The Cuomo Matrix Mess

The new teacher evaluation plan in New York is so complicated, it seems nobody can get their head around the details:

Part of the issue was the complicated grid or "matrix" in which test results play a role in an educator's final evaluation. Tisch at one point told Regents members to draw a box and rectangle as an aid to help visualize the various options.

"My head is spinning,'' Regent Kathleen Cashin later said.

Great - when the "matrix" makes the head of one of the members of the Board of Regents spin, you know it will go swimmingly for the rest of us.

The Times-Union has an editorial today that points out what a mess this rushed implementation is going to be:

Brace yourselves, New Yorkers. The state seems to be on its way to another botched rollout of a so-called education reform.

It's happening in the rush to implement a teacher evaluation system under a law passed just over two months ago. It gave the Board of Regents only until June 30 to come up with a whole new system for evaluating teachers. This was Gov. Andrew Cuomo's answer to the last evaluation system, which called for what many parents said was too much testing and which resulted, in Mr. Cuomo's view, in too many teachers being rated effective.

Under the timetable set by Mr. Cuomo and reluctantly embraced by lawmakers, school districts will have until Nov. 15 to negotiate local evaluation systems under the Regents' model and have them approved by the State Education Department. Districts that miss the deadline risk losing this year's state aid increases.

We've seen this kind of rush before. The results weren't pretty.

We saw it with Common Core, which is inextricably linked to the phrase "botched rollout" for how New York imposed the new standards before curriculum materials were ready and tested students on material that many hadn't been taught.

We saw it with the last teacher evaluation system, introduced around the same time as Common Core. With it came more tests, sparking outrage from parents and teachers about wasting class time on questionable measurements of teacher effectiveness. Upward of 200,000 students boycotted the latest standardized tests, with their parents' blessing.

Now we are seeing what threatens to be a repeat of this upheaval.

Even supporters of teacher evaluations say the idea of judging teachers based on a single high-stakes test, as the law now requires, is flawed. They argue that to gauge student progress, multiple tests are needed over time. But parents and teachers say there's too much testing. Tests are useful, many educators say, only if teachers get data in time to address weaknesses. But that isn't the plan here.

There ought to be time to weigh these concerns. Instead, schools seem poised to plunge headlong into an initiative that sounds like it's simply not thoroughly vetted. And how can we expect children to thrive and learn in such an atmosphere of adult discord?

The TU editorial board calls for a slowdown, that the latest iteration of New York's teacher evaluation system needs to be better thought-out before it gets rolled out or it'll be just another "botched" implementation - like the Common Core, like the last evaluation rollout.

Quite frankly, I hope Cuomo keeps the pressure on the regents and SED to get this evaluation system in place in as many districts as possible this coming November.

Because Cuomo owns this matrix mess, this is his arbitrary deadline, his imposed timeline.

When this thing falls in on itself - and make no mistake, the regents' inability to get their heads around the matrix means it will fall in on itself sooner rather than later - Cuomo will own the mess.

The members of the Board of Regents made that clear yesterday, the heavy hearts in the Assembly who voted for Cuomo's education reform budget that mandated this garbage have made that clear and parents and teachers who have been fighting Cuomo on his "reforms" have made that clear.

This is Cuomo's matrix mess, his deadline, his timeline, his mandates.


There will be nobody to blame for the fallout but himself.

Governor Cuomo Brings Us The Matrix

Tenure, the charter cap and receivership appear to be out of the budget discussions (at least for now), but teacher evaluation changes are not - and they sound like they're a mess:

ALBANY—Following negotiations with the governor this weekend, Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie asked the Democratic members of his conference to consider alternative means of doing teacher evaluations.

Assembly members interviewed by Capital referred to one of the models under serious discussion as a “matrix” or “grid,” which include a variety of “boxes” or categories for measuring educators’ performance. A spokesman for the conference confirmed that a “matrix” model was one possibility lawmakers are considering.

But the Democratic members—many of whom are closely allied with the teachers' unions, and are at odds with Cuomo's push to make teachers ratings more heavily contingent on testing—said they had not seen exact language to describe what Heastie was proposing. And in the absence of further detail, some worried that the proposed alternatives were simply repackaged versions of what the governor was pushing for.

...

Assemblywoman Amy Paulin, a Democrat from Westchester, said she needs more information on the proposal. But she said it sounds like the plan is being sold as a “matrix” when it’s actually not much different than the current system, which is based on student test scores and observations.

“If it’s what I think it is, one side down the matrix is still one test … and the other side is performance evaluation by the school district,” she said. “It doesn’t look like a matrix to me. It looks like an index, because you have 50 percent and 50 percent. That means there’s still a score based on 100 percent, which is not a matrix.

“I’m looking for someone to show me the matrix, show me the boxes, the different components,” she said.

Show me the matrix.

Oy.