Cuomo Says Test Scores Are Indeed Still Part Of The APPR Teacher Evaluation System

Governor Cuomo says, despite news coverage to the contrary, test scores are still going to be part of his vaunted APPR teacher evaluation system:

“There are teacher evaluations that are in the report and they are connected to tests, either state tests or locally approved tests,” Cuomo said on Sunday in Syracuse.

That's right, kids - your APPR teacher rating is going to be devised, in part, using test scores, either "local" tests approved of by NYSED or, wait for it, state tests.

If you've been reading this blog or a few of the other blogs on the blog list over to the right, you'd already know that test scores are still part of your APPR teacher evaluation rating despite the Cuomo Common Core Task Force report or the vote of the Board of Regents yesterday to implement a four year "moratorium" on the use of the Common Core tests in teacher ratings.

But it can't be any plainer than Cuomo put it on Sunday - test scores are still in APPR and depending upon what "local" tests your district decides to use for that part of APPR, you still might be rated by state tests, since some districts use that measurement for the local part of the APPR test score component.

How's that for a vaunted UFT/NYSUT "win", eh?

How's that for a "decoupling" of tests from teacher evaluations?

How's that for a bait and switch with the test scores/APPR ratings?

The cynic in me admires the bottom barrel cynicism of this move from Cuomo and his deformy pals at the Board of Regents and on his Common Core Task Force.

Seriously, to get all those headlines claiming test scores were no more for teacher evaluations until 2019 when they're actually not going anywhere.

The cynicism takes your breath away, it's that good.

How Andrew Cuomo's "Reformy" Teacher Evaluation System Keeps "Great Teachers" Away From Schools That Serve The Most Vulnerable

Back in 2013, education reform organization StudentsFirstNY called for a strengthened teacher evaluation system to help ensure that every child has access to the best teachers in the school system.

They claimed to have done an analysis that showed "that New York City’s most vulnerable students have a disproportionate share of the city’s unsatisfactory-rated teachers" (this was under the old rating system when teachers were still given either "satisfactory" or "unsatisfactory" ratings.)

Their solution to this so-called inequitable distribution of excellent teachers across the system?

Why, a data-driven teacher evaluation system that incorporated student performance measures into the ratings, along with some other reforms like the following:

• Require parental consent for a student to be taught by an ineffective teacher
  
• Provide significant salary increases to highly effective teachers who stay in the classrooms of high-needs schools
  
• Prohibit schools from assigning to the class of an ineffective teacher any student taught by an ineffective teacher in the previous year
  
• Make it easier for top college graduates to enter teaching, and provide financial incentives for them to do so
  
• Impose a cap on how many ineffective teachers may be allowed to remain at any one school year after year
  
• Require annual reporting by the New York City Department of Education on the distribution of teacher quality across schools and student populations
  

Sounds swell, right?

They're going wash those "ineffective teachers" right out of schools with the most vulnerable student populations through a combination of a more rigorous teacher evaluation system that relies upon students' test scores to prove teacher effectiveness and reporting and capping measures for how many "ineffective" teachers can be at individual schools or teach individual students.

Ah, except that the new APPR teacher evaluation system hawked by education reform groups like StudentsFirstNY and imposed upon the state by Governor Andrew Cuomo (a recipient of much StudentsFirstNY/education reform group largesse) actually keeps "excellent teachers" from going to schools that serve the most vulnerable student populations because it ties 50% of a teacher's rating to student test score performance and few teachers want to teach at schools that have low test scores.

Here is a comment left at a Perdido Street School blog post from yesterday on the irrationality of the value-added measurement system that NYSED uses on teachers to prove so-called "effective teaching":

I am an assistant principal in the Bronx on the HS level. Unfortunately, we cannot attract teachers to our school due to our graduation rate, deriving from low scores (international school). I wanted to recruit an Earth Science teacher. She told me she'd never work at my school because 50% of her overall rating would basically give her a Developing as the HIGHEST rating. You see, the schools are taking a hit too with recruitment. Great teachers go to specific schools. You want to talk about segregation? Here it is at its finest. There are other HS in the campus that are premium. We are in the same campus but can't offer our kids a vibrant Science education, but the other school are. This is terrible and should additionally be reported from an administrators viewpoint. 

