Chancellor Farina Knows Teachers' Evaluation Ratings Are In Jeopardy At "Struggling" Schools

Eliza Shapiro at Capital NY sat in on a meeting between NYCDOE Chancellor Farina and the superintendent of District 8, Karen Ames.

Here's an interesting bit of that report::

30 percent of students in one of the Renewal Schools are in temporary housing. Fariña closed her eyes and inhaled sharply when Ames described the school’s challenges, and said she wanted to put an “asterisk” next to city schools with extremely high levels of student poverty and homelessness.

Fariña also said she wants to establish a so-called asterisk for highly effective teachers who move to Renewal Schools. While Fariña said “it’s been easier to recruit teachers to Renewals than ever” because of strong professional development and a sense of mission, she’s concerned that effective teachers’ ratings will drop when they move from high-achieving schools to struggling ones.

Fariña said she was planning to follow one teacher who was leaving a high-performing school to teach at a Renewal School in Ames’ Bronx district.

“She’s going to do the same assessments, she’s going to do everything she did before,” Fariña said. “But the scores are only going to go to a certain point. How is that going to affect her rating? It’s not going to make her any less of a good teacher.”

Here's a question I have:

If "effective" teachers should get asterisks next to their names because they've chosen to work in a school with high poverty, high homelessness demographics next year, is it just possible that those "ineffective" or "developing" teachers that are already there working in that school might face the same challenges the new "effective" teachers are going to face next year and deserve asterisks too?

The dirty secret of education reform is that the problems in schools and districts with high poverty/high homelessness demographics are NOT caused by "bad teachers" - they're caused by all the effects that poverty has on the psychological, emotional, physical and social development of the children in those schools and districts.

Does that mean there's not some mismanagement in schools and/or districts that are "struggling"?

Of course not.

To that end, Shapiro reports that "Fariña asked Ames to outline consistency goals for all the schools in her district by October" to address the hodgepodge of programs that may not be the most effective way to educate children in the district.

But the truth is that most of the problem are not due to mismanagement, a lack of "consistency goals," or a plethora of "ineffective" teachers at those schools/districts, they're due to the effects of what Farina winced at - high rates of poverty and high rates of homelessness.

If Farina thinks the new "effective" teachers coming in to "struggling" schools deserve asterisks next to their names, then she also knows that a hell of a lot of the teachers already there deserve the same benefit of the doubt.

Cuomo Attempts To Place Blame For Overtesting Onto Teachers And Unions

Rich Karlin in the Times-Union:

As lawmakers approached Tuesday night's state budget deadline, Gov. Andrew Cuomo was finalizing what could be described as a take-it-or-leave education reform package that continues to rely heavily on standardized test results but seems to put the onus on the state teachers union to seek second chances for low-scoring teachers.

The Education Transformation Act is tied to a school funding increase of more than $1.33 billion, but it may be a hard pill for lawmakers to swallow — especially in the Democrat-dominated Assembly, where members are closely aligned with teachers unions.

Under the plan, teachers whose students persistently do poorly on tests designed to show student growth during the school year could be fired, even if they are tenured.

...
 
The plan works to shift the blame for alleged overtesting of students — a major complaint by the public — from the state to the teachers union.

And it puts a heavy responsibility on the state Board of Regents and their Education Department to develop the "cut scores" for exams that will place teachers into one of four performance categories: ineffective, developing, effective and highly effective.

Under the new program, half of a teacher's rating will be based on classroom observations and half will be based on tests. Only one set of tests will be mandated: the standardized math and English tests given in grades 3 to 8, and Regents exams required for graduation from high school.

If a teacher's students do poorly on those, the educator could not receive an overall rating of effective or highly effective.

In that case, however, the union could request another set of tests. If the results for this second test are also poor, that teacher would be considered ineffective overall, and the school could move to terminate the teacher after a minimum of three years of poor results.

This aims to attack the perception among parents that the state is mandating too many tests.

If students are subjected to extra tests, it would be because the local teachers union was asking for them to help with the teachers rating, according to the thinking behind the proposal.

Cynic that I am, I am not shocked by much in this world.

But even I am stunned at the audacity of this testing proposal and the attempt to shift the blame for overtesting from the state to teachers and teachers unions.

