Teacher Accountability Systems Need Accountability Too

Some drivel in the Wall Street Journal this morning that Cuomo is caving on "accountability"  for teachers - they're very sad about the proposed "moratorium" on using state test scores in APPR.

Somehow the lawsuit Sheri Lederman brought against NYSED for APPR never makes it to their accountability argument.

You may remember Sheri Lederman, the teacher who received a 14 out of 20 on her state test score VAM one year, which fell to 1 out of 20 the next despite her students getting very similar scores to the year before.

The next year, btw, Lederman's test score VAM rose to 11 - so for those scoring at home, it went from 14 to 1 to 11 in three years.

How is it that "teacher accountability" exactly?

There are these jive assumptions in the deform narrative that test score VAM's and the Danielson rubric are "objective" measures of teacher performance.

They're not.

NYSED's test score VAM is so unreliable that when Lederman sued, they twice tried to get the lawsuit dismissed rather than expose how they devised the score.

As for Danielson, the so-called "objective" rubric used for teacher evaluations, ask teachers about the scores they're getting in their Danielson evaluations and many will tell you there is nothing "objective" about the process.

Administrators can use the Danielson to focus on whatever they want to focus on and claim a teacher is deficient in something while ignoring other areas that might raise the overall Danielson score.

To claim there is anything "objective" in a classroom evaluation is to make believe that the so-called judgment of the evaluator comes down from the Mount, along with Moses and the Ten Commandments.

If an administrator wants to give a good evaluation rating to a teacher via the Danielson, he/she will, and if he/she wants to nail somebody with it, they can do that too.

The truth is, the Danielson was devised to give districts the tool to "document" when they want to get rid of teachers, but that doesn't mean the documentation itself is based in reality.

If we're going to talk about teacher accountability, we ought to talk about accountability for the teacher accountability system as well - the assumptions that it is based upon must stand up to scrutiny.

Clearly NYSED wasn't too confident they're test score VAM would stand up to that scrutiny, since they tried as hard as they could to avoid explaining it (or the bell curve they use for APPR) in court.

As for Danielson, I'm now starting to think that every observation should be taped so that teachers have the video to use if they need to counter claims made by administrators in their Danielson evaluations.

There is an awful lot of talk about so-called teacher accountability from politicians, from the media, from ed deformers - but the system that measures so-called teacher accountability almost always skirts its own accountability and lives in this fantasy world where it stands as some objective measure of performance.

Today's drivel in the WSJ is just one more example of that.

Daily News Declares War On Teachers And Parents Who Are Critics Of Corporate Education Reform

The Daily News editorial page is certain that Governor Cuomo MUST not decouple student performance from teacher evaluations:

Gov. Cuomo’s sudden call for a “comprehensive review” of New York’s use of the Common Core educational standards stands as a loud warning that the drive for teacher accountability is in dire jeopardy.

...

What Cuomo should now clearly state is not what is on the table but what’s off it. Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch and Education Commissioner MaryEllen Elia should join him in laying down non-negotiables:

They will not bend on ensuring higher standards that closely track Common Core guidelines developed over many years by the nation’s top education experts.

And that they will not accept any attempt to decouple student achievement gains, as measured primarily through rigorous state tests, from teacher ratings.

The teachers union, petrified about finally being subjected to serious evaluations, has played a skillful and cynical game in amplifying anti-Common Core anxieties among parents and legislators.

Stunningly, Speaker Carl Heastie, who represents the Bronx, has gone along with a suburban-based movement that works to the disadvantage of the city’s largely minority student body.

Kids in struggling schools have for years been plagued by low expectations and too many lower-performing teachers.

For their sake, supporters of higher standards for kids and more accountability for teachers must gird for war.

Did the Daily News just declare war against parents and teachers in this state who are opposed to the corporate education reform agenda Cuomo, NYSED and the Regents have imposed?

They did indeed - and of course, they do so with a straw man argument that attempts to paint teachers as children who wish to skirt accountability and parents who go along with critiques of the APPR teacher evaluation system as dupes of the teachers union.

Another straw man argument from a pro-reform newspaper editorial board about teacher evaluations - gee, what a surprise.

Let's dispense with the straw man argument that teachers don't want to be evaluated.

Teachers are not afraid of evaluations - we're afraid of an irrational evaluation system that has an adverse affect on our jobs, professional reputations, and ability to take care of our families.

Cuomo's vaunted APPR teacher evaluation system - the one the reformers at the Daily News love so much - is currently in the courts with a judge deciding whether to toss part or all of it onto the junk heap because it is an irrational system set up not to fairly evaluate teachers but rather one that uses a value-added method that NYSED refuses to explain, that often seems inexplicable (more on this in a moment) and is rigged to find at least 7% of teachers "ineffective."

Sheri Lederman, 19 year veteran teacher, sued the state over her APPR VAM because she went from 14 out of 20 on her state test component to 1 out of 20 in a year - even though her students performed similarly on their tests in both years.

Lederman, who was rated "effective" overall on her evaluation, nonetheless was given an "ineffective" rating on her state test component, something that now matters a lot since Governor Cuomo has insisted the state test component should count for 50% of a teacher's evaluation.

Here's Carol Burris in the Washington Post explaining the irrationality of the system and how it played out in the Lederman court case:

The exasperated New York Supreme Court judge, Roger McDonough, tried to get Assistant Attorney General Galligan to answer his questions. He was looking for clarity and instead got circuitous responses about bell curves, “outliers” and adjustments. Fourth-grade teacher Sheri Lederman’s VAM score of “ineffective” was on trial.

The more Ms. Galligan tried to defend the bell curve of growth scores as science, the more the judge pushed back with common sense. It was clear that he did his homework. He understood that the New York State Education Department’s VAM system artificially set the percentage of “ineffective” teachers at 7 percent. That arbitrary decision clearly troubled him. “Doesn’t the bell curve make it subjective? There has to be failures,” he asked.

The defender of the curve said that she did not like the “failure” word.

The judge quipped, “Ineffectives, how about that?” Those in attendance laughed.

Ms. Galligan preferred the term “outlier.” Those who got ineffective growth scores were “the outliers who are not doing a good job,” the attorney said. She seemed oblivious to the fourth-grade teacher who was sitting not 10 feet away from where she stood.

“Did her students learn nothing?” Justice McDonough asked. “How could it be that she went from 14 out of 20 points to 1 out of 20 points in one year?” He noted that the students’ scores were quite good and not that different from the year before.

Back behind the bell curve Ms. Galligan ran. As she tried to explain once again, the judge said, “Therein lies the imprecise nature of this measure.”

...

Lederman was not the only teacher in the school to get a poor score. In 2014, 21 percent of the staff at E.M. Baker School received a score of “ineffective,” 21 percent “developing” and 57 percent were “effective.”  Just the year before, not one teacher received an “ineffective” score.

The irrationality was not limited to the teachers of Sheri Lederman’s school, one of the highest performing elementary schools in the state. In 2014, 44 percent of the teachers of the Fox Meadow School in Scarsdale received growth scores that said they were not “effective” teachers with 22 percent rated “ineffective.”  Yet 61 percent of the school’s students were proficient in English Language Arts, and 75 percent were proficient in math—more that double the state’s proficiency rate.   Similar results were found at the high-achieving Harbour Hill School in Roslyn, where 36 percent of its teachers received growth scores that labeled them “ineffective.”

The Lincoln School in Rochester, is a school designated as a priority/failing school by the state. Its proficiency rate was less than 3 percent. In 2014, 100 percent of its teachers received “effective” state scores, with 7 percent being rated “highly effective.”  At another school facing receivership, The Martin Luther King Jr School in Utica, New York, 60 percent of the teachers received “effective” VAM scores and 40 percent were given VAM scores of “highly effective .”