How ironic, that the very system StudentsFirstNY called for, paid for and had imposed on the state that they said would ensure that "all students, regardless of zip code, race or socioeconomic status, are afforded a quality education" by having access to quality teachers actually does the opposite.

Education people knew that this would happen, that the more "rigorous" teacher evaluation ratings would harm any teachers who teach in schools with the most vulnerable populations because the VAM rating based upon test scores would be brutal.

This is why NYCDOE Chancellor Carmen Farina said that she wanted to put an asterisk next to the names of "highly effective" teachers who go to teach at Recovery Schools, the pool of schools that the state has labeled "struggling" or "persistently struggling" and will take over in a year or two if performance doesn't improve.

The cynic in me thinks the education reformers at StudentsFirstNY and elsewhere knew that the teacher evaluation system they got Cuomo to impose on the state would do the opposite of what they claimed, that it would harm vulnerable student populations they claim to care about by keeping any teacher who wants to remain in the system for more than two years away from schools where they are likely to get mauled on the APPR test score VAM.

I dunno exactly what the game is, perhaps just making things worse at the most vulnerable schools so that they can claim the public school system sucks and needs to be blown up, perhaps ensuring that many of the schools that serve the most vulnerable populations end up in receivership and get handed over to charter operators, perhaps a combination of the two.

In any case, the rationale behind the APPR teacher evaluation system tied to test scores was always to harm public schools, harm the teaching profession and push as many teachers out of the system as possible by a) increasing the ineffective ratings (two consecutive "ineffectives" in a row can get a teacher fired these days) and b) making the workday so onerous and odious for teachers that they quit in droves and new ones don't come to replace them (both of which are happening all across the country now.)

Keep in mind, education reformers have made sure that charter schools don't have to abide by any of these evaluation reforms, just public schools.

StudentsFirstNY claims to care about students and children, claims to speak for and stand up for the most vulnerable, but the net effective of their reform efforts has been to harm those very students and the schools that serve them.

Cuomo Poisons Everything He Touches - Including Public Education

This LoHud editorial discussing how New York State will have the opportunity to rethink its test-obsessed education system if NCLB gets an expected overhaul points out one big impediment here in New York to doing just that:

If NCLB is finally left in the dust – just as New York’s participation in the Race to the Top program is expiring – will Albany take advantage of its newfound freedoms to rethink its testing programs? The clear answer is … maybe.

Newly arrived state Education Commissioner MaryEllen Elia has said she will appoint task forces to review the Common Core standards, New York’s 3-to-8 tests that are now tied to Common Core, and how test results are used to evaluate teachers. Elia has a track record of supporting the standards-testing-evaluations approach to improving education, but seems keenly aware that many New Yorkers have little faith in our testing obsession. She’ll soon realize that a whole new group of parents are now irritated because of the recent Regents exam in algebra, which left even top students scratching their heads.

The state may have bought some time with its critics by dropping mega-corp Pearson for grade 3-8 test development. But Pearson’s replacement, Questar, will also get its marching orders from the Education Department.

Then there’s the Cuomo problem. Our governor is the driving force behind New York’s brutish teacher-evaluation system, which will increasingly rely on test scores to label teachers (even though we won’t use the same scores to evaluate students because the tests are unproven). Many classroom teachers and the parents who appreciate them will remain peeved until the system is changed. Elia will have to confront this problem pronto and figure out a way to circumvent Cuomo’s stubbornness, driven largely by his animus for teachers unions.

