Quinnipiac Poll: Voters Back Teachers Unions Over Cuomo, 54%-31%

Capitol Confidential reports on a Quinnipiac Poll out this morning that finds 65% of New Yorkers do not believe standardized tests are the best way to measure student learning.

The poll finds a split for opt out (48%-47%), with huge regional disparities - opt out has more support upstate and in the suburbs than in New York City.

And the poll finds voters back teachers over Cuomo generally on specific issues like tenure and merit pay as well:

Though what voters think of opt-outs is a mixed bag, they’re put more faith in the teachers unions, which pushed the opt-out movement, to improve education than they put in the governor (54-31). Voters also strongly rebuke the idea of teacher pay and tenure being based on how well students perform on standardized tests.

If you're an education deformer pushing an education deform agenda, the poll numbers are moving against you on a host of issues, from tenure to teacher pay to standardized testing to Common Core.

Even the opt out findings are a victory for the Opt Out movement.

Can you imagine 48% saying it was okay to opt children out of standardized tests just a couple of years ago?

Campbell Brown To Hammer De Blasio For Not Being Reformy Enough

Keshia Clukey at Politico NY:

ALBANY — Campbell Brown, the former news anchor turned anti-teacher tenure advocate, is hoping her keynote address Wednesday night to the Business Council of New York State's annual conference will spur its members to focus attention on education reform.

...

Brown said she will focus her speech on student achievement and income inequality and that the keynote, which she will deliver at The Sagamore Resort in Bolton Landing, will also take issue with New York City mayor Bill de Blasio, whose policies “not only have been inadequate but, in many situations, have made the situation worse.”

“We can’t afford to have incremental changes. We don’t need any more speeches. We need real change,” Brown said.

We can't afford incremental changes - we need drastic, sudden, dramatic change.

Interestingly enough, Brown gets lumped in politically with "conservatives".

In fact, her husband Dan Senor was one of the "conservatives" who helped bring drastic, sudden, dramatic change to Iraq. 

That went well, didn't it?

So you know the drastic, sudden, dramatic change Brown wants to bring to the education system will go just as swimmingly.

When Brown says de Blasio's policies “not only have been inadequate but, in many situations, have made the situation worse," she can look to husband Dan and the policies he helped engineer in Iraq as a model.

Union, NYSED Argue That Campbell Brown's Anti-Tenure Suit Is Moot With New APPR Changes

From the Post:

The teachers union and state officials argued Tuesday that a lawsuit challenging New York’s tenure policy should be tossed because Gov. Cuomo and the Legislature approved a new law tightening teacher accountability.

The changes make the tenure suit moot, lawyers defending the state claimed during oral arguments in Staten Island Supreme Court.

“We live in a different world ­today than when this action was filed,” said Assistant State Attorney General Steven Banks.

Cuomo and lawmakers approved in April a tougher tenure law that more closely links teacher job ratings to the test scores of their students. The new law also awards tenure after four years instead of three.

The lawyer representing plaintiff Campbell Brown and the NYC Parents Union claimed the changes to the tenure law were just "windowdressing" and the suit should go forward.

Windowdressing?

Tenure is effectively abolished under the new APPR law.

If a teacher receives two consecutive ineffective ratings, the district may bring a 3020-a proceeding and the burden of proof shifts to the teacher with the hearing completed within 90 days.

If a teacher receives three consecutive ineffective ratings, the district must bring a 3020-a and the only defense a teacher can use is fraud or mistaken identity with the hearing completed within 30 days.

How the hell are those windowdressing changes to tenure?

Those are drastic changes that essentially abolish tenure protections since a tenured teacher can be fired based upon his/her APPR rating.

Brown is also aiming at LIFO seniority - the last in, first out rules for layoffs - so it's possible the suit will go forward based on that.

But for Brown's lawyer to claim that the new APPR law only provides "windowdressing" changes that do not affect the core tenets of tenure - well, that's just absurd.

NYSUT, UFT Bring Us Another Disaster

So much for all those rallies, ad and rhetoric from union leaders that they're not going to let Governor Cuomo destroy public schools.

The budget agreement was announced last night and in it we got details of the new teacher evaluation system and other education reforms agreed to by Cuomo, the Assembly and the Senate.

Three parts should be particularly galling to you if you're a teacher:

1. NYSED gets the power to re-do the evaluation system to make it a "state-wide" system. Yes, that's right - the same people who gave "Dr" Ted J Morris Jr. a charter school get the power to impose a statewide evaluation system.

2. Teachers who are rated "ineffective" two years running are subject to being declared "incompetent" and fired within 90 days unless they can demonstrate "clear and convincing evidence" to the contrary. Teachers who are rated "ineffective" three years running are subject to disciplinary charges and expedited firing in 30 days unless they can prove the ratings were based on "fraud."

