Michael Mulgrew And Leo Casey Just Like The Fonz

.@PSulliv yup, wonder if @LeoECasey will apologize to @carolburris now & admit she was right
— leonie haimson (@leoniehaimson) November 7, 2013

Mikey and Leo now criticizing the teacher evaluation system they helped develop and defend against criticism from Carol Burris and Diane Ravitch.

Mikey and Leo are criticizing the system for some of the very reasons Burris and Ravitch criticized it in the past.

But Mikey and Leo never admit they were wrong to help develop this system or defend it, of course.

That would be going to far.

They cannot admit they were wr- wr- wr- wro-wrong...

Carol Burris: The VAM And SLO's Are Indefensible

A comment Carol Burris made at Gotham Schools:

This is my prediction...in the end, it will all result in lawsuits because VAM and the SLOs will be found to be indefensible as measures of teacher quality. This is the full employment act for school attorneys.

Unfortunately it does not seem the UFT will be joining the lawsuits because they're too busy spinning how this is a win for teachers.

You can bet they are in major CYA mode at 52 Broadway and every critique of the system will get a response from the geniuses there.

I wonder, will they bring back Lyin' Leo Casey to lead the pushback?

Will they bring in Redhog to tell us how this deal is so good it "scrapes the skies"?

I think that the whole system is indefensible in court.

Again, I'm not a lawyer, but it seems to me both the VAM, with its large margins of error and wide swings in stability from year to year, and the SLO's, with their dubious make-up and quality, cannot stand up to scrutiny as measures of teacher quality.

In addition, I think that the changes to test part of the evaluation plan are also problematic.

Under the agreement made in February 2012 by King, Tisch, Cuomo, Mulgrew and Iannuzzi, a teacher found to have "zero growth" in the test score part of the evaluation (20%) would have to be rated "ineffective" automatically no matter what.

But under the plan revealed yesterday, we get this:

"Teachers rated ineffective on student performance based on objective assessments must be rated ineffective overall." 

If I'm reading that correctly, that's a big shift from the February 2012 agreement - from "zero growth on student performance" to "ineffective on student performance."

Will that seismic change to the 20% test part of the evaluation stand up in court?

We may never know because the UFT doesn't seem like they're going to challenge any of this stuff in court.

They're already in major spin mode, with Mulgrew sending out a jive letter stating that "The commissioner’s plan is professional and fair and is designed to help teachers improve their skills throughout their careers" when the truth is, the plan is anything but fair and has been instituted simply to give the NYCDOE the tools to fire as many teachers as possible as quickly as possible.

I do think this system unveiled by King yesterday is indefensible.

Unfortunately for us, the UFT leadership are too busy defending it in the court of public opinion to take it to a civil court and see just how indefensible it really is.

Carol Burris Gives Her Testimony To The Cuomo Education Commission

Via the Answer Sheet, here it is, in full:

This past summer, New York high school Principals Carol Burris and Harry Leonadartos attempted to testify about school reform before New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s Education Commission in New York City.  They were not given the opportunity to speak, and they wrote about it in this post. Yesterday the commission — which is chaired by former Citibank chairman Dick Parsons — visited Long Island and Burris was allowed to speak. She received a standing ovation when she was done. Below is her testimony.

Burris is the principal of South Side High School in Rockville Centre, New York and a co-author of the New York Principals letter of concern regarding the evaluation of teachers by student scores. Over 1,500 New York principals and more than 5,400 teachers, parents, professors, administrators and citizens have signed the letter which can be found here.

Testimony by Carol Burris:
Thank you very much for this opportunity. My name is Carol Burris, principal of South Side High School in Rockville Centre. I was an assistant principal, a teacher, a school board member and a board president. I am but one of many dedicated educators on Long Island. A remarkable 33% of all of the Reward Schools in the State of New York are in Nassau and Suffolk counties. If Long Island were a state, we would be first in the nation.
Long Island is also where the principals’ letter in opposition to APPR, the evaluation system, began. That letter is signed by 80% of all of Long Island’s principals along with more than 1500 other principals across the state, and thousands of parents and teachers. We are not afraid to be evaluated nor are we afraid to evaluate our teachers — those who claim we are simply “anxious” do not know us at all.

 In the testimony which I submitted, I explain why APPR will not improve teaching and will negatively impact the learning of our students. Rather than repeat that reasoning, Mr. Chairman, I would pose this scenario instead. Suppose the legislature decided that the solution to the financial crisis was to mandate an evaluation system for every loan officer in the state, even mandating a value added metric to be used. Suppose that 80% of your best managers and vice presidents told you that using that inaccurate metric was going to hurt, not help Citibank. Mr. Chairman, would you have complied, or would you have resisted in order to save your bank?

The obsession with test based evaluations of students, schools and teachers is tearing the schools we love apart. Something is very wrong when nine year olds sit for tests that are longer than the SAT and the Graduate Record Examination combined.

Something is wrong when policymakers contemplate tests for kindergarteners to predict whether they are on the path to college readiness.

Something is wrong when my students must take a pre-test comprised of Regents Physics questions BEFORE they have taken the course, so that their teachers can be evaluated.