It's such a cynical and hostile move from Cuomo and his flying attack monkeys that I can't imagine it doesn't backfire on them.

More from State of Politics:

New teacher evaluation criteria that is being proposed in the state budget would potentially put the onus on local teachers unions as to whether a second test should be added for students which would count to a performance rating, according to a Cuomo administration official.

“It’s an option and it’s a risk,” the official said on Monday night. “It is a risk to have that second test. We’ve design it in the system because we’re trying to reduce testing.”

...

Evaluations would include one state-based test, along with an option — to be decided by collective bargaining — for a second test to be developed by the Department of Education. No new funding will be allocated for the second test, which would not have to a newly written examination.

Implementing the new evaluation is tied to a increase in education aid, with a November deadline.

“It puts the burden on them and in many ways belies the myth the state was asking for more test,” the official said. “Now, if they want the second test, they’ve going to need to ask for a second test.”

These people claim they have students' interests at heart?

This is nothing but a cynical "gotcha" system meant to scapegoat teachers and teachers unions.

Scapegoating Teachers Will Keep Good People Out Of Teaching

In the middle of a New York Magazine profile on Campbell Brown and her attack on teacher tenure in New York State is this:

Head-spinning data sets are the fluttering fans of both sides in the school-reform debate, concealing ideological motivation of the game’s players and the overwhelming complexity of measuring student performance, but plenty of experts disagree about how important teacher tenure really is. “Most people agree that Campbell Brown has identified an important problem: Poor kids are stuck with the worst teachers. But her approach of attacking tenure is barking up the wrong tree,” says Richard Kahlenberg, an author and senior fellow at the progressive Century Foundation, adding that polling shows tenure is so important to teachers you’d have to increase their salaries by half to make up for taking it away. (Weingarten, sworn enemy of Brown, points out that the states that have the best protections for teachers also have the best academic performance.) Low-income minority students have the weakest teachers because of economic segregation, Kahlenberg says, which suggests the solution is mixing and matching low- and ­middle-income kids in individual schools (something, one imagines, that would cause an uproar in nice neighborhoods already endowed with good schools). “On the tactics, I have to give Campbell enormous credit,” Kahlenberg continues. “She’s taken what most educators believe is a peripheral issue and elevated it to the cover of Time magazine. So even if she loses her lawsuits, she’s changed the public conversation—in my view, in a negative way. But I think she’s highly effective.”

Take away tenure or make it "renewable" based on student test scores and other quantifiable measures as Campbell Brown and a host of other reformers want to do (which is just a roundabout way of getting rid of tenure) and you'll end up keeping good people out of teaching.

That's the part of the argument in teacher quality that never gets publicly stated much in the mainstream media.

The more the teaching profession gets beaten up in the media and by politicians, the more insane compliance they throw on teachers in the form of ever-more "rigorous" evaluations, the more they strip teachers of protections like due process, the less likely it is quality people are going to want to teach.

Why spend money and effort to get trained and licensed as a teacher if you're going to spend your workday doing insane compliance that takes away from your ability to do your job well, get beaten up in the media seven days a week and hear the politicians in your state denigrate you as garbage as they annually impose more mandates on you?

I am in my fourteenth year teaching, but if I were doing this all over again, there is NO WAY I would go into teaching.

Seriously, who needs to be told what a piece of shit you are, how you're responsible for poverty and the achievement gap and income inequality and a danger to national security to boot (which Joel Klein and Condi Rice actually said)?

I teach seniors and when we talk about college majors and career options and some tell me they are thinking about teaching, I tell them to think long and hard about that before they embark on the journey.

Teachers and the teaching profession are under constant assault, a barrage that never seems to end but just gets heavier and heavier as the years go by.

I tell students they must be aware of the political battles going on around schools and teachers before they decide to teach, because these battles will effect them greatly, make their jobs much harder than they have to be, and perhaps even make it such that their career choice will be turned into nothing more than an at-will position that they can be fired from for any reason.

I'm not trying to dissuade students from going into teaching, but I do want them going in with their eyes open and their minds aware.

Teachers are scapegoats for so many of the problems this country faces and no one should go into the profession without knowing that there's going to be a lot of excessive blame they'll carry along with their other job duties and responsibilities.

Michael Goodwin: What About The Parents?