3. The state gets to takeover chronically "failing" schools (10 years or more) and if they cannot show improvement in one year. The state gets to take over moderately "failing schools (3 years of "failing") if they cannot show improvement in two years

In the past, NYSED rigged the Common Core tests so that 70% of students would fall below the proficiency rate.

There is no reason to think they won't rig the APPR re-do they've been tasked with so that large swaths of teachers are declared "ineffective" as well.

As is the case now, if a teacher is "ineffective" on the test component of the system, that teacher must be declared "ineffective" overall.

Two consecutive "ineffective" ratings and you're out of a job in 90 days - good luck finding "clear and convincing evidence" to the contrary that you're not "incompetent."

As for the state takeover plan, so-called "failing" schools have to submit a plan to NYSED to show how they'll improve in a year - NYSED gets final approval of the plan.

You can bet that plan will be as rigged by the sociopaths at NYSED as the Common Core test results.

If so-called "failing" schools do not hit their benchmarks in a year, they're handed over to the state for receivership.

Some schools that were "failing for three years or less get two years to show improvement.

In short, the state's going to be taking over lots of schools and handing them to charter operators.

On Saturday, NYSUT President Karen Magee said the following:

"The policies proposed by Gov. Cuomo are harmful to our children and our students and that is unacceptable," she said, "and we are not going to let him do that!"

Dunno how you read the above agreement details that we have, but it sure sounds like Cuomo got a lot of the policies he wanted in the budget.

I am especially concerned by the evaluation re-do.

Giving the sociopaths at NYSED the power to re-do teacher evaluations and impose a statewide system onto New York may provide politicians in Albany with some cover for the damage, but it surely doesn't bode well for schools, students or teachers.

I would expect that something like the New York City system that former NYSED Commissioner John King imposed on teachers in the NYCDOE will make it around the state.

Mark Naison summed the education policies agreed to in the budget framework this way:

NY State Education Department given dictatorial powers in Budget Agreement. Incompetent bureaucrats given power over teachers and principals
— Mark Naison (@McFiredogg) March 30, 2015

Another disaster from our union leaders brought to us in a year where Cuomo had his budget agenda hijacked by Preet Bharara and Shelly Silver's arrest and his poll numbers plummet even before NYSUT began running ads against him (Cuomo's been under water in the Siena poll since late 2014.)

NYSED Gets Power To Reform New York's Teacher Evaluation System

It's bad:

ALBANY—Governor Andrew Cuomo and legislative leaders have agreed on a framework for the state budget with at least a $1.4 billion increase in school aid, a plan to allow the state education department to develop the new teacher evaluation system and tighter disclosure requirements for lawmakers.

...


Cuomo has said education and ethics reform were his top two priorities in the budget, but the governor was forced to make concessions from his initial proposals.

Heastie said the task of developing a new evaluation system for teachers and principals would be delegated to the education department. Earlier this week, lawmakers said they were discussing a plan to ask the Board of Regents to develop the new rating system. Since the education department reports to the board, it’s unclear what’s different about the two plans.

A Cuomo administration source said the budget would specifically charge the education commissioner with the task, not the board. There is currently a vacancy in that role, since commissioner John King departed last year to take a job with the federal government.

...

The department would have to flesh out the details of the new system by June. School districts would need to finalize any locally negotiated aspects of their ratings system and submit their plans for state approval by November.

“We’re giving S.E.D. the ability to do what the intent is for them to do,” Heastie said. “The state education department should be the chief arbiters of education policy in the state, and we’re allowing them to do what their mission is.”

Heastie said the education department would have broad authority to determine the specifics; the Cuomo source, speaking on background, said the rating system would be based on observations and testing. Districts would be required to use state-administered standardized assessments as a component in the ratings, but they would also have the option to use an additional test that would also be designed by the state.

The rating system would use a model that’s not based on percentages, the source said. Lawmakers have debated using a “matrix” model.

Teachers and principals who are rated “ineffective” on the portion of the evaluation that’s based on testing would not be able to earn an overall rating of “effective” or higher.

Currently, the system is based on a scale of “ineffective,” “developing,” “effective” and “highly effective,” and two “ineffective” ratings could be used as grounds for termination.

Under the new plan, districts may bring disciplinary charges against educators with two consecutive “ineffective” ratings, and educators would be fired within 90 days unless they can provide “clear and convincing” evidence that they should keep their job.

Districts could bring disciplinary charges against educators with three consecutive “ineffective” ratings, and the educators would be fired within 30 days unless they can prove “fraud.”

A spokesman for the education department declined to comment.

More later.

Looks Like It Will Take Four Years For Teachers To Get Tenure

Joseph Spector in the Democrat & Chronicle on what seems almost settled in the education reform battle going on:

An increase in school aid is expected to exceed $1.4 billion, officials said, and teachers would be eligible for tenure after four years of service instead of the current three years.

In the changes being discussed, teachers would be eligible for tenure if they are rated "effective" or "highly effective" in three of the four years. And they couldn't be deemed "ineffective" in the fourth year.

