Time To Sue The City And The State

NYC Educator posts that high school teachers may be subject to a new component in the evaluation system known as a "growth model" that will use a pre-test in the beginning of the semester and a Regents exam at the end of the semester in order to derive 20%-40% of the teacher's evaluation from so-called student performance (AKA, student test scores.)

This method has even less validity than the already notoriously error-riddled value added measurement (AKA, VAM) that is used to measure so-called student growth from one year to the next on subject tests.

But just because these growth and value-added measurement methods are error-riddled (87% maximum margin of error on the ELA VAM used by the NYCDOE), subject to wide swings in stability and/or totally hogwash as a way to measure teacher effectiveness doesn't mean the NYCDOE and the NYSED won't try and impose them onto us, nor does it mean that the UFT will try and protect us from them.

On the contrary, the UFT and the NYSUT were both on stage last February with Cuomo, Tisch and King when all this nonsense was announced and they were "at the table" during the discussions on how this new system would be devised and how it would work.

APPR is as much the UFT's and the NYSUT's baby as it is Tisch's, King's, Cuomo's and Pearson's.

Now it seems to me that the geniuses at the NYSED who brought us the Pineapple and the Hare and the geniuses at Tweed who brought us the truly awful Acuity exams are not going to get any better when they bring us the tests that will be used for VAM or growth models.

Remember, they're as much under the gun as the rest of us, trying to develop the tests and get them out as fast as they can before the public and the legislature come to their sense and change the laws to something less insane than "Eval By Test Score".

So you can bet the tests that will be used as pre-tests for high school teacher growth models will not actually be designed to work with the new Regents tests to measure growth any more than the elementary or middle school tests have been designed to measure "added value" from year to year by a teacher in isolation from many other factors.

I see no reason why we, the teachers, should not band together and sue the city and the state over this holy mess in order to protect ourselves.

Let's be honest here - the UFT and the NYSUT are not going to do this because they are invested in this system.

They helped develop it.

They stood on stage with Cuomo and Tisch and King and patted themselves on the back for what a swell system it is.

And when critics took to the Twitter and the Internets to point out all the flaws in the system and warn how damaging this system was going to be to schools, students and teachers - critics like Diane Ravitch and Carol Burris -  the UFT and the NYSUT defended the system and sent Lyin' Leo Casey out there to tell us the system scrapes the skies it's so good and we should ignore all the Negative Nellie's who say differently.

So unfortunately we cannot rely upon our union to protect us from this garbage.

We must protect ourselves from it.

This means banding together and suing over the VAM and the growth models, which will be error-riddled, unreliable and suffer from wide swings in stability from year to year, as an unfair and indeed, illegal way to evaluate NY State school teachers.

I expect an evaluation deal between the UFT and the NYCDOE will be announced by the middle of next week before the Cuomo evaluation cliff deadline hits.

The discussions of lawyering up and suing the governor, the NYSED, the Regents, and the NYCDOE for imposing an unfair, unjust, invalid evaluation system upon teachers should start directly after that announcement.

Drill, Baby, Drill

It really feels like Bush never left.

When President Obama signed the health care "reform" law that forces millions of people to buy garbage insurance they won't be able to afford to use and levies an excise tax of 40% on middle and working class people with employer-provided health care plans to do it, he said "This is what change looks like."

I thought "Really - looks more like business as usual at the Bush administration where President Bush forced through the Medicare drug bill giveaway to Big Pharma and called it "reform" too.

Then there's Obama's NCLB re-authorization, NCLB Jr., in which President Accountability is taking the battery of tests Bush first imposed and adding them to every subject in every year. Adequate Yearly Progress measures for schools are gone - now they've been added to teacher evaluations. Teachers must increase the test scores of their students from September to May or risk being fired like President Accountability had all those teachers in Rhode Island fired. NCLB Jr. is a wet dream Bush never could have gotten through a Democratically-controlled Congress but when a Democratic president pushes through Republican policies, Democrats seem to vote for them anyway.

And today the NY Times reports that Obama has decided to drill baby drill:

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is proposing to open vast expanses of water along the Atlantic coastline, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and the north coast of Alaska to oil and natural gas drilling, much of it for the first time, officials said Tuesday.

The proposal — a compromise that will please oil companies and domestic drilling advocates but anger some residents of affected states and many environmental organizations — would end a longstanding moratorium on oil exploration along the East Coast from the northern tip of Delaware to the central coast of Florida, covering 167 million acres of ocean.

Under the plan, the coastline from New Jersey northward would remain closed to all oil and gas activity. So would the Pacific Coast, from Mexico to the Canadian border.

The environmentally sensitive Bristol Bay in southwestern Alaska would be protected and no drilling would be allowed under the plan, officials said. But large tracts in the Chukchi Sea and Beaufort Sea in the Arctic Ocean north of Alaska — nearly 130 million acres — would be eligible for exploration and drilling after extensive studies.

...


While Mr. Obama has staked out middle ground on other environmental matters — supporting nuclear power, for example — the sheer breadth of the offshore drilling decision will take some of his supporters aback. And it is no sure thing that it will win support for a climate bill from undecided senators close to the oil industry, like Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, or Mary L. Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana.

The Senate is expected to take up a climate bill in the next few weeks — the last chance to enact such legislation before midterm election concerns take over. Mr. Obama and his allies in the Senate have already made significant concessions on coal and nuclear power to try to win votes from Republicans and moderate Democrats. The new plan now grants one of the biggest items on the oil industry’s wish list — access to vast areas of the Outer Continental Shelf for drilling.

But even as Mr. Obama curries favors with pro-drilling interests, he risks a backlash from some coastal governors, senators and environmental advocates, who say that the relatively small amounts of oil to be gained in the offshore areas are not worth the environmental risks.

The Obama administration’s plan adopts some drilling proposals floated by President George W. Bush near the end of his tenure, including opening much of the Atlantic and Arctic Coasts. Those proposals were challenged in court on environmental grounds and set aside by President Obama shortly after he took office.

It's like Bush never left.

Obama seems to relish sticking it to people who voted for him - teachers, environmentalists, health reform advocates.

Apparently the Change We Can Believe in Obama spoke about bringing America was Bush administration policy.

POSTSCRIPT: I should also note that Obama has doubled down on the war in Afghanistan, has kept troop levels in Iraq the same as Bush, swallowed the Bush/Paulson TARP/TALF bailout-plan whole and continued to hand out billions to Too Big To Fail Institutions, and renominated Bush's Fed Head Bernanke to the Federal Reserve.

All very Bush/GOP-friendly policies.

And remind me, did I miss the DADT repeal signing ceremony in the Rose Garden or did that not happen?