I point out these dramatic differences not to disparage or embarrass the teachers of any school, but rather to shine a light on the irrational state-produced teacher scores based on the New York Common Core tests. For more information on the unreliable manner in which these scores functioned in 2013 and 2014, read here.

Bruce Lederman argued the irrationality of that rating system before the court. He laid out a careful, systematic argument. He was not opposed to evaluation. He was not even opposed to evaluation based on a measurement of student learning growth. He objected to a rating created in a black box that spit out predictions that compared his wife’s students to “avatar students.” He was disturbed that when questioned, that system responds with “because we say so.” He noted that “the magic of numbers brings a suspension of common sense.”

“There is nothing in the law that requires a bell curve,” he argued. He explained that a bell curve with its forced failures violates that law that requires that every teacher must be able to get all scores. Not only did he want the court to set aside his wife’s score, he wanted the court to “declare the measure an abuse of discretion” because “the State Education Department does not get a pass on unreasonable and irrational actions.”

NYSED never showed cause for why Lederman received the 1 out of 20 on her VAM score the year after she received 14 out of 20.  They instead tried to have the Lederman case dismissed twice (here and here), arguing there was no harm to Lederman because she was rated "effective" overall despite the "ineffective" VAM score.

But the evaluation system that the Ledermans have put on trial has been made that much worse by Governor Cuomo and the Legislature this year, with test scores now increased to about 50% of a teacher's evaluation rating, so the "irrationality" of the state's APPR VAM matters greatly and a decision by the judge to declare the measure "an abuse of discretion" will have serious consequences for the governor, the Legislature, the Board of Regents, NYSED and teachers and schools all across the state.

But not for the reformers at the DN editorial board.

They want teachers held "accountable" for student performance, the rationality, sanity and justice of the evaluation system be damned, and so, they publish a straw man argument in today's paper to warn Cuomo they will not be happy if his teacher evaluation system is changed and warning that "war" coming between reformers and the rest of the system.

BTW, Sheri Lederman got her latest APPR teacher evaluation rating from the state and her state test component VAM has again changed drastically - she received an 11 out of 20 on it.

So from 14 out of 20 to 1 out of 20 to 11 out of 20 in three year's time.

That's some trend.

How exactly do the reform-friendly writers at the Daily News defend a system that jumps around like that?

Reality is, they don't - they simply ignore the problems with the system, smash their proverbial fists down onto their desks, insist upon "teacher accountability!" and "gird for war!"

A shameful editorial, but just the kind of thing we can expect from education reformers as they desperately try to save their precios education reforms.

NY Times Covers National Teacher Shortage, But Misses Point Of Why It's Happening

And so we've gone from "How do we fire teachers!" to "Gee, we can't find teachers!" in a pretty short period of time - even the education reporter at the NY Times noticed:

ROHNERT PARK, Calif. — In a stark about-face from just a few years ago, school districts have gone from handing out pink slips to scrambling to hire teachers.

Across the country, districts are struggling with shortages of teachers, particularly in math, science and special education — a result of the layoffs of the recession years combined with an improving economy in which fewer people are training to be teachers.

...

Louisville, Ky.; Nashville; Oklahoma City; and Providence, R.I., are among the large urban school districts having trouble finding teachers, according to the Council of the Great City Schools, which represents large urban districts. Just one month before the opening of classes, Charlotte, N.C., was desperately trying to fill 200 vacancies. 

But as is usual with the Times ed coverage, they screw up the story and miss why the shortage is happening:

Educators say that during the recession and its aftermath prospective teachers became wary of accumulating debt or training for jobs that might not exist. As the economy has recovered, college graduates have more employment options with better pay and a more glamorous image, like in a rebounding technology sector.

In California, the number of people entering teacher preparation programs dropped by more than 55 percent between 2008 and 2012, according to the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing. Nationally, the drop was 30 percent between 2010 and 2014, according to federal data. Alternative programs like Teach for America, which will place about 4,000 teachers in schools across the country this fall, have also experienced recruitment problems.

Yes, it's true that a rebounding economy leads fewer people to go into teaching - there are more opportunities available for other kinds of work with "better pay and a more glamorous image."

But unexplored in the Motiko Rich Times piece is one big reason why teaching isn't a job with a glamorous image. - the consequences of 10+ years of corporate education reforms.

Every day you open the newspaper or turn on the TV, you see or hear some teacher-bashing crap, some politician like Christie saying he wants to punch teachers in the face, some rag like the Post blaming teachers for destroying the lives of children by using the Three Little Pigs as a DO NOW exercise to teach POV and bias.

Then there are the new "accountability rules" - the constant observations, the evaluation ratings tied to test scores (as high as 50%), the increased work load and stress for the same (or less) money, the decreased benefits, gutted pensions, and diminished work protections like tenure (Kansas is an emblem of this, but it's happening nationwide too.)

I'd say if kids are looking around at the job landscape and saying "Hell, I can do better than be a teacher!", they're right - and smart for saying it.

I teach seniors and I tell the ones who say they want to be teachers to think twice about the major - that teacher bashing and odious accountability measures (most of which simply add more work to a teacher's load without making them better teachers) make the job miserable these days.

I also tell them that teaching isn't really a career anymore, that the politicians and educrats and oligarchs who fund education reform see it as a McJob that can be filled by untrained temps who do it for a couple of years and move on (or get moved on by accountability measures) to something else.

To that end, the Times again:

Ms. Cavins, 31, who once worked as a paralegal and a nanny, began a credentialing program at Sonoma State University here in Rohnert Park less than a year ago. She still has a semester to finish before she graduates. But later this month she will begin teaching third grade — in both English and Spanish — at Flowery Elementary School in Sonoma. Ms. Cavins said she would lean on mentors at her new school as well as her professors. “You are not on that island all alone,” she said.

Esmeralda Sanchez Moseley, the principal at Flowery, said she could not find a fully credentialed — let alone experienced — teacher to fill the opening. “The applicant pool was next to nothing,” she said. “It’s crazy. Six years ago, this would not have happened, but now that is the landscape we are in.”

Before taking over a classroom solo in California, a candidate typically must complete a post-baccalaureate credentialing program, including stints as a supervised student teacher. But in 2013-14, the last year for which figures are available, nearly a quarter of all new teaching credentials issued in California were for internships that allow candidates to work full time as teachers while simultaneously enrolling in training courses at night or on weekends.

In addition, the number of emergency temporary permits issued to allow non-credentialed staff members to fill teaching posts jumped by more than 36 percent between 2012 and 2013.

At California State University, Fresno, 100 of the 700 candidates enrolled in the teacher credentialing program this year will teach full time while completing their degree.

“We don’t like it,” said Paul Beare, dean of the Fresno State school of education. “But we do it.”

Mission accomplished for education reformers - a cheap untrained temp workforce is soon going to be commonplace in schools, this will lead to an even bigger "teaching quality crisis" and allow reformers to promote privatization as the answer to the "education crisis."

Shame Motiko Rich missed the part of the story about how education reform has helped bring about the national teacher shortage.

But alas, this is another example of a Times ed article that only gets half the story: the "national teaching shortage" is reformer-generated and will serve the ultimate goal of may education reformers - to destroy the public school "monopoly" and privatize the public school system.

The Role Opt Out Will Play In Undoing APPR

A commenter at Perdido Street School blog:

 

The opt out numbers will play an important role when the new APPR eventually gets challenged in court. It's not just the missing scores but the psychological impact on students taking the tests which corrupts the scores they will still use to rate teachers.