We hope that Congress will let states decide how to use test data for their own purposes. But it would be up to New York’s leaders to recognize what even those in Washington see: testing should not drive education policy. Many teachers will spend too much time next year trying to protect their jobs by preparing students for tests. This must not continue.

Indeed, Cuomo and his hedge fund backers are huge impediments to any positive change to public education in New York, though they certainly are both squarely behind damaging changes to it, like making test scores 50% of a teacher's evaluation.

Fred LeBrun, writing about Cuomo's unworkable SAFE Act and the ridiculous MOU that Cuomo and Senate Republicans agreed to earlier in the month that said the state would not enforce the unenforceable parts of the law, wrote this about Cuomo:

Cuomo has proved to be a politician with an uncanny knack for poisoning the well at every oasis he visits. Except those where hedge fund managers gather to squat.

That LeBrun statement certainly applies to public education, the quality of which Cuomo has made much worse since he became governor.

The system is test-obsessed, teachers are held accountable for test scores that don't count for their students, some teachers are evaluated based upon test scores in subjects they don't teach and/or of students they don't teach.

What does all this test obsession do for schools? 

As the LoHud editorial notes, it means teachers have to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to protect their jobs by preparing students for the state tests.

With the new receivership program shoved through by Cuomo in the last budget, so do schools.

All it takes is a couple of years of being deemed "persistently struggling" via the state's test score data to have NYSED swoop in and hand a school over to an "independent receiver" (i.e., charter operator.)

The public education system is fear-fueled, in large measure because Cuomo wants it that way - he wants to pay back his hedge fundie donors who started giving him suitcases full of cash before he was elected governor and have continued to do so ever since.

As with the SAFE Act, much of the "change" Cuomo has imposed was meant to become part of Cuomo's political record that he would use to run for president in the future - the governor who got gun control before anybody else after the Sandy Hook tragedy, the Dem governor who took it to the teachers unions and "busted" the public school monopoly.

Given Cuomo's plummeting poll numbers, it's doubtful he'll get the chance to run nationally for anything, but that hasn't stopped him from continuing to do damage with his policies.

As Fred LeBrun says, he poisons everything he touches.

Everything.

Play Governor Cuomo's High Stakes Testing Three Card Monte Game

Commenters in this post point out how, if Governor Cuomo gets his way on teacher evaluation reform and makes test scores 40% of a teacher's evaluation, teachers who teach subjects without state tests will have to figure out whether they should use math or ELA scores for their test component.

Here's how that string went:

How do Art, Music, Dance, and Theatre teachers play into the 40%? How about the Physical a Education teachers? Other non regents teachers? How does the 40% state effect these several thousand teachers?

...

Anon 10:25pm. I am a phys ed HS teacher. I was given the choice of which subject to link to last year. Of course I looked at the overall scores for my school for the past several years and going that the English Regents was highest at around 84% passing. I linked to them and scored very high. Research your schools history on all regents subjects and link to that subject, which is part of the rules for non regents teachers. It's probably English. Do not allow your administration to make the decision for you. You are allowed to link to any subject You choose.

...

I am an elementary PE teacher and the poster above is correct. I was able to link my evaluation score to the overall math scores of my school. (The students in my school do better in math than language arts due to the high ELA population)

There will be plenty of games that will be played in order for teachers who teach subjects without annual state tests to be evaluated on their 40% component (if Cuomo gets his way on that, at any rate.)

Will it be like roulette, spin the wheel, see if it's ELA or math this time around?

Or will it be like three card monte - follow the positive VAM, here it is, here it is, oh, no sorry, that's a negative VAM...

These will be high stakes games, of course.

Because if a teacher chooses wrong and she/he comes up "ineffective" on the 40% test component, she/he will be rated "ineffective" overall for the year.

And if Cuomo gets his way on streamlining the dismissal process, two consecutive "ineffective" ratings will trigger automatic incompetency charges and firing.

So choose well, folks.

The wrong choice and you can lose your profession and your livelihood.