Thank goodness my school does not offer sky diving! It sounds irrational — it is. Worst of all, taxpayer dollars and instructional days are being wasted.

Parents get it. They are opting out of testing. From Niagara Falls to Long Island they are uniting against the proliferation of standardized tests, and test based reform.

At the same time, the most critical reasons for poor student achievement are being ignored. As I documented in my testimony, New York is ranked number 4 in inequitable funding. Among the states in the Northeast, New York State is #1 in childhood poverty. We are at the top of the list for racially and socioeconomically segregated schooling.

I ask you to recommend that the millions upon millions of taxpayer dollars used for multi-day testing, test security and shredding, APPR and the creation of student data systems be dedicated instead to wrap around services for poor children and to fund excellent pre-schools and to the classrooms of New York that need it the most.

I ask you to recommend that the governor visit Long Island Schools and study just how well disadvantaged students can do if their school is not overwhelmed and has sufficient resources.

Some of the best schools in the nation are here on Long Island. In our schools that have ample support systems and not extraordinary poverty, students who receive free or reduced price lunch excel.

I understand that it is far more popular to blame teachers, tenure, unions, and principals. However, by ignoring the core reasons — that account for 85% of the variance in student performance — you do not make things better, and you risk making our schools worse as dollars flow to the wrong solutions.

I thank you for your service on this committee. I truly appreciate your visit to Long Island. Come visit our schools and speak with our teachers and us. We understand quality and we practice it. Thank you for considering my testimony.

Of course Cuomo, Tisch and King won't care about any of this.  They would rather blame teachers, principals, schools, unions and tenure for the problems in schools.

But Burris, the other principals who signed the letter, and everybody else who is fighting APPR are putting the people in charge on notice - the solutions being proposed and put into place are more damaging than the problems themselves.

Take the money going to all these so-called "reforms" and put them to wrap-around services for the schools and students that need it the most and you go a long way toward solving the problems in the school system.

That common sense solution is not very sexy.

No one gets fired.

So-called reformers like Klein and Rhee do not get to thunder about all the "bad teachers" who need to be swept out into the ocean via a broom.

But what Burris says is the truth.

It's a shame that so-called Democrats like Andrew Cuomo and Barack Obama are unwilling to here this message.

NEWSDAY Calls New Teacher Evaluation System "State Of The Art"

The geniuses at NEWSDAY write the following about the new teacher evaluation system in New York State known as APPR:

The other problem, one that won't ever be solved perfectly, is that principals are seeing growth scores that occasionally defy what they personally know about the skills of certain teachers. That's going to happen with sample sizes as small as single classrooms, but hopefully not too often, and teachers who do well on the other 60 to 80 percent of their evaluation shouldn't have much to fear from it. Experts, even those who aren't big on judging teachers this way, agree the system New York is putting in place to measure student achievement year-over-year is "state of the art."

"State of the art?"

Based on what?

The tests they're using for this system are an error-riddled embarrassment.

The system is set up on a bell curve so that every year, 10%-20% of teachers are going to be ranked substandard no matter what.

And as the geniuses at NEWSDAY themselves even note, there are teachers coming up substandard on the "performance-based" part of the evaluation system who administrators, students, parents and other teachers know to be excellent educators.

The same happened with New York City's vaunted TDR system - teachers who were known by administrators, students, parents and other teachers to be excellent educators came up "ineffective."

Michael Winerip covered the story of one last year in his Times column, actually.

Under the new APPR system, this kind of teacher will be slated to be fired after two years of "I" ratings.

Gary Rubenstein pointed out that the VAM the city used on 4th-8th grade ELA and math teachers was essentially random - one third came up "effective," one third above, one third below. But the clicker was, many teachers switched where they came up each year, so that an "effective" teacher often came up "ineffective" the year after and vice versa for the teacher found "ineffective" the year before.

And as Carol Burris has pointed out, the system is set up so that you can be ranked "effective" on the three different evaluation parts - the state assessment, the local assessment and the classroom observations - and STILL be given an "I" rating.

Whether you are talking about the state's APPR system or the city's TDR system, there is nothing "state of the art" here, unless by state of the art, you mean how ingeniously dishonest these systems are.

They are rigged against teachers.

They are meant to be rigged.

That's why they've set it up on a bell curve, that's why they're hiding the tests used to generate the "performance data," that's why the governor, the Regents and the NYSED made it so that a teacher whose students show no growth on the tests must be rated "ineffective" automatically no matter how she/he scores on the rest.

They want to fire teachers - lots of them - and now they've got a couple of systems in place (the state APPR and the local assessment data systems) that will provide them with the "data" to support the firings.

Even though the data generated from these systems has large margins of error, wide swings in stability and is based upon error-riddled tests.

The only thing "state of the art" here is the dishonesty with which the governor, the NYSED. the Regents and the editorial writers at the Times, the Post, the News, Newsday and the Journal cheer this evaluation system while claiming it is so "scientific" and excellent.

They know this thing is half-baked (as even NEWSDAY admitted today) they know it's untested, they know it's rigged to smear a certain percentage of teachers as "ineffective" every year no matter what - but they're going to use it on teachers and fire the "bad" ones anyway.