The psychological impact of opt out cannot be overestimated, not only on students taking the tests but also on the proponents of the Endless Testing regime.

Governor Cuomo remains in denial about that:

Some testing opponents point to Mr. Cuomo’s effort as a moment that galvanized parents to opt out. But Jim Malatras, his director of state operations, said the rise in test refusals did not signal a political miscalculation on the part of the governor. This kind of reaction, Mr. Malatras said, was to be expected from any substantial shift in policy.

“I don’t think this does anything to change the accountability push,” he said.

But you can hear the concern in this statement from a reformer in the Times article on opt-out:

Robert Pondiscio, a senior fellow and vice president for external affairs at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative education policy organization, said that rather than enforcing the rules, government officials might very well retreat. 

“You could write a really good history of education writ large about our tendency in this country to go from one extreme to the other, and this has all the hallmarks of that,” Mr. Pondiscio said. “This is not a prediction, but it would not surprise me to see New York, or someplace else, go from testing every kid within an inch of their life to testing nobody, ever."

We're not at that point yet, but if and when politicians begin to pay political prices for supporting Common Core and the Endless Testing regime, we will be well on the way to getting there.

Let's make Cuomo - still an accountability lover if ever there was one (at least for public schools) - pay a price.

If Only These Banks Were Teachers

From the NY Times:

For most people, pleading guilty to a felony means they will very likely land in prison, lose their job and forfeit their right to vote.

But when five of the world’s biggest banks plead guilty to an array of antitrust and fraud charges as soon as next week, life will go on, probably without much of a hiccup.

The Justice Department is preparing to announce that Barclays, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and the Royal Bank of Scotland will collectively pay several billion dollars and plead guilty to criminal antitrust violations for rigging the price of foreign currencies, according to people briefed on the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Most if not all of the pleas are expected to come from the banks’ holding companies, the people said — a first for Wall Street giants that until now have had only subsidiaries or their biggest banking units plead guilty.

...

The guilty pleas, scarlet letters affixed to banks of this size and significance, represent another prosecutorial milestone in a broader effort to crack down on financial misdeeds. Yet as much as prosecutors want to punish banks for misdeeds, they are also mindful that too harsh a penalty could imperil banks that are at the heart of the global economy, a balancing act that could produce pleas that are more symbolic than sweeping.

Holding companies, while appearing to be the most important entities at the banks, are in less jeopardy of suffering the consequences of guilty pleas. Some banks worried that a guilty plea by their biggest banking units, which hold licenses that enable them to operate branches and make loans, would be riskier, two of the people briefed on the matter said. The fear, they said, centered on whether state or federal regulators might revoke those licenses in response to the pleas.

Behind the scenes in Washington, the banks’ lawyers are also seeking assurances from federal regulators — including the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Labor Department — that the banks will not be barred from certain business practices after the guilty pleas, the people said. While the S.E.C.’s five commissioners have not yet voted on the requests for waivers, which would allow the banks to conduct business as usual despite being felons, the people briefed on the matter expected a majority of commissioners to grant them.

In reality, those accommodations render the plea deals, at least in part, an exercise in stagecraft. And while banks might prefer a deferred-prosecution agreement that suspends charges in exchange for fines and other concessions — or a nonprosecution deal like the one that UBS is on the verge of losing — the reputational blow of being a felon does not spell disaster.

Maybe if these banks had cheated on some standardized tests, real criminal penalties and jail time would be handed out.

Who Will Become A Teacher In The "Age Of Accountability"?

A commenter on Arthur Goldstein's Daily News piece about Andrew Cuomo's sham evaluation system wonders just what kind of candidates will be attracted to teaching in the "Age of Accountability":

Mr. Goldstein, I could not agree with you more. As I sit here during my "vacation" with a stack of essays and exams to grade, I am also planning my lessons for the remainder of the semester. I have had a very successful career for over two decades and I am not about to allow student test scores from untested Common Core Standards to change what I and my colleagues know works with an underserved population.

If standardized tests are not shared with educators, how in the world are they to guide instruction? Unlike the old Regents exams that we scored in our own schools, we will never see what parts of an exam our students need to work at. All we get is a score that is arbitrarily set by the state to tell us which schools are "failing" or not.

 These evaluations mean nothing to me at this stage of my career but they mean the livelihood of so many others. I worry about what kind of teacher will replace our generation as we retire. Teacher retention is already awful and punitive evaluations will not attract good, caring, and intelligent people into the craft. If teaching is going to be tethered to a numbers game, all we will have for our children are people gaming the system to keep their jobs; no more, no less!

Reformers keep telling us getting a "great teacher" in every classroom is the goal of reform.

And yet, the "gotcha" reforms they keep shoving through, the teacher-bashing they engage in on a daily basis, the coordinated efforts they make to tie teachers to accountability measures teachers have little control over, the glee with which many look to cut our job protections and our wages (merit pay is so much better than salary steps!) - this will get a "great teacher" into every classroom?

More likely this will keep quality candidates from going into education because who the hell wants to deal with all the compliance and accountability nonsense that keeps changing by the year, that keeps being imposed on teachers from above by people with little or no education experience whatsoever?

The commenter is exactly right - awful and punitive evaluations are not going to attract good, caring, and intelligent people to teaching.

The cynic in me wonders just why reformers engage in reforms that are resulting in outcomes that are 180 degrees from what they say they want.

If they really want a "great teacher" in every classroom, why they do engage in a long-term, well-funded coordinated effort to disparage teachers, teaching and public schools?

Teach For America In Recruitment Crisis

From the NY Times:

Teach for America, the education powerhouse that has sent thousands of handpicked college graduates to teach in some of the nation’s most troubled schools, is suddenly having recruitment problems.

For the second year in a row, applicants for the elite program have dropped, breaking a 15-year growth trend. Applications are down by about 10 percent from a year earlier on college campuses around the country as of the end of last month.

The group, which has sought to transform education in close alignment with the charter school movement, has advised schools that the size of its teacher corps this fall could be down by as much as a quarter and has closed two of its eight national summer training sites, in New York City and Los Angeles.

And I'm sure that recruitment crisis has nothing to do with this:

The economic momentum evident late last year carried into 2015, the Labor Department said Friday, with American employers adding 257,000 jobs in January as wage growth rebounded and more people joined the workforce.

With new figures on the last two months of the year, 2014 turned out to be the strongest year for job gains since 1999. The government revised upward the already-healthy figures for payroll gains in November and December, increasing their estimate by 147,000. All told, the economy added, on average, 260,000 jobs a month over the course of the year. 1999.

“This is the best employment report we’ve had in a long time,” said Guy Berger, United States economist at RBS. “The labor market looks like it’s in really good shape as we head into 2015.”

Average hourly earnings rose 0.5 percent in January, the biggest monthly gain in more than six years, though it followed a disappointing increase in December that left the average for the two months running at just over 2 percent, in line with the recent trend.

Still, the overall picture was so strong, Mr. Berger said, that the Federal Reserve might begin its long-awaited move to raise short-term interest rates in June, a step many economists had been expecting to be delayed until September.

And indeed, the Times reports that is one of the problems:

Leaders of the organization say their biggest problem is that the rebounding economy has given high-achieving college graduates more job choices.

“It’s so different from three years ago, where suddenly you have candidates that may have an offer from Facebook and Wells Fargo and an offer to join the T.F.A. corps, and clearly, the money is going to be radically different,” said Lida Jennings, executive director of the Los Angeles office of Teach for America.