From the Post:

But, ultimately, King’s ruling is no silver bullet because it can’t be. As Rudy Crew believed, and as the failure of most reforms demonstrates, the biggest problem with education isn’t the union, the politicians, the money or the kids — it’s the parents. Everything else matters, but it is secondary in most cases.

Consider a study on absentee rates among third- and fourth- graders in New York. It found that about 20 percent were chronically absent, meaning they miss at least a month of school.

But attendance wasn’t uniform, with nearly a quarter of black and Hispanic students chronically absent, while 12 percent of whites and only 4 percent of Asians were. The achievement gap starts with attendance, and it starts early. Other studies show a link between children born out of wedlock and performance.

Given the correlation between home life, attendance and academic progress, students who miss a lot of school in early grades are unlikely to catch up. Today’s truants are tomorrow’s dropouts.
Yet when elementary children don’t show up for school, whose fault is that? While Mayor Bloomberg’s truancy-prevention program shows some success, it’s largely despite parents, not because of them.

Should bad teachers be fired? Absolutely. And there’s zero argument for leaving crooks and sexual predators in the classroom.

But we spend so much time and energy focused on these obvious things because the union is absolutist and because nobody has the guts to talk about the elephant in the room. If we want better students, we must demand better parents.

Let’s see if the mayoral candidates dare touch that one.

I am teaching a Regents remedial class.

I have some students who come to class the way guest stars used to make an appearance on The Love Boat back in the day - you seem them every once in a while.

I have called home, written home, written referrals and done all the things in my power to try and get them to my class so that I can prepare them for the Regents exam in a week.

For a core group, nothing has worked and they continue to skip school.

Under the new APPR system, this is my fault and these "failures" will be counted in my statistics.

I am actually pretty damned good at motivating students on the margins to come to class more often than they usually do in order to get ready for their high stakes exams.

But with some students, there is nothing I do that works to motivate them.

Should I be held accountable for this?

Or should the parents?

The system has decided to give the parents a pass and hold only teachers accountable.

And NYSED Commissioner John King has doubled down on that in the new evaluation plans he has approved around the state.

According to him, it is always the fault of the teacher when a student fails a high stakes exam.

But Goodwin speaks truth here in this column - "we spend so much time and energy focused on these obvious things because the union is absolutist and because nobody has the guts to talk about the elephant in the room. If we want better students, we must demand better parents."

Indeed.

Not Adding Value: Obama Edition

From the Associated Press:

The ranks of America's poor are on track to climb to levels unseen in nearly half a century, erasing gains from the war on poverty in the 1960s amid a weak economy and fraying government safety net.

Census figures for 2011 will be released this fall in the critical weeks ahead of the November elections.

The Associated Press surveyed more than a dozen economists, think tanks and academics, both nonpartisan and those with known liberal or conservative leanings, and found a broad consensus: The official poverty rate will rise from 15.1 percent in 2010, climbing as high as 15.7 percent. Several predicted a more modest gain, but even a 0.1 percentage point increase would put poverty at the highest level since 1965.

Poverty is spreading at record levels across many groups, from underemployed workers and suburban families to the poorest poor. More discouraged workers are giving up on the job market, leaving them vulnerable as unemployment aid begins to run out. Suburbs are seeing increases in poverty, including in such political battlegrounds as Colorado, Florida and Nevada, where voters are coping with a new norm of living hand to mouth.

"I grew up going to Hawaii every summer. Now I'm here, applying for assistance because it's hard to make ends meet. It's very hard to adjust," said Laura Fritz, 27, of Wheat Ridge, Colo., describing her slide from rich to poor as she filled out aid forms at a county center. Since 2000, large swaths of Jefferson County just outside Denver have seen poverty nearly double.

Fritz says she grew up wealthy in the Denver suburb of Highlands Ranch, but fortunes turned after her parents lost a significant amount of money in the housing bust. Stuck in a half-million dollar house, her parents began living off food stamps and Fritz's college money evaporated. She tried joining the Army but was injured during basic training.

Now she's living on disability, with an infant daughter and a boyfriend, Garrett Goudeseune, 25, who can't find work as a landscaper. They are struggling to pay their $650 rent on his unemployment checks and don't know how they would get by without the extra help as they hope for the job market to improve.