It's unclear whether the system would impact current teachers or only new hires.

As for evaluations, the latest:

Cuomo has been at odds with the teachers' union over his education reforms, and he said Saturday that stronger education policy has probably been the "single most difficult challenge" he's faced since taking office in 2011.

He initially proposed that 50 percent of teacher evaluations should be tied students' test scores. Now the sides appear to have agreed to letting the Board of Regents, which oversees New York's educational system, take up the evaluation issue.

But it's unclear whether the Board of Regents would have a specific charge in the legislation, such as coming up with a system where a new percentage of a teacher's evaluation would be based on test scores.

More as we get it.

Cuomo Not Caving On Teacher Evaluations

Again, I keep hearing how Governor Cuomo's pushing for a commission to handle teacher evaluation reform is a "cave" from him.

It is not a "cave" at all:

A deal on education and ethics reforms remain the key dividing lines between Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the state Legislature before the fiscal year starts a week from today.

Assembly Majority Leader Joseph Morelle, D-Irondequoit, Monroe County, said the sides are trying to ensure that schools at least know a range of potential aid if a deal on new teacher evaluations lingers into June. Cuomo has linked school aid to tougher evaluations, as well as a longer tenure period of teachers: from three to five years. It appears the sides are moving toward a four-year period before a teacher could get tenure.

...

Schools want school-aid estimates as soon as possible as they prepare their budgets for a public vote May 19.

“We want to give as much clarity and predictability to school districts as we can to allow them to plan budgets,” Morelle said. “By the same token, the governor has been very clear that he wants, as part of the budget, a teacher-evaluation system different from the one we currently have.”

Tying school aid to the commission outcome is NOT a cave.

It's a way to force an outcome he wants a few months down the line.

Oh, and in case you didn't notice, Cuomo's going to get at least half of what he wants on tenure reform.

Don't think he won't get the same on evaluations - and maybe more - before it's all said and done.

Hope I'm wrong but the trajectory I see in these negotiations is compromise from the legislature and the teachers unions where no compromise need be made.

Cuomo is an unpopular governor with an unpopular agenda.

He can be told to go scratch with his agenda - and if he doesn't like it, he can purposely delay the budget himself.

Cuomo knows what the poll numbers are on that.

NYSUT ought to mount an ad campaign blaming him for purposely delaying a budget because he wants to increase the weight and emphasis of Common Core testing in schools.

See if Cuomo would like to have to counter that.

It's a shame the legislature and the teachers unions leadership doesn't seem to get this.

But doesn't seem they do.

Report From TWC News: Charter Cap, Receivership, Teacher Tenure Are Out Of The Budget Talks

Zack Fink writing at State of Politics:

The conversation on education reform in the State Budget appears to have shifted. Sources say last night Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie and Governor Cuomo had a long talk about some of the Governor’s policy proposals and now, finally, there seems to be some movement on the budget.

Assembly Democrats conferenced the proposed changes this afternoon, which include taking charter schools out of the discussion. Governor Cuomo had wanted to raise the cap to allow more charters, but as of now that will be taken up at another time, likely later in the session. The Governor also appears to be backing away from his insistence that “failing” schools be placed into a receivership. Democrats staunchly oppose this. Weakening teacher tenure is also on the chopping block ( Cuomo wanted to make it harder for teachers to gain tenure ) and a formula for teacher evaluations is still being worked out. Democrats described the overall mood on budget talks as “very different.” No longer was Cuomo taking a “storm-the-beach” approach on his controversial education reforms. Many of those ideas have now been “uncoupled” from the revenue appropriations they were attached to. That paves the way for compromise, and an on time budget, at least within the the world of Democrats who had loathed the Governor’s approach. But of course, Republicans still need to come around on ethics, if the budget is actually going to be on time.

So, what changed? a couple of things…for one, sources say Cuomo was losing the war against teachers. First there was the poll last week showing his approval rating at the lowest it has ever been. Then there was the Siena poll that showed the public isn’t really with him on this one. Finally, there are the teacher’s unions, NYSUT and UFT, who successfully painted Cuomo as the enemy of teachers. From the campaign to demonstrate he has spent no time in schools as Governor, to the billboards on the Thruway telling Cuomo he needs to listen to to teachers, it all adds up to a losing battle for the Governor.

Not for nothing, but if you are going to take on an entrenched group like the teacher’s union in this state, you gotta be ready to really go to war. That includes a TV ad blitz, which was noticeably absent in this particular fight. Cuomo’s buddy Chris Christie successfully turned the public against the NJEA in New Jersey, but he did so after first coming into office in 2010, when his political clout was at its highest. It was also during the great recession when antipathy toward public unions living-large-on-the-public-dime was at an all-time high.

