaching and learning, it's meant to give NYC the power to fire as many teachers as they want as quickly as they want.

But I am not convinced that this will happen before the system collapses from unworkability and court challenges.

Will the VAM stand up to a court challenge?

Will the SLO's?

Will the way they've rigged the 100 point system for the overall APPR to make it almost impossible to be rated "highly effective" or "effective"?

Will allowing third graders to evaluate their teachers stand up to court scrutiny?

I'll admit, I'm not a lawyer, but I have a hard time seeing how something so convoluted and incoherent stands up to court challenges.

And there's the whole unworkability angle.

4-6 observations a year for every teacher using all 22 items on the Danielson rubric, with pre-and post-observation conferences.

How long does that kind of burn and churn system last before there's a mass exodus of administrators out of the system?

I know they want to fire teachers en masse, but where exactly are they going to get the hundreds of new administrators a year they're going to need after the current ones start walking away from the workload?

How about all the extra added paperwork teachers have to keep, the "artifacts" as King calls them, in order to prove they're not incompetent?

Most of the job next year will be collecting crap to play CYA with come evaluation-time.

Seriously, I have a difficult time seeing this piece of crap last more than a couple of years before it goes the way of the hipster goatee (oops - NYSED Commissioner/rookie teacher John King still wears one, doesn't he?)

Make no mistake, there will be plenty of careers and reputations destroyed before this thing falls apart under the weight of its own incoherence and unworkability.

But it will.

The arrogance of King, Tisch, Cuomo and the educrats in designing something so over-the-top and unworkable sows the seeds of the system's own destruction.