In an election year dominated by discussion of the middle class, Fritz's case highlights a dim reality for the growing group in poverty. Millions could fall through the cracks as government aid from unemployment insurance, Medicaid, welfare and food stamps diminishes.

"The issues aren't just with public benefits. We have some deep problems in the economy," said Peter Edelman, director of the Georgetown Center on Poverty, Inequality and Public Policy.

Not a pretty picture.

But as usual with our elite overlords, President Obama refuses to be held accountable by the data.

You see, it's Bush's fault.

Really?

Obama wasted all that stimulus money on jive like Race to the Top.

There should have been national programs rebuilding the infrastructure of this country - the roads, the bridges, the rail, the electric grid.

We could have put Americans back to work and rebuilt the Third World infrastructure we suffer with.

Instead we got teacher evaluations tied to test scores.

Heckuva job, Barack "Hoover" Obama.

We need to add one more man to the unemployment ranks - Barack "Hoover" Obama.

Spending Freeze

President Accountability, ever looking to hold the wrong people accountable for the problems in the country, is proposing a two year spending freeze on the salaries of civilian employees.

The administration acknowledges that the $28 billion in savings is a drop in the bucket of the $1.3 trillion deficit, but this is "a symbolic gesture" to make people feel the Obama administration is doing something to hold down spending.

Meanwhile Gregg Easterbrook details the profligate spending that the Pentagon is doing:

This year, the United States will spend at least $700 billion on defense and security. Adjusting for inflation, that’s more than America has spent on defense in any year since World War II—more than during the Korean war, the Vietnam war, or the Reagan military buildup. Much of that enormous sum results from spending increases under presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Since 2001, military and security expenditures have soared by 119 percent.

For most of that time, of course, the United States has been fighting two wars. Yet that’s not the cause of the defense-spending explosion. Even if the costs of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan are subtracted, the defense budget has swelled by 68 percent since 2001. (All money figures in this article are stated in 2010 dollars.) The U.S. defense budget is now about the same as military spending in all other countries combined.

In a historically unusual twist, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a Republican appointee and a former CIA director, has repeatedly acknowledged that military costs are untenable and decried the Pentagon’s “culture of endless money.” But despite Gates’s advocacy, and Obama’s backing, not much has changed. Congressional leaders nod in agreement at talk of reform—then demand that their pet projects be fully funded. A recent Gates proposal, received as if it heralded dramatic cuts, seeks merely to constrain Pentagon budget growth to 2 percent to 3 percent over inflation. At that pace, defense and security costs will hit a ruinous $1 trillion annually by 2030.

So Obama will get $28 billion in savings by freezing government employees salaries while the Pentagon continues to throw hundreds of billions at projects that do nothing to keep us safer but certainly manage to enrich the companies (and people) involved.

This disconnect between the actual causes of the current economic and fiscal crisis the U.S. is suffering from and the people who get blamed for it drives me batty.

It's just like when Obama blamed the 2008 credit crises and financial collapse on public schools.

Public schools had NOTHING to do with the problems brought to us by the housing bubble, securitization, or insolvent banks.

But politicians of both parties know it's fun and profitable to scapegoat government workers, unionized workers and/or public schools for all the problems that have been brought to us by income disparity, Wall Street greed, and corporate corruption.

Common Dreams: When It Did Become Acceptable To Scapegoat Teachers?

There is a very, very good piece at Common Dreams by Robert Freeman on the teacher scapegoating movement.

I repost it in full:

When Did Teachers Become Bums?

by Robert Freeman

When did teachers become bums? When did it become okay to vilify an entire occupation — three million college educated professionals working as hard as anyone to make the world a better place?

It wasn’t that long ago that teachers occupied a quasi-secular-sainthood. It was the underpaid, overworked teachers who guided, inspired, succored, and cajoled every one of us to find in ourselves that bigger person we all long to be.

But lately it’s become acceptable, even sport, to blame teachers for all of the ills of American education.

The new documentary, “Waiting for Superman” is just the most recent salvo in a broad-spectrum campaign to demonize teachers, teachers’ unions, and public education in general. It is a blinkered caricature of life for five underprivileged students, with teachers cast as the villainous Simon Legree.

Indeed, it is amazing what a rapid turn-around the film represents in the public narrative about teachers: from near-adulation only a few years ago to ill-concealed contempt today.