Then there is the ethics reform. Last week, Cuomo successfully pulled Speaker Heastie into the fold on ethics when they announced a two-way agreement which left Senate Republicans on the sidelines. This was immortalized by the hug-heard-round the world. ( This photo appears to have been taken after the two leaders won their field hockey game. They then apparently went back to the mansion and watched “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants” and shared a good cry. Next week, it’s an all “Fried Green Tomatoes,” and “Steel Magnolias” marathon. Btw – I’m totally kidding about everything I just wrote in parenthesis…Heastie actually HATES “Steel Magnolias.”)

Once the Governor had the Democrats on ethics reform, he was able to squeeze the Republicans a bit. But of course, no one gets everything they want. And to bring the Dems on board for ethics, meant sacrificing something on education. Heastie and his members couldn’t live with what Cuomo wanted in terms of ed reform. Cuomo needed ethics to be his top priority following the arrest of former Speaker Sheldon Silver.

Rumor has been that Assembly Dems agreed to ethics reforms for Cuomo and Cuomo agreed to drop the education reforms in return.

Given how Cuomo has broken his word in the past (most recently on the Common Core safety net for APPR), until the budget agreement is completed, I wouldn't bet the mortgage on any of this.

Also, note that teacher evaluation changes still remain in the budget talks:

A formula for teacher evaluations is still being worked out

Hard to know what that will be.

Last night I posted that according to the NT2 blog, Mulgrew was having his own discussions with Cuomo's people.

He may be helping to work out the "formula" for evaluation changes.

If I remember correctly, he was touting the John King-imposed APPR system NYC has as something the whole state should get.

At any rate, there's a lesson here that mobilizing parents and teachers for public protests and running ads aimed at taking the governor down a few pegs can work wonders with the public.

Don't think the charter folks are taking this lying down, btw.

They've gone up with their own pro-Cuomo/pro-ed deform ads to try and change the trajectory of the education story before the budget is completed.

You can bet they'll look to get the cap raised, and if it doesn't come now in the budget, they'll look to get it later.

In any case, as I wrote above, until this is a done deal, I wouldn't put any money on anything anyway.

With NYSUT and the UFT in charge, there's always a good chance they'll steal defeat from the jaws of victory.

But for now, it looks like the governor may have blinked because he needed an ethics deal with the Assembly Dems and they wanted - and got - something in return.

We'll see.

Cuomo Job Approval Falls In Siena Poll, Down To 43%

New Yorkers do not like the job Governor Andrew Cuomo is doing.

His job approval rating has fallen to 43% in the latest Siena poll, down from 44% in the last poll.

His personal favorability rating remains high - it's at 57% - but that number has dropped since the last poll too.

As for his policies, well, they're not any more positive than his job approval numbers.

80% disagree with his policy to delete emails after 90 days.

77% disagree with his upstate Hunger Games competition that has 7 regions competing for 3 pots of state gold.

Majorities of New Yorkers want both ethics reform and education policy negotiations stripped from the budget and completed on their own.

And New Yorkers back teachers unions over Cuomo 51%-40% in the education battle.

(The Q poll had voters backing teachers over Cuomo 55%-28% last week, but the question was asked a little differently in that poll, perhaps accounting for the difference in findings.)

In all, another bad poll for Cuomo as we get near the budget deadline.

He is weakened, his policies are unpopular and New Yorkers do not like the job he is doing as governor.

Alas, instead of taking advantage of this weakness, word is, Mike Mulgrew is "negotiating" with Cuomo on education policy himself.

Long-time readers of this blog know just how dangerous that story, if true, is.

There show be NO compromise with Cuomo on education.

The public is with us in the battle against Cuomo.

Report: Mulgrew Is Negotiating With Cuomo On His Own, Going Around NYSUT

Okay, I missed this extraordinary NT2 blog post from a few days ago.

I wish I hadn't - it's that extraordinary.

Read the whole piece, in its entirety over at NT2.

But the gist is this:

Cuomo's approval numbers have tanked because of his attacks on teachers.

People are conflating Common Core, the CCSS tests and Cuomo's push for teacher evaluations all into one and are blaming Cuomo for all three.

NT2 says the numbers would be even worse if NYSUT hadn't pulled their TV ads:

And think of what the drop might have been had NYSUT not pulled its TV ads a month ago. They were good ads. They featured women teachers speaking directly to Cuomo saying in effect: “How dare you say that I’m the problem.”

Nonetheless, Cuomo's getting hurt bad in this battle, even with the ads down.

But it doesn't matter, because no matter how weak Cuomo is at this moment, the UFT leadership is looking to help him out:

This post is actually about NYSUT, once the state’s most powerful union, but now a shell of itself due to internal conflict within its own ranks and with other teacher unions.  One would have thought that Cuomo’s unprecedented attack would have unified the teacher reps, but no.  They are still fragmented, still paralyzed, still seemingly unable to capitalize on this moment in which Cuomo seems so vulnerable on education policy.

(Even as we are writing this, the UFT’s Mike Mulgrew is negotiating with Cuomo’s office on his own, going around NYSUT.)

