Test Prep Inc.

A quotation from the bald-headed pimp running the UFT who sold 80,000 teachers down the river yesterday:

"We are adamant that we do not want New York City going any further into Test Prep Inc.," said United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew.

Except that he ensures that NYC school children and teachers will be engaging in all test prep all the time because under the new agreement the unions reached with the state education department:

For the first two years under the system, teachers whose students take state exams - fourth- through eighth-grade teachers - will have 20% of their evaluations based on the results.

An additional 20% of their rating would come from new assessments that would have to be created at the local level, as will 40% of the evaluation for kindergarten through third grade and high school teachers.

Both the city and the state will give tests in every subject. So if your kid is already taking one high stakes standardized test in each subject, you can now double that and make it two high stakes standardized tests a subject.

And that's assuming they don't do value-added per year, in which case it would have to be four tests a year - one from the city and one from the state in the beginning of the year, one from the city and one from the state at the end of the year - to see how teachers have "added value" to their students.

Except that wouldn't work for high schools. That might have to do that every semester instead.

That would make for eight tests a year. In every subject.

This is a complete mess and the only winners are the education deformers looking to declare all public schools "failing" and privatize the system (like Obama, Bloomberg, Klein, Duncan, Rhee, et al.) and the test prep companies that will make billions from all the new test prep before it is all said and done.

And the price tag for all these new assessments and tests?

More than what that cigarette smoking pimp in the White House is dangling to the data-counting pimps here in NY as part of the Race to the Top lottery competition.

I wonder if the bald-headed pimp running the UFT into into submission and his counterpart at the state union know that?

Or care?

Perhaps parents can change this law eventually when it becomes clear that the Era of High Stakes Testing just got so much worse as a result of this "agreement."

Welcome to all high stakes testing all the time.

Now that jobs are on the line as a result of test scores, you can be sure any teacher who doesn't bail from the system will spend most of his or her time on test prep.

And the institutionalized cheating and grade inflation will sky-rocket more than they already have.

I'm sure that will turn around the achievement gap and the graduation rate.