In truth, it is teachers who have held education together in recent decades against a seemingly endless deluge of social pathologies. Consider just a few examples.

In the past thirty years:

• Most mothers have joined the workforce. No more Mrs. Cleaver at the door with warm cookies and milk and help with Beaver’s homework.
• We’ve surrendered our children’s socialization to television, video games, the Internet, and on-line social media.
• America jails more of its population than any country on earth — a sign of an almost psychotically violent society. One in thirty children has a parent in jail!
• We’ve absorbed the largest wave of immigrants in our history, many speaking no English and with little educational background.
• Many of the best teachers, especially women, have found opportunities in other fields that were not open to them before.
• Forty-five million Americans live in poverty; one of five American children are raised in poverty; one out of every eight Americans are on food stamps. The middle class is dying.

It’s pretty hard to teach a kid who has been raised by the television, when he hasn’t eaten breakfast, when the family has been kicked out of their home, when he has to work a job to help feed the siblings, when the parents have just gotten divorced or lost both of their jobs, when no-one at home speaks English, or when their most alluring role models are dope dealers, pimps, or gangsta rappers. Imagine, then, trying to teach a room full of such trauma cases.

Yet, for many of our lowest-performing schools, that is the world we actually live in. Trying to teach in that world is like trying to put up a tent in a hurricane. No sooner do you get it up than it comes right back down again. And the force factor is increasing. But teachers continue to do it.

Finally, let’s be honest about the motives of those behind the teacher-bashing.

We spend almost $750 billion each year on public education. Enterprising capitalists want to get a piece of it. A little known loophole enacted at the end of the Clinton administration allows wealthy investors to double their investment in only seven years by providing the funding for building charter schools.

That’s a 10 per cent annual return compared to less than 1 per cent available in conventional bank deposits. And the investment is essentially foolproof since it is public spending that assures the payback.

Now, making a profit isn’t a crime in a capitalist country but isn’t it funny how these “reformers” always cast their motives as altruistic? These “philanthropists” include the Walton Family Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and some of the wealthiest hedge fund managers in the world — yes, the same wizards who brought us The Greatest Economic Collapse Since the Great Depression.

It is they, fronted by President Obama, who are behind the charter school movement. Their goal is to make franchises of our schools, docile, low-cost industrial robots of our teachers, and McStudents of our children. This, despite the fact that the best academic studies of charter schools have shown that they perform no better than public schools and in many cases perform worse. Sometimes much worse.

A 2009 Stanford University study surveyed results for schools teaching more than 70% of the nation’s charter school students. It showed charter schools performed better than comparable public schools in 17% of the cases. But they were more than twice as likely to perform worse, in 37% of the cases.

That doesn’t matter. What matters is getting in on the big money.

In truth, the motive of the charter school boosters is the same profit motive that destroyed a once vibrant public health system, replacing it with the highest cost/lowest quality system in the industrialized world. Now they want to do the same for education. And the bonus add-in for them is that in the process they will destroy one of the most potent democratizing institutions in the history of America: public education.

But in order to make the sale, they have to demonize teachers first.

Are there bad teachers out there? Of course there are! They should be fired. By sheltering incompetent teachers, the unions are only giving ammunition to those whose motives are far more base than mere incompetence: making a profit off of your children. That is the reality of the public debate about education and teachers today.

Teachers don’t teach in a vacuum. Education isn’t some Immaculate Conception that occurs in a classroom, untouched by the world around it. And fast-money billionaires don’t invest for the warm-and-fuzzies.

If you want better schools, work for more stable incomes, families and neighborhoods. Get involved in your schools. Fire the few bad teachers but support the overwhelming number of good ones. And don’t be suckered by those peddling venom in the guise of altruism. Your children are products to them, pieces of meat on an assembly line whose only purpose is to produce profits. We can be better than that.

Robert Freeman teaches history and economics at Los Altos High School in Los Altos, CA. He is the founder of One Dollar For Life, a national non-profit that helps American students build schools in the developing world through contributions of one dollar. His earlier piece, “Competing Models for Public Education,” was also published on Common Dreams. He can be reached at robertf@odfl.org

Their goal is to make franchises of our schools, docile, low-cost industrial robots of our teachers, and McStudents of our children.

Couldn't have said it better.

That's the "reform" movement as run by the vulture philanthropists encapsulated in 21 words.