They're Setting Us Up To Fail

The four horseman of the NY State education reform world (Tisch, King, Walcott, Polakow-Suransky) wrote an opinion piece in the Daily News to let everybody know that these new Common Core tests that 4th-8th grade students are taking next week will be really, really hard and they expect scores to fall a lot.

They offer this reassurance:

And yes, because the new tests are aligned to a higher bar, the percentage of students scoring proficient or above will not be comparable to previous years. Kentucky saw an almost 35% difference between the Common Core scores and its old test results. This does not mean schools are getting worse or students are learning less; this is a completely different baseline.

Transitions take time. This year’s results will not lead to a surge in summer school attendance and are not meant to disadvantage any one teacher or school.

The results will serve a more important purpose: Parents will learn where their children are on the path to college and career readiness, and teachers will get the feedback they need to help their students master the new benchmarks.

Yet these scores WILL be used as part of the new teacher evaluation system next year.

According to a WNYT.com article, the NYSED claims the new Common Core tests won't have much impact on teacher evaluations:

 On the State Education website, it says the expected declining scores will have "little or no impact" on principals' or educators' growth scores.

But this teacher in Saratoga crystallizes exactly how many of us our feeling:

"The results of these tests will be used to determine whether we are good educators," Swift suspected. "Low test scores will lead to our low evaluations. It seems that we've been set up to fail."

A commenter on the article says the same thing:

 I am not sure how they can say it will have no impact on teachers evaluation being that that is why the kids are taking the test. The test scores are part of the evaluation.

That's exactly right.

It would be one thing if they put these new Common Core tests into place a few years before APPR went into effect, piloted the changes through and carefully assessed how things were going before shoving the thing on the whole state.

But they're not doing that.

They're pushing the new Common Core tests and the new teacher evaluation system based upon those tests in the same year.

 

They're telling us that scores are going to drop precipitously and we should know that going into testing season but we shouldn't worry about the consequences - even as they tell us that teachers are going to get this more "rigorous" test score-based evaluation system that will use the Common Core tests for its data and will root out the "bad teachers."

 

It's a set up, pure and simple.

It's a shame our union leadership, such as it is, played directly into the education corporatists' hands by agreeing to this garbage.

But they did and now we teachers will have to do the best to protect ourselves from what is a very toxic system developed purely to label teachers as "bad" and schools as "failing."

I think Bruce Baker at Rutgers is providing plenty of ammunition for the eventual lawsuits over this garbage.

Here are two recent posts you should read here and here.

Get as familiar as you can with how they're screwing you with the VAM and the growth measures, because it may save your reputation and your job in the very near future when they VAM you out of your job.

Mulgrew Brags In Daily News How APPR System Is His Baby

Mulgrew has an opinion piece in the Daily News that attacks Bloomberg for not wanting to come to an agreement on a teacher evaluation deal.

He says Bloomberg was the one who blew up the negotiations and points out that both the principals union head and NYSED Commissioner John King have backed the UFT up on that.

Then he notes the following:

To me, all this is evidence that Bloomberg may have decided that it is not in his interest to have a new teacher evaluation system in place when he leaves the political scene at the end of this year.

But that isn’t true for the UFT, which went to Albany and Washington to lobby for the creation of such a system and has been working toward one even as the Education Department has not.

King has said that the city’s Education Department “has not prepared effectively for implementation of the evaluation system.” To meet that need, which we discovered when we surveyed teachers earlier this year, the union has on its own sponsored briefings in the new evaluation methods for hundreds of both teachers and principals.

We are now working on a framework of best practices that the Education Department can use as part of the training system it must outline to King by Feb. 15 if it wants to avoid the loss of even more state and federal funds.

And we are willing to sit down to negotiate the new teacher evaluation system by the governor’s new Sept. 1 deadline.

The UFT is not the obstacle here. We believe the current evaluation system is inadequate. We want a new one that provides educators more nuanced ratings that give them the chance to grow on the job — and, yes, remove those who consistently underperform.

But if we are going to be successful, we will need people on the other side of the table who are interested in creating a system that will truly help teachers improve, not in leaving a legacy of blame.

UFT members, please note that Mulgrew is taking credit for going to Albany to lobby for a teacher evaluation system that uses tests scores, value-added measurements, growth models and the Danielson rubric with the 57 page checklist.

UFT members, please also note how the union leadership wants to see teachers fired under the new, "more nuanced ratings."

UFT members, please note how the UFT leadership is bragging about both of these facts in the NY Daily News.

So next year, when you get Student Learning Objectives that start on September 1 and you must keep folders with standardized assessments and standardized rubrics for students all the year through so that you can be graded on your performance, please know who to thank for that.

And next year when you get a new Teacher Data Report based upon the "state assessments" with a high margin of error and wide swings in stability, as the NY State value-added measurement model is sure to have both of these, please know who to thank for that.

And next year, when you are observed without notice by your APPR with her/his 57 page checklist and you are found to be ineffective because you didn't get a check on 3 of the 57 pages of the list, please know who to thank for that.

It's Michael Mulgrew and the leadership of the UFT who have brought you these "more nuanced ratings" in the form of evaluations based upon tests scores, value-added measurements, growth models, Student Learning Objectives and a classroom observation rubric with a 57 page checklist.

And all this work come with no raise, no salary increase - in fact, you didn't even get the 4%-4% that the other unions got as part of the pattern without having to give any concessions back.

That's a heckuva job this union leadership has done selling you out and making sure your job is in jeopardy, you have lots more work to do, and your salary has stagnated.

I am amazed that Mulgrew is bragging about this in public.

Sounds like he wants to be the ed deform movement's second favorite labor leader (Weingarten of course being the first.)

The sell-out is coming.

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.