But this might be the bigger issue:

When Haleigh Duncan, a junior at Macalester College in St. Paul, first came across Teach for America recruiters on campus during her freshman year in 2012, she was captivated by the group’s mission to address educational inequality.

Ms. Duncan, an English major, went back to her dormitory room and pinned the group’s pamphlet on a bulletin board. She was also attracted by the fact that it would be a fast route into teaching. “I felt like I didn’t want to waste time and wanted to jump into the field,” she said.

But as she learned more about the organization, Ms. Duncan lost faith in its short training and grew skeptical of its ties to certain donors, including the Walton Family Foundation, a philanthropic group governed by the family that founded Walmart. She decided she needed to go to a teachers’ college after graduation. “I had a little too much confidence in my ability to override my lack of experience through sheer good will,” she said.

And of course the biggest might be that after years of attacks on teachers, the teaching profession and teacher benefits and job protections, it's just not a very appealing career choice:

Teaching in general has been losing favor. From 2010 to 2013, the number of student candidates enrolled in teacher training programs fell 12.5 percent, according to federal data.

Andrew Cuomo's about to make teaching an even less appealing career in New York State if he gets his reform agenda.

I can't see Cuomo's desire to link 50% of a teacher's ratings to test scores, fire them if they're deemed "ineffective" on those scores two years running by an NYSED algorithm, weaken tenure such that few teachers will ever get it and streamline the 3020a discipline process so that teaching becomes an at-will position will make the career, such as it is, more appealing.

Ed deformers have been very successful at transforming the teaching profession over the past ten years into a data-driven career with little autonomy and few protections - so successful that few people want to become teachers either in TFA or out.

Time To Trash Cuomo's APPR Teacher Evaluation System

Gary Stern at LoHud:

School superintendents from the Lower Hudson Valley say it's time for the state to shut down it's failed teacher-evaluation system and to pilot new models with the involvement of administrators and teachers.

"There is no simple fix," Valhalla Superintendent Brenda Myers said. "We want this to stop. You can't just mandate and roll out this system and publish scores that are invalid. We warned that this would happen and now we need a moratorium."

The state Board of Regents, which sets education policy, began pursuing a new evaluation system in 2009 as part of its agenda to "reform" schooling in New York. With the strong support of Gov. Andrew Cuomo, the state Legislature adopted a system into law in 2010 that has been widely criticized by school districts and teachers.

...

A new study commissioned by the superintendents group identified problems with the complex scoring system. Superintendents also say they gleaned little useful information from the first full year of results.

"If the goals of this reform agenda were to improve teacher accountability, improve a district's ability to remove incompetent teachers, to provide data to inform teacher practice, and improve student achievement — it has been a costly and wholly avoidable failure," said Harrison Superintendent Louis Wool, who co-chairs the committee with Myers.

The goal of the reform agenda is always to breed as much chaos and disruption in the public education system as possible.

The more chaos and disruption reformers can bring to education, the faster they can destroy it, privatize it and profit off of it.

APPR is an emblem of chaos and disruption, bringing about wholesale changes to teacher evaluations that have done nothing to improve the system but much to exhaust the people and resources in it:

For 2012-13, the first year when all school districts outside New York City used the system, 91.5 percent of teachers statewide were rated "effective" or "highly effective." Results for 2013-14 are expected to be released by the end of the year.

State Education Department officials have said that they want to review more data before considering changes. But local superintendents do not want to wait. They say the current system falsely implies that teachers can be compared based on their ratings.

"The system creates an illusion of accountability," Byram Hills Superintendent William Donohue said.

The study commissioned by the superintendents group looked at 2012-13 results for 1,400 teachers in 32 districts in Westchester, Rockland, Putnam and Dutchess counties. It found that, because of the state's uneven scoring scales, districts must give teachers high scores for classroom observations — an average of 58.1 out of 60 — to ensure they don't get "unjustly" low overall ratings.

It's a mess and it was meant to be a mess.

And it's only going to get worse:

Cuomo has said several times in recent weeks that the evaluation system needs to be revised. He told "The Buffalo News" that results have been too positive.

"Not everybody can get an 'A,' it can't be," he said.

So get ready for the reformers and the politicians in their pockets - like Cuomo - to push for the so-called accountability mechanisms to get ratcheted up because not enough teachers around the state were found "developing" or "ineffective" even as local superintendents are saying the system is worse than useless and calling for it to be scrapped.

If you're a reader of this blog, you know I'm with the superintendents and want to see the system scrapped.

That's because real accountability for teachers must be built into a fair, just, workable evaluation system - and APPR wasn't built for that and can't be made into it.

Be A Teacher - Read A Script, Follow Orders, Raise Test Scores Or Be Fired!

What a joke this is:

With so much teacher bashing, who in the world would want to teach? 

Seeking to combat such sentiments, the Department of Education — in partnership with the Advertising Council, Microsoft, State Farm Insurance, Teach for America, the nation’s two largest teachers’ unions and several other educational groups — is unveiling a public service campaign this week aimed at recruiting a new generation of classroom educators. 

According to the Department of Education, as many as one million teachers could retire in the next four to six years. Hoping to attract young, high-achieving college graduates — particularly in science, math and engineering — the campaign, called Teach, uses video spots and radio announcements that portray teaching as creative, invigorating and meaningful, and as compelling a career as medicine, acting or engineering. 

...

Microsoft, along with State Farm, is financially supporting the campaign with an undisclosed amount. Some of the funding will be used to hire recruiters to visit college campuses and talk to juniors and seniors about a career in education. 

“The challenge is to change the conversation around teaching so that it becomes the career that you want your child to go into,” said Kathy Payne, senior director of education leadership at State Farm, “rather than the career that you counsel children out of.”

Even the clueless Motoko Rich manages to get a "What Jive This Thing Is" quote:

The campaign comes at a time when public education is increasingly riven by battles over the use of standardized testing in teacher performance evaluations and the rollout of the Common Core, new benchmarks for what students need to know and be able to do between kindergarten and the end of high school. The standards have been adopted by 45 states and the District of Columbia.

Some critics say that such policies, which have been encouraged by the Department of Education, could make recruiting top candidates to the profession more difficult. 

“Obviously teaching is a wonderful profession, but I think it’s a little blithe in the way that it presents the profession,” said Anthony Cody, a former public-school teacher and current education blogger, of the Teach ads. “It’s a very tough job and it’s being made tougher every year, and a lot of the other things that the Department of Education is doing are making it really difficult to stay in the profession.” 

Reading the Common Core scripts, having lesson planning and autonomy taken from you, having test scores of other individuals you cannot control used to evaluate you, having value-added algorithms with margins of error larger than Bill Gates' ego used to calculate yearly ratings, having your salary based on voodoo VAM calculations, getting bashed by politicians, business leaders, professional teacher haters, and two bit celebrities like Rosie Perez every day of the year - yeah, teaching really is a glamorous job full of lots of creativity and meaning.

Please - jive ass crap from the same corporate criminals and political functionaries who have been busy destroying the teaching profession for the past decade +.

Arne Duncan Is, As Usual, Full Of Crap

Lisa Fleischer at the Wall Street Journal:

The next New York City mayor will take control of the nation’s largest school system. But don’t look to the U.S. Secretary of Education for guidance on which candidate would be best for the city’s 1.1 million public schoolchildren.

“I haven’t followed it that closely,” Secretary Arne Duncan said of the mayor’s race in an interview Tuesday.

Duncan famously said that his tenure at the USDOE will have been a failure if there aren't more cities and districts under mayoral control after he leaves his seat of power than before he took it.

You see, Duncan is not a big believer in democracy.