NT2 blog ends the post with this:

The entity that may capitalize on Cuomo’s vulnerability, however, is the Assembly.  Now that the Assembly has taken ethics off the table, it’s free to do what it wants to do – a wholesale re-write of Cuomo education policies.

Cuomo, stung by the poll, and wanting mainly and perhaps only an ethics victory, might go along. NYSUT would benefit, although not as a result of its own efforts. It will simply luck out.

I've been pointing out for weeks now how the union leadership has been fighting a half-assed battle against Cuomo instead of going for his throat.

Now we know why.

The sellout is being negotiated by Mike Mulgrew and the UFT leadership.

Siena Poll: Only 10% Of NYers Blame Teachers For The Failure Of Public Schools

New Siena poll out this morning showing Governor Cuomo's job approval rating at 44%.

The poll asks a few questions about Cuomo's education agenda and which side voters support in the "war of words" between the governor and the teachers unions.

Here is the most striking finding:

Of the following choices, which do you think is the SINGLE biggest reason why note enough children graduate from high school college and career ready?

Teachers 10%
Not Enough Parental Involvement 37%
Insufficient Money Being Spent On Education 18%
Effects Of Poverty 17%
Ineffective State Education Oversight 12%
Other 3%
Don't Know 3%

In addition, Siena asks who voters back in the "war of words" between the governor and the teachers unions over his education agenda:

Teachers Unions 48%
Governor Cuomo 36%
Both 2%
Neither 6%
Don't Know 8%

Finally, Cuomo's job approval rating has fallen yet again - it now stands at 44%-55%.  That's down three points from the last poll.

More on this poll later, but suffice to say for now - other than on the tenure issue where the Siena poll found voters agree that tenure should take 5 years to get, New Yorkers are not siding with Governor Cuomo on his education reform agenda and they do NOT blame teachers for the struggles of public schools in the state.

Scapegoating Teachers Will Keep Good People Out Of Teaching

In the middle of a New York Magazine profile on Campbell Brown and her attack on teacher tenure in New York State is this:

Head-spinning data sets are the fluttering fans of both sides in the school-reform debate, concealing ideological motivation of the game’s players and the overwhelming complexity of measuring student performance, but plenty of experts disagree about how important teacher tenure really is. “Most people agree that Campbell Brown has identified an important problem: Poor kids are stuck with the worst teachers. But her approach of attacking tenure is barking up the wrong tree,” says Richard Kahlenberg, an author and senior fellow at the progressive Century Foundation, adding that polling shows tenure is so important to teachers you’d have to increase their salaries by half to make up for taking it away. (Weingarten, sworn enemy of Brown, points out that the states that have the best protections for teachers also have the best academic performance.) Low-income minority students have the weakest teachers because of economic segregation, Kahlenberg says, which suggests the solution is mixing and matching low- and ­middle-income kids in individual schools (something, one imagines, that would cause an uproar in nice neighborhoods already endowed with good schools). “On the tactics, I have to give Campbell enormous credit,” Kahlenberg continues. “She’s taken what most educators believe is a peripheral issue and elevated it to the cover of Time magazine. So even if she loses her lawsuits, she’s changed the public conversation—in my view, in a negative way. But I think she’s highly effective.”

Take away tenure or make it "renewable" based on student test scores and other quantifiable measures as Campbell Brown and a host of other reformers want to do (which is just a roundabout way of getting rid of tenure) and you'll end up keeping good people out of teaching.

That's the part of the argument in teacher quality that never gets publicly stated much in the mainstream media.

The more the teaching profession gets beaten up in the media and by politicians, the more insane compliance they throw on teachers in the form of ever-more "rigorous" evaluations, the more they strip teachers of protections like due process, the less likely it is quality people are going to want to teach.

Why spend money and effort to get trained and licensed as a teacher if you're going to spend your workday doing insane compliance that takes away from your ability to do your job well, get beaten up in the media seven days a week and hear the politicians in your state denigrate you as garbage as they annually impose more mandates on you?

I am in my fourteenth year teaching, but if I were doing this all over again, there is NO WAY I would go into teaching.

Seriously, who needs to be told what a piece of shit you are, how you're responsible for poverty and the achievement gap and income inequality and a danger to national security to boot (which Joel Klein and Condi Rice actually said)?

I teach seniors and when we talk about college majors and career options and some tell me they are thinking about teaching, I tell them to think long and hard about that before they embark on the journey.

Teachers and the teaching profession are under constant assault, a barrage that never seems to end but just gets heavier and heavier as the years go by.

I tell students they must be aware of the political battles going on around schools and teachers before they decide to teach, because these battles will effect them greatly, make their jobs much harder than they have to be, and perhaps even make it such that their career choice will be turned into nothing more than an at-will position that they can be fired from for any reason.

I'm not trying to dissuade students from going into teaching, but I do want them going in with their eyes open and their minds aware.

Teachers are scapegoats for so many of the problems this country faces and no one should go into the profession without knowing that there's going to be a lot of excessive blame they'll carry along with their other job duties and responsibilities.

Cuomo Goes Public With Details Of His Plan To "Break" The Public School Monopoly

From Capital Confidential:

The Cuomo administration has sent a letter to Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch and outgoing-Education Commissioner John King outlining the governor’s intention to make teacher reforms a top priority.

The letter from State Operations Director Jim Malatras also seems to bolster Cuomo’s controversial campaign season comments that he’d like to break up one of the last remaining public monopolies: public education.

“Several weeks ago Governor Cuomo said that improving education is thwarted by the monopoly of the education bureaucracy,” Malatras writes. “The education bureaucracy’s mission is to sustain the bureaucracy and the status quo and therefore it is often the enemy of change. The result is the current system perpetuates the bureaucracy, but fails our students in many ways.”

The monopoly busting plan is addressing the questions outlined in the letter, which include those about how the state’s current teacher evaluation is credible, how the administration would address the problem of removing poor-performing teachers and what Cuomo’s vision for charter schools is.

Here are some of the areas Cuomo suggests could see so-called reform or push in the next legislative season:

1. The evaluation system
2. The 3020a disciplinary process
3. The ATR pool in NYC
4. Teacher certification
5. Probationary period for teachers
6. Making it easy to close schools
7. Increase in charter schools, especially in NYC
8. Adding more technology to the system, including online classes
9. Consolidating districts
10. Reforming the Regents appontment process
11. Making the hiring of NYSED Commissioner King's replacement transparent

I'll have more later on this.

But suffice to say, there's a lot here that Cuomo says he wants to tackle.

Does he have the political juice to pull this kind of agenda off?

This is the kind of agenda you see from a governor with an 80% approval rating (like he had in the first term), not a governor who won re-election with the lowest totals of anyone since FDR.

So he can be beaten on a lot of this if the union leaders at the AFT, UFT and NYSUT actually decide to fight him.

But will they?

What Will Cuomo Try To Pull In His Second Term?

Governor Cuomo remains in hiding post-Election Day:

Governor Andrew Cuomo is in the New York City area with no public schedule.

It's been that way since the election.

He is said to be making plans for his second term.

I posted last week that he is sitting in his darkened room preparing to settle all Family business and dispatch his enemies and anybody else who humiliated him during the election cycle.

We know he's going to go after teachers and schools - he already told us he plans to "break" us.

I expect that he will try and revise APPR (which he has promised to do in order to add "real sanctions"), that he will try and further weaken tenure and go after seniority rights for layoffs.

And of course the charter cap will be either lifted or eliminated - that goes without saying.

Also mayoral control in NYC will be revised to humiliate de Blasio and further empower the charter school entrepreneurs.

I have heard rumors of even darker things to come, with Cuomo planning a full-out assault on unions in the state, a la Scott Walker.

There are rumors that he plans to go after the Triborough Agreement and pensions of current (and perhaps even retired) state workers, a la Chris Christie.

I have a difficult time seeing him getting the political juice to mount a major assault against the Triborough agreement or pensions, given that he won re-election by just 13%, many of the people who voted for him weren't particularly enamored with him to begin with and he's got lots of enemies in Albany who would love to stick a shiv in him.

But you never know - Cuomo's a vindictive SOB and he hasn't hidden away for the last few weeks in a darkened room with Joe Percoco and his other henchmen to throw us all a party in January.

So, whatever's coming is going to be pretty bad.

What do you expect him to try and do and what do you think he'll actually be able to do?

That second part of the question is important - Cuomo's got all kinds of evil in his heart he wants to unleash on people, but we need to remember, after spending 9 to 1 over his GOP opponent, he won the election by just 13 percentage points.

And he has a U.S. attorney looking into him.

And he has a lot of enemies in Albany and around the state looking to pay him back for his previous crimes against them.

This is not 2010 and Governor Cuomo is not some juggernaut.

He CAN be beaten in whatever fight he brings to us.

Campbell Brown Uses A Paid Organizer Of StudentsFirstNY As The Face Of Her Tenure/Seniority Lawsuit

From the Daily News:

Seven families will file suit Monday to end teacher tenure in the fiercest attack yet on job protections enjoyed by New York State educators.

The families, including five from some of the most impoverished communities in the city, claim their children were underserved in school due to incompetent teachers who only kept their jobs because of tenure rules that violate kids’ constitutional right to a sound, basic education.

The lawsuit will be filed in Albany and is backed by the politically connected journalist-turned-education advocate, Campbell Brown.

“There’s no reason why my kids should not be reading on grade level. The law should be changed,” said Nina Doster, 33, of South Ozone Park, Queens. The mother of five is a plaintiff in the suit and also a paid organizer for the StudentsFirstNY advocacy group.

“Every child should be subject to the best education and teaching in every classroom,” she said.

One of the plaintiffs is on the StudentsFirstNY payroll as an organizer?

Doesn't that set up at least the appearance of a conflict of interest in the case?

I mean, this parent is part of a lawsuit that is financially backed by the same financial interests that back StudentsFirstNY.

In any case, Brown's lawsuit here in New York is going to have a rougher road than the Vergara lawsuit in California.

But observers say it will take much more than just education horror stories to win the case.

Brown “has to prove inequity, inadequacy and causation — that the different legal constellation in New York causes the learning issues that we see throughout the state,” said David Bloomfield an education professor at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center.

Are teacher tenure and seniority rules the reasons why Ms. Doster's kids are not reading on grade level?

And do teacher tenure and seniority rules lead to systemic problems around the state that cause learning issues like this?

That's what Brown and her cohort have to prove.

To my mind, that they're using a paid organizer for StudentsFirstNY as one of the faces of that lawsuit to prove that says a lot about the legitimacy of the lawsuit.

Ironically, the former head of StudentsFirstNY was Micah Lasher, Mayor Bloomberg's former liason in Albany.

So now what we have here is a woman who works for an organization that was led by Michah Lasher, a Bloomberg crony, suing over teacher tenure and seniority rules in the NYC school system that supposedly caused her children learning problems while Michael Bloomberg was running the system and Michah Lasher was pushing his agenda in Albany.

To make matters worse, we don't know who Campbell Brown's donors are and she refuses to reveal the list, but it is thought that the education reform-friendly Bloomberg may have donated to her cause, as he has donated to StudentsFirst, the parent group of StudentsFirstNY in the past.

I dunno, I'm not a lawyer but it seems to me there are all kinds of conflict of interest problems with that part of the suit.

Why Teacher Tenure Is NOT The Problem In Education

From Dale Hansen:

By concluding that the due process protections afforded to educators under tenure denied students "equal opportunity to achieve a quality education," Judge Treu seems to ignore that correlation does not prove causation.

If tenure unfairly protects teachers, there should be a considerably higher number of teachers fired per year at schools where tenure is not available. The data, however, show that is not the case. Believing tenure is to blame for low termination rates and proving that tenure keeps bad teachers in the classroom are two very different things.

Additionally if Judge Treu believes that tenure results in the retention of bad teachers which leads to an unequal opportunity for students to achieve then he must believe that the counterfactual is true. This means Judge Treu feels that hiring new teachers will lead to equal opportunity for all students because if it doesn't then the correlation between tenure and student achievement is anecdotal.

Unfortunately, data show that new hires are less effective than their more experienced counterparts. Given that 46 percent of teachers leave the profession in the first five years, it should come as no surprise that those individuals that administrators have observed, mentored and granted tenure are more skilled than those fresh out of college.

If teacher tenure was the problem in public education, then states and districts without tenure protections should be at the top of list for test score performance, graduation rates, college attainment rates, etc.

But they're not - the states and districts that are at the top of the performance list are the ones with the highest numbers of unionized teachers who enjoy work protections like tenure.

Corporate reformers don't really care about improving education for children - the attacks on tenure and teacher work protections are all about giving states and districts the tools to slimline their work forces and cut labor costs.

That's it - that's what the fight is about.

NYC Parents Union Files Suit Against City, State Officials Over Tenure/Seniority Rules

From the NY Times:

An education advocacy group on Thursday threw down the first challenge to New York’s teacher tenure laws in the wake of a landmark court decision in California last month finding such laws there unconstitutional.

A lawsuit filed in State Supreme Court on Staten Island argues that the tenure laws violate the State Constitution’s guarantee of a “sound basic education” by making it difficult to fire bad teachers and by protecting the most veteran teachers in the event of layoffs, regardless of their quality. The suit, filed against city and state education officials, names as plaintiffs 11 public school students whose parents belong to a group known as the New York City Parents Union.

...

 Mona Davids, the president of the New York City Parents Union, said the suit was modeled on the Vergara case, in which Judge Rolf M. Treu of Los Angeles Superior Court ruled that the tenure laws deprived students of their right to an education under the California Constitution and violated their civil rights. He also ruled that seniority rules requiring the newest teachers to be laid off first, as in periods of economic downturn, were harmful.

The Times article raises some reasons why the tenure suit may not work the way it did in California:

Already, the California Federation of Teachers has vowed to appeal the decision in the case, Vergara v. California. And union leaders, legal analysts and others said it would be difficult to gain any traction on the issue in New York’s judiciary.

 “It is basically unprecedented for a court to get into the weeds of a controversial education policy matter like this,” said Michael A. Rebell, an education lawyer and professor at Teachers College at Columbia University. “Even if a court agrees there is a problem, they are more likely to defer to the legislative branch, which, in New York, has been trying to deal with these complex tenure issues and knows more about the workings of these policies.”

...


In New York, teachers can earn tenure after a three-year probationary period, which city school officials can extend for another year, and often do. That represents one big difference with California, where teachers can win tenure after 18 months, and even before being certified.

Once granted, tenure in New York does not afford any advantages in pay or job assignments. Its most important benefit, in the eyes of teachers’ unions, is protection against indiscriminate, unjustified or politically tinged hiring and firing.

“Tenure doesn’t protect bad teachers,” said Carl Korn, a spokesman for New York State United Teachers, the statewide union, adding that its lawyers are “already gearing up” to defend tenure in court. “It allows good ones to fight for what students need.”

State education officials say that a new teacher evaluation law, which assigns teachers one of four grades each year, will make it easier to fire teachers who repeatedly get poor marks, although very few did so in the first year that the law was in effect.

“With that evaluation system, the teachers who get promoted, the teachers who stay, would be the teachers who are high performing,” Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said when asked last month about the Vergara case.

Timothy Daly, the president of the New Teacher Project, which has advocated changes in the way teachers are hired and fired, agreed that the new evaluation system could help remove bad teachers in New York, in contrast with California, which he said had “a very outmoded system for evaluating teachers.”

Daly does think challenges to seniority have a better shot here in NY State than a tenure challenge.

I wrote something similar a few weeks back, when a story surfaced saying reformers were going to go after teacher tenure, seniority rules and pay scales:

New York laws are different - it takes longer to get tenure, in NYC many teachers never get tenure at all and some have to wait well over the mandated three years to get it.

In addition, the APPR teacher evaluation system allows districts to fire teachers who come up "ineffective" two years in a row.

The argument that was used in California - "grossly ineffective" teachers cannot be fired without a long cumbersome process - doesn't hold water here.

So the deformers are looking to broaden the case, adding seniority rules around layoffs and performance pay to the mix.

They may be able to craft an argument around seniority, but I have a difficult time seeing them craft one around performance pay.
 
I'd like to see the judge in New York who agrees that students' civil rights have been violated because their teachers are ineligible for merit pay.

Often these deformers exist in a deform echo chamber where they say stuff that makes sense to everybody in their little circle, but once they get outside that circle, people look at them like they're crazy.

Arguing that students' civil rights have been violated because their teachers aren't eligible for merit pay is one of those cases. 

I maintain the same thinking on this issue today - I think APPR and the longer probationary period before tenure put a severe crimp in any tenure challenge mounted in the NY courts.

The performance pay challenge is insane - "Judge, children are having their civil rights trampled upon because their teachers are not eligible for performance pay."

Yeah, good luck with that challenge.

Seniority rules will be the challenge that we'll have to watch going forward.

One of things we're starting to see, however, is that deformers are looking like they're going to throw as many challenges against the courthouse wall to see if any stick.

I'm not a lawyer, but my sense is, the wider you make the cases, the more likely they are to get tossed.

So it will be interesting to see how this all ends up.

One thing I do know - none of this has anything to do with the quality of education children get.

If they wanted to fix that, they'd lower class sizes, stop the Endless Testing regime, and cease handing out Common Core homework that makes both children and parents cry.

How Many Teachers Voted For Obama In 2012?

I didn't - not after Race to the Top and Arne Duncan and the Rhode Island teacher firings that Obama applauded.

But I bet lots of teachers out there still voted for Obama because they were scared that Mitt Romney might get elected.

Well, here's what Obama and his people are doing now, teachers:

Teachers unions are girding for a tough fight to defend tenure laws against a coming blitz of lawsuits — and an all-out public relations campaign led by former aides to President Barack Obama.

The Incite Agency, founded by former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs and former Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt, will lead a national public relations drive to support a series of lawsuits aimed at challenging tenure, seniority and other job protections that teachers unions have defended ferociously. LaBolt and another former Obama aide, Jon Jones — the first digital strategist of the 2008 campaign — will take the lead in the public relations initiative.

And you can bet Obama supports his former aides working to destroy the teaching profession and protections for teachers, because that's exactly what Race to the Top and the rest of the Obama education policies were all about.

In the future, don't let the bogeyman scare you away from NOT voting for an anti-teacher, anti-public education Democrat.

 

I refuse to be bullied into voting for an education reform Democrat no matter who he/she is running against.

 

Take New York, for example.

 

I'm not supporting Cuomo no matter what - not even if a poll the night before the election shows GOP candidate Rob Astorino within striking distance of Sheriff Andy.

 

Cuomo is anti-teacher, anti-traditional public schools and anti-union - so I am anti-Cuomo no matter what.

 

Obama is also anti-teacher, anti-traditional public schools and anti-union - so I am anti-Obama no matter what.

 

Teachers who supported Obama despite his record - well, he's paying you back now as he sends forth Obama administration shills to attack teachers. 

WSJ: Campbell Brown Is Aiding Parent Group For Tenure/Seniority Lawsuit

Not a surprise:

A new advocacy group is helping parents prepare a challenge to