Rather he is a big believer in autocratic mayoral control in which one man or woman (but mostly a man) gets to push through whatever the hell they want no matter how people in the community feel about these actions and policies and without any recourse for anybody to do anything about it.

Duncan very much likes the way autocrat Mike Bloomberg has run his school system, shoving through as many disruptive changes and administering as much shock and awe as possible to the system in his 12 years in power.

De Blasio's win in the Democratic primary is seen as a rejection of that Bloomberg education reform platform:

Some have said that the election of Mr. de Blasio was a repudiation of Mr. Bloomberg’s education-reform policies, which include using test scores to measure students, teachers and schools, and embracing competition among schools.

You can bet that Duncan was watching this election closely and hoping for a Christine Quinn win.

You can also bet that if de Blasio follows through on a charter school moratorium, a relaxation of the Bloomberg fixation on testing, and the other progressive education policies he ran on during the primary, Duncan will be very sad and will work to undercut de Blasio from Washington.

Arne Duncan is that kinda guy.

He likes his corporate ed deform policies - charter school expansion, school closures, teacher firings, Endless Testing, and teacher evaluations tied to test scores - and anybody who tries to put a stop to even one of those tenets of the education reform doctrine will get pushback from Arne and his USDOE.

Witness how Duncan is taking on California for putting a stop to their state testing program while they implement the Common Core tests.

In the end, no matter what de Blasio wants to implement here in NYC, much ed deform pressure is going to come from Andy Cuomo, John King, Barack Obama and Arne Duncan to make sure that the nation's largest school system does not turn from the education deform policies that have been instituted by the powers that be during the Bloomberg years.

De Blasio will have his work cut out for him if he truly intends to turn the clock back on the destructive Bloomberg/Klein/Bush/Obama/Duncan/Cuomo/King/Tisch education deform policies.

What These Latest Polls Mean For Standardized Testing And Teacher Evaluations

Two polls out recently show conflicting results over public support for standardized testing and teacher evaluations tied to test scores.

The AP-NORC poll got a lot of press the other day because it seemed to show vast public support for testing:

WASHINGTON — Often criticized as too prescriptive and all-consuming, standardized tests have support among parents, who view them as a useful way to measure both students’ and schools’ performances, according to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll.

Most parents also say their own children are given about the right number of standardized tests, according to the AP-NORC poll.

They’d like to see student performance on statewide exams used in evaluating teachers, and almost three-quarters said they favored changes that would make it easier for schools to fire poorly performing teachers.

“The tests are good because they show us where students are at, if they need help with anything,” said Vicky Nevarez, whose son Jesse just graduated from high school in Murrieta, Calif. “His teachers were great and if there were problems, the tests let me know.”

The polling results are good news for states looking to implement increased accountability standards and for those who want to hold teachers responsible for students’ slipping standing against other countries’ scores. Teachers’ unions have objected to linking educators’ evaluations to student performance.

Reformers hailed this poll, pointing to it as proof positive that parents and the public love all things reformy and states can go full speed ahead on standardized testing and teacher evaluations tied to those tests.

But a PDK/Gallup taken in May and released yesterday shows different results:

The poll also found eroding support for standardized testing, with fewer than 25 percent of respondents saying they believe increased testing has helped to improve public schools. Connected to that is a sharp, one-year decline among Americans who favor using student scores on standardized tests as a measure of teachers’ job performance. In the 2012 poll, 52 percent of poll respondents said they favored using test scores to evaluate teachers. This year, support dropped to 41 percent.

...


The PDK/Gallup poll, which is its 45th annual survey on public attitudes toward public schools, was conducted by telephone in May. The national survey of 1,001 respondents 18 and older has a margin of error of 3.8 percent.

The findings on standardized testing—that fewer than one in four of those responding believe that more student testing has led to better public schools—stand in sharp contrast to the results in another national poll published this week by the Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research at the University of Chicago.

In its question on testing, the PDK/Gallup poll told respondents that there had been a significant increase in testing before asking them to answer whether they thought more testing had helped, hurt, or made no difference in the performance of public schools.

The AP survey—which polled parents and guardians with children in grades K-12—posed a different question. In asking parents how important it is for schools to regularly assess students, 74 percent said it was either extremely or very important to use tests to gauge both how their children are doing and how schools are measuring up. In the same poll, 61 percent of parents said their own children are given about the right number of standardized tests, while 26 percent said their children are overtested.
Sixty percent also said that students’ scores on state tests should be included in teacher evaluations.

The PDK/Gallup survey, however, found that 58 percent of respondents oppose requiring teacher evaluations to include student scores on standardized tests. That’s a reversal of public opinion from just last year, when 47 percent of PDK/Gallup respondents opposed using test scores in evaluations.

So, depending upon how you ask questions around standardized testing issues, you either get overwhelming public support for standardized testing or overwhelming belief that standardized testing has not improved education.

When relying on general knowledge of standardized testing issues, most parents say their children are given just the right amount of tests.

But when parents are given context - NCLB increased the amount of standardized testing, Race to the Top will increase that amount even more - most parents say standardized testing is not improving education for children.

We are at the cusp of the Common Core standards implementation movement in 45 states around the country.

Along with those new standards will come new Common Core tests - just like the ones that New York State gave last April that saw scores plummet across the state.

In addition, as part of Race to the Top and NCLB waiver mandates, the Obama administration is requiring states to tie teacher evaluations to "student performance" - a euphemism for standardized testing.

Here in NYC, students will be subject to taking both city and state tests in every subject, K-12, in order to pull off the new APPR teacher evaluation system that requires 40% of a teacher's evaluation come from test scores (20% from state tests and 20% from "local measures.")

On top of all of that testing, some students are forced to take "field tests" during the year to help Pearson, the state's testing vendor, and the NYSED develop testing materials for future state "assessments."

We have already seen more than 1,500 children, parents and teachers join together in Port Jefferson to protest the state's testing regime.

As more and more tests are added to the year not to help assess where students are academically but rather to evaluate their teachers and schools based on growth measures and/or value-added measurements, you can bet that parents won't need to be given any context around these testing issues - they will see for themselves just how damaging the testing regime is to children, teachers and schools.

Indeed, the PDK/Gallup poll indicates many parents are already growing skeptical of teacher evaluations tied to test scores.

In last year's poll, 52% of respondents approved of using standardized test scores in teacher evaluations while 47% opposed.

In this year's poll, 41% of respondents supported using test scores in teacher evaluations, 58% opposed.

That's an 11% shift in one year - a year when more tests and assessments were rolled out for children to take so that their teachers and schools could be evaluated using the scores.

The test rollouts are only going to increase in the coming years, as more and more states begin giving standardized tests based on the Common Core standards and more and more states put their teacher evaluation systems tied to test scores on line, as required by the Obama administration for RttT funds or NCLB waivers.

The state commissioner in Kentucky - a state that has already rolled out the new Common Core tests and seen scores drop precipitously - acknowledged that the PDK/Gallup poll findings gave him pause over the evaluation issue:

Terry Holliday, the commissioner of education in Kentucky, said that the one-year change in the public’s view is an important data point to weigh.

“For Kentucky, where we have been slow and deliberate about how we are doing our evaluations, this tells me that we need to be even more cautious,” he said.

The president of the State Board of Education in California, Michael Kurst, told the San Jose Mercuty News that "he was surprised by the apparent change in public opinion related to using test scores in teacher evaluations."

The trajectory of public support for standardized testing and teacher evaluations tied to test scores is turning against reformers and the Obama administration.

There is a lot of propaganda out there right now, with the corporate education reform movement having to battle opponents on both the left and the right over the new Common Core standards.

The corporate education reformers are bringing out the big guns in their propaganda war - from Bill and Paul Krugman of the NY Times to Jeb Bush and Chris Christie - to convince the public that Common Core and the tests associated with the new standards are good things for children and schools.

But propaganda doesn't work so well when it comes in direct conflict with person's experience, and as the states roll out dozens of new tests tied to Common Core and scores plunge across the country as they already have in New York State and Kentucky and teachers come under the gun under the new teacher evaluation systems based upon these scores, it's going to become one of those "What are you going to believe - the propaganda in the media or your own lying eyes?" kind of thing.

Context and experience is everything in this fight - and the more context and experience parents and the public get with the Common Core and the associated tests, the more the opposition to both will grow.

NY Post: NYC Prinicpals Rarely Held Accountable

Not a surprise to those of us in the system:

They dole out discipline to teachers and students, but city school principals rarely get a taste of their own medicine.

In the past three years, just two of 14 principals formally accused of misconduct have been fired — and not a single boss in the city’s 1,600 schools was charged with incompetence, officials told The Post.

The disciplinary deficiency raises questions when 217 elementary and middle schools received grades of F, D or consecutive C’s on the city’s latest report cards, and 31 high schools rated D or F.

“The numbers don’t add up to the Bloomberg administration’s goal to hold everybody accountable,” a veteran teacher said.

The DOE offers excuses for why principals at "failing" schools should stay in place:

“Some administrators worked at schools that weren’t doing so well, but that doesn’t mean they’re not highly effective administrators,” said Deputy Chancellor David Weiner. “It just means they’re in a school that’s struggling.”

Ah, but the DOE wants teachers in "failing" schools removed and tried to do just that with the turnaround mess last year.

And just how bad are some of the principals in this system?

Pretty bad:

Some principals stay in place despite serious problems.

Darlene Miller, chief of the NYC Museum School in Chelsea, was busted in December 2011 on DWI charges in Rockland County, when her speeding Hyundai smashed into the rear of a parked police car. She failed to report the arrest as required.

But the DOE will not discipline Miller until her criminal case is resolved, if at all. She has won delays in the DWI case, which remains open.

Anissa Chalmers of PS 32 in Morrisania, the target of staff and parent complaints, has been under DOE investigation for an undisclosed matter for more than a year. Last June, an 8-year-old pupil slashed a 9-year-old classmate’s neck with a razor at the school. Chalmers is also an actress and starred in a bloody B-flick, “Gang Girl,” as a killer thug, but did not tell the DOE about the content.

...

In a case of wrongdoing rewarded, Janet Saraceno, then-principal of Lehman HS in The Bronx, improperly changed student grades and gave credits to students who failed classes, a probe concluded. She quit Lehman in August 2011, but the DOE kept her on to advise principals and teachers on curriculum and other matters as an “achievement coach.”

 The DOE issues some jive for why they refuse to hold these kinds of administrators accountable:

The DOE denies it lets principals slide. “There are many ways we hold principals accountable,” said spokesman David Pena. “Not only are bonuses based on their school’s progress report cards, but tenure decisions are also based on performance. We work with struggling principals, and where the problems persist many of those principals opt to resign.”

Sure they do.

We learned earlier in the article that there's nobody to go after these principals because the DOE doesn't really care to put anybody in place to monitor them:

The principals union agrees that the Department of Education fails to adequately monitor principals, who are paid up to $150,000 a year, to either help or weed out poor performers.

“They haven’t been in the schools observing,” said Robert Reich, director of grievances for the Council of Supervisors and Administrators.

The superintendents, stripped of real authority, often “rubber-stamp” decisions from above, he said. “If no one’s ever told a principal that he or she isn’t doing something right, how can you justify removing them?”

All of this expended energy and rewritten law and policy to hold "bad teachers" accountable, but the "Gang Girl" principal with numerous staff and parent complaints against her at P.S. 32 is still in place.

Just another example of how there are two standards in the system - one for administrators and Tweedies, one for everybody else.

How Bad Will King's Evaluation System Be?

The sham testimony for the APPR system for NYC teachers takes place today and tomorrow between Commissioner King, the UFT and the DOE.

King will announce something this weekend.

You can bet the system is already a done deal and the "testimony" is nothing more than a formality.

How bad will it be?

Since the UFT happily abdicated negotiation to an "independent" arbitrator who is anything but independent (the head of the NYSED and a former charter school hack/pro-testing champion), it's going to be pretty bad.

The good news is, Mayor Bloomberg is out of office in a little over seven months.

The bad news is, he may be replaced by somebody who will keep whatever system King imposes in place rather than negotiating changes with the UFT.

If there is a bright side to all of this, it's that the more unworkable and insane the system is, the more likely the whole thing falls apart under it's own unworkability and insanity or is successfully challenged and killed in court.

Still, it's going to be a rough time for students, teachers, and schools under this insanity.

Education Reformer Caught Plagiarizing Column, Blames It On Assistant

News Corporation journalist Juan Williams hates teachers unions because he believes they allow teachers to be unaccountable.

Just last week, he wrote a Wall Street Journal opinion piece about how the largesse Bill Gates and other "business leaders" give to education reform and schools doesn't benefit students because of "a lack of teacher accountability and school choice."

Williams believes union protections allow teachers to protect the "failing" status quo of the school system, fight even "modest efforts to alter the status quo," and hammer any politicians with the courage to take on the status quo with "strikes, protests, negative ads and litigation."

Williams is cheered that politicians in both parties - like Bobby Jindal, Chris Christie, Rahm Emanuel, and Andrew Cuomo - are courageous enough to take on the evil teachers unions and begin to hold the up-til-now unaccountable public school teachers accountable for their performance and hopes that more politicians and business leaders will follow the reform path of teacher accountability.

That column - with "the need for teacher accountability" as it's main theme - appeared on February 28.

On March 2, Salon found that The Hill, a political journal Williams writes for, had published a Williams column on February 18 which Williams, the stickler for teacher accountability, had partly plagiarized from a Center for American Progress report on immigration.

Here is Alex Seitz-Wald, the Salon writer who caught the plagiarism:

In a case of apparent plagiarism, Fox News pundit Juan Williams lifted — sometimes word for word — from a Center for American Progress report, without ever attributing the information, for a column he wrote last month for the Hill newspaper.

Almost two weeks after publication, the column was quietly revised online, with many of the sections rewritten or put in quotation marks, and this time citing the CAP report. It also included an editor’s note that read: “This column was revised on March 2, 2013, to include previously-omitted attribution to the Center for American Progress.”

But that editor’s note mentions only the attribution problem, and not the nearly identical wording that was also fixed.

In a phone interview Thursday evening, Williams pinned the blame on a researcher who he described as a “young man.”

“I was writing a column about the immigration debate and had my researcher look around to see what data existed to pump up this argument and he sent back what I thought were his words and summaries of the data,” Williams told Salon. “I had never seen the CAP report myself, so I didn’t know that the young man had in fact not summarized the data but had taken some of the language from the CAP report.”

Hugo Gurdon, the editor in chief of the Hill, told Salon on Thursday evening that: “CAP drew the similarities between Juan’s column and their report to my attention and I spoke to Juan about it. He went back and looked at the two and spoke to me having had a look and acknowledged there were unacceptable similarities.

“And he gave me an explanation, which I found satisfactory. And I believe there was an honest mistake and it related to the transfer of copy and the use of a researcher and it was completely inadvertent. He was very concerned to set the record straight.

“All parties — CAP, the Hill and Juan — were satisfied that we had not dramatically changed the column after the fact to conceal what had happened.”

Williams told Salon that the researcher has submitted a letter of resignation, but that he has not decided whether to accept it. “I just feel betrayed,” Williams said.

Williams claimed the plagiarized part of the column was "not the start or ending of the column — it’s not the theory of the column. It’s just the data.”

Salon writer Seitz-Wald disagreed:

There are three key passages where the CAP report and Williams’ original column are similar.
In the first example, here’s the original language from the CAP study:

According to the National Foundation for American Policy, immigrants will add a net of $611 billion to the Social Security system over the next 75 years. Immigrants are a key driver of keeping the Social Security Trust Fund solvent, and Stuart Anderson of the National Foundation for American Policy finds that cutting off immigration to the country would increase the size of the Social Security deficit by 31 percent over 50 years.

Here’s what Williams wrote in the original published version of his February 18 column, as found through a Google cache search:

According to the independent National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP), immigrants will contribute $611 billion to the Social Security system over the next 75 years. Indeed, immigrants are a key force in keeping the Social Security trust fund solvent for older Americans who are at or near retirement. NFAP also found that halting all immigration into the United Size [sic] would explode the size of the Social Security deficit by at least 31 percent over 50 years.

To the first sentence, Williams added the word “independent.” In the second sentence, he added “indeed” and turned “key driver” into “key force.” He split CAP’s second sentence into two, but the language is strikingly similar — “cutting off” becomes “halting” while “increase” becomes “explode.”
But that section of the story was dramatically rewritten and republished on March 2, with the editor’s note. Here’s how that paragraph is cast in the version of the column that appears online at The Hill now:

The CAP report makes the point. It cites a study on the impact of immigration reform by the independent National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP). That study finds immigrants will contribute $611 billion to the Social Security system in the next 75 years. Indeed, the arrival of newcomers is key to funding Social Security for older Americans who are at or near retirement. NFAP found that halting all immigration into the United States would explode the size of the Social Security deficit. They estimate an increase of at least 31 percent in that deficit in the next 50 years without continued immigration.

In this second example, we’ve italicized the borrowed wording:
CAP writes:

These big gains occur because legalized workers earn higher wages than undocumented workers, and they use those wages to buy things such as houses, cars, phones, and clothing. … Hinojosa-Ojeda found that the tax benefits alone from legalization would be between $4.5 billion and $5.4 billion in the first three years.

Here’s how the cached version of Williams’ column reads:

These big gains occur because legalized workers earn higher wages than undocumented workers, and they use those wages to buy things and stimulate the economy through commerce. Professor Hinojosa-Ojeda also calculated that the tax benefits alone from legalization would be between $4.5 billion and $5.4 billion in the first three years.

The revised version not only attributes that to the CAP reports, but the paragraph is rewritten to put the borrowed language in quotation marks. Again, the editor’s note mentions only the attribution problem and not the word-for-word echo that now appears in quotes.

In citing that study, CAP attributes the increase in GDP to gains that “occur because legalized workers earn higher wages than undocumented workers and they use those wages to buy” merchandise. That stimulates the economy through commerce.

A third section of the story also appears to have been borrowed and then changed.
In the CAP report:

Demographers Randy Capps, Michael Fix, and Everett Henderson, for example, compared welfare-participation rates of legal permanent resident immigrants to the native born. When controlling for income, they found that immigrants had similar—if not lower—participation rates than natives in the three main social programs: welfare, food stamps, and Medicaid. At the 200 percent poverty line—a common threshold for low-income households—32 percent of native families received food stamps, compared to 22 percent of naturalized-citizen immigrant families.

In Williams’ original column:

Jeffrey S. Passel and Michael E. Fix, two respected demographers, recently compared the welfare participation rates of legal immigrants to native-born American citizens. Controlling for income, they found that immigrants had nearly identical — and in some cases lower — participation rates than citizens in the three big social programs: welfare, food stamps, and Medicaid. They found that 32 percent of natural-born citizen families at the 200 percent poverty line received food stamps, compared to only 22 percent of immigrant families.

And finally the rewritten column, which again adds an attribution to CAP and quotation marks to the borrowed language, but retains many echoes:

 The CAP study also included reference to a report by Randy Capps, Everett Henderson and Michael E. Fix, respected demographers, comparing the welfare participation rates of legal immigrants to native-born American citizens. The Center’s conclusion is that the three demographers show that “controlling for income… immigrants had similar —if not lower — participation rates” than American-born citizens who get benefits from three safety net programs: welfare, food stamps, and Medicaid. They found that 32 percent of natural-born citizen families at the 200 percent poverty line received food stamps, compared to only 22 percent of naturalized immigrant families.

What's worse than Williams' trying to minimize the plagiarism by changing the column after the revelations is how he tries to blame the mess on the assistant.

To wit:

“I was writing a column about the immigration debate and had my researcher look around to see what data existed to pump up this argument and he sent back what I thought were his words and summaries of the data,” Williams told Salon. “I had never seen the CAP report myself, so I didn’t know that the young man had in fact not summarized the data but had taken some of the language from the CAP report.”

 ...

Williams told Salon that the researcher has submitted a letter of resignation, but that he has not decided whether to accept it. “I just feel betrayed,” Williams said.

So Juan Williams was plagiarizing words from his assistant who had plagiarized them from the CAP report but Williams is the one who has been betrayed and the assistant is the one who has to lose his job.

How's that for personal accountability from Juan Williams, the teacher accountability man?

Williams should be fired from his Hill gig not only because he plagiarized a column from the Center for Amercan Progress report but because he sees nothing wrong with plagiarizing the words of his assistant without offering any attribution and only publicly discloses he lifted someone else's words when that someone else is caught lifting those words too.

Just another example of an education reformer who promotes the idea that teachers need to be "held accountable" for performance but refuses accountability for himself.

In that way, Williams fits right in with Bloomberg, Klein, Rhee, Duncan, et al.

NY Post And NY Daily News Slap At Andrew Cuomo Over Teacher Evaluations

Ooh, lookee here - Rupert Murdoch just slapped Cuomo across the face with today's editorial on teacher evaluations and the Daily News made matters worse by comparing him unfavorably (at least in their minds) to the behemoth across the Hudson, Chris Christie (who happens to be Cuomo's rival, perhaps, for the 2016 WH race.)

Cuomo never likes to be criticized by any news outlets, but he especially hates to be taken to task publicly by his patron, Rupert Murdoch, or Murdoch's proxy in Albany, Fred Dicker.

You can bet Cuomo will respond the way he always responds when slapped by Murdoch - he'll act as fast as he can to make Uncle Rupert happy.

Remember, that's what he did the last time Murdoch slapped at him by calling him "Chicken Cuomo" on Twitter over teacher evaluations.

Within hours, Cuomo responded by giving Uncle Rupert everything he wanted (at least at that time) on evaluations.

But now it turns out it wasn't enough.

How long will it take for Cuomo to give Murdoch what he wants once again?

Oh, and one last thing - are the DN and Post coordinating editorials?

Funny how they ran the same one on the same day.

Daily News editor Colin Myler of course is a former criminal, er, employee of News Corporation, so perhaps there is some coordination there.

Or perhaps somebody in the education reform/hedge fundie world pushed to have the editorial pages run the editorials so close together.

More likely it's the second choice.

With the start of school just a few weeks away, I suspect we are about to get a very heavy-handed push from the education reform world and their media mouthpieces to get a punitive, test-centric teacher evaluation deal here in NYC that will give the DOE the right to impose dozens of local standardized tests in every subject in every grade on top of the state tests and use the scores from both to evaluate and fire teachers.

Who cares if adding dozens of high stakes standardized tests a year to every grade in every subject makes sense?

Who cares if this so-called accountability movement is actually doing much more harm than good to kids?

After all, there is money to be made by Uncle Rupert and the rest of the reformers on all the testing, the test prep and the accountability and data tracking tools, and there is money to be saved by firing all those expensive veteran teachers and replacing them with cheaper (and disposable) newbies.

Albany Pols Know This Teacher Evaluation System Is Unworkable

Governor Cuomo patted himself on the back for completing what he called the best legislative session in modern political history by forcing a teacher evaluation disclosure plan through the Assembly and the State Senate yesterday.

The plan hides the names of individual teachers from media and public scrutiny, but allows parents to see the evaluations of their children's teachers with names attached.

Everybody else can see the teacher evaluations for each school without the names attached.

As has been his wont throughout his tenure as governor, Cuomo bullied his way through this, putting out a plan that he said pols could take or leave. He refused to negotiate any details after Monday.

So members of the Assembly and the State Senate passed Cuomo's plan - but not without dissent or a desire to revise it in the future:

In the Assembly, discussion lasted nearly three hours, touching on everything from complaints about the federal No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top programs to concerns over testing and fairness. It passed, 118-17, though many said they voted “yea” reluctantly.

For many, the choice came down to accepting a bill that generally maintains teacher privacy, or doing nothing — the latter option would have meant that instructors could be identified publicly along with their evaluations, as happened in the city earlier this year when scores were published in newspapers.

“This particular path we’re on is a mistake, and we need to rethink what we’re doing here; but clearly we don’t want a repeat of last February’s or March’s media disaster,” said Assemblyman James Brennan (D-Brooklyn) in voting “yes.”

...

Several lawmakers said they voted for the bill with the desire to make changes in the future — but Cuomo quickly said he has “no intention of revisiting the bill in six months or a year.”

Even some Senate Republicans know this teacher evaluation plan of Cuomo's is a sham:

Assemblyman Steven F. McLaughlin, a Republican from the capital region whose wife is a kindergarten teacher, predicted that parents would post the teacher data they receive on the Internet for all to see.

“I already went to GoDaddy.com — you can get teacherscores.org or .net, that’s available, you can grab that,” Mr. McLaughlin said. He added, “It seems like we’ve got the torches and the pitchforks and we’re coming after the teaching profession.”

Cuomo may have “no intention of revisiting the bill in six months or a year," but he's going to have to because the way the evaluations will now play out is exactly the way Mr. McLaughlin says they will.

Don't be surprised to see some astroturf "parent group" funded by the hedge fund managers/education reformers put up such a site and begin to collect "data" and names from all New York City schools, all in the interest of "public disclosure."

And don't be surprised to see some semblance of NY1, the Daily News, the Post, the Wall Street Journal and the NY Times publish the data with names attached as part of some story about the overall effectiveness of the teacher evaluation law and the existence of the "parent-created data sites."

As Mr. McLaughlin says, they've got it out for teachers and the teaching profession and the plan passed in Albany isn't going to stop Murdoch, Zuckerman, and the corporate education reform movement from demonizing as many teachers as they can next year.

But here's the crux of this issue - while the media fights for full disclosure of the names and data and Cuomo strikes his "balance" between disclosure and privacy, no one is looking at the integrity of the system itself.

The tests are a mess. The ones we've seen so far, developed by both the state and the city, have been error-riddled embarrassments.

Does anybody really think Dr. John King, who couldn't put out the 4th-8th grade math or ELA tests this year without major mistakes, or the city, which couldn't put out a few foreign language exams without major mistakes, are going to be able to put out all the state and local exams for all the subjects - ELA, math, social studies, science, art, music, foreign language and physical education - in all grades year after year without making a mess of it?

And does anybody think Dr. King, the same genius who first defended Pearson's Pineapple and Hare passage as excellent test material, can develop a value-added measurement of teachers that is fair and workable?

In the best of circumstances, value-added measurements of individuals have high margins of error and wide swings in stability.

Add error-riddled tests to the equation and a circus-like atmosphere around the disclosure of the evaluation data and names and you have a recipe for disaster.

I spoke to someone in a State Senator's office who told me that most Albany pols in both parties know that the teacher evaluation and state testing systems are unworkable and will have to be revised in coming years.

This person said she thought once parents saw the sheer insanity of a system that forces students to take 35+ tests a year to grade their teachers, they'll balk over it and force changes.

This person also said parents aren't go to like to find out that teachers now have to "compete" with each other on a state-developed value-added bell curve and will force changes to that too.

Now Governor Cuomo, who is of course infallible and the smartest person ever, who just capped this legislative session by saying “This bill is the metaphorical cherry on the cake to the end of what I believe is one of the most successful and broad- ranging legislative sessions in modern political history" is not going to want to revise this teacher evaluation system.

But the politicians in Albany of BOTH parties know what has been put into law is totally unworkable and once the consequences of the system become clear to their constituents - from the 35+ standardized tests a year students will take simply to grade their teachers to the terrible quality of the tests themselves to the insanity of making teachers compete against each other for their evaluations along the value-added bell curve - this system will be revised whether Governor Cuomo likes it or not.

Unfortunately there will be a lot of damage done to students, teachers, schools and public education before that happens.

Education Reformers Look To Remove The Most Talented Teachers

See here:

I suppose the leaders of D.C. Public Schools want me to be happy that social studies teacher Kerry Sylvia won’t be coming back to Cardozo Senior High next year. The sound bite sounded appealing when DCPS Chancellor Kaya Henderson announced recently in her new strategic plan that one way to improve graduation rates is to focus on teacher talent — to remove bad teachers and replace them with better ones. But what if, however well intentioned, the reforms are actually leaving uninspired teachers in place and getting rid of some of the best talent?

When I heard that Sylvia had received a notice last month that she was being “excessed” from Cardozo after 13 years, it didn’t add up. I know good teaching, having taught high school for 16 years myself and helped to design the celebrated teacher evaluation system in Montgomery County. My daughter is about to graduate from DCPS, and I have been an engaged parent and a close DCPS observer for 14 years.

Sylvia is clearly a brilliant teacher, committed to her students, her school and its community. She is not only an award-winning teacher but also a leader and student advocate. I’ve talked with her students, several of whom told me that Sylvia’s class was the reason they come to school. If the District’s new plan is eliminating teachers like Sylvia, it’s on the wrong track.

...

In March, Post reporter Bill Turque penned an insightful profile of another demonstrably terrific teacher, Sarah Wysocki from MacFarland Middle School, who was fired from DCPS after getting low scores in her IMPACT evaluation. The mechanical process of IMPACT insults good teachers and doesn’t do justice to the complexities of good teaching.

If the reform strategies in place in DCPS were working, then perhaps a resolute and unsympathetic response to so-called “soft issues” of staff morale and workforce culture would be understandable. But gains in student achievement in DCPS have stalled. The dropout crisis continues. It’s not that reform isn’t a good idea, but these modest results call for some humility. They might even call for listening to the wisdom of accomplished teachers we can’t afford to lose.

And next year, this kind of teacher evaluation system comes to New York State, thanks to Governor Cuomo, NYSED Commissioner King and Regents Chancellor Tisch.

Should go swimmingly.

And when it doesn't, the people in charge will blame the teachers, as Bill Gates did when his "small schools initiative" failed.

Hell, it couldn't be his fault the program was a bust.

Must be the teachers.

Let's put some galvanic skin bracelets on them, put some cameras in the classroom, add 35+ high stakes standardized tests a year and tie teacher evaluations to the scores.

That should improve things!

And when it doesn't, we'll blame it on the teachers and the policymakers and the edu-entrpreneurs like Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee will continue to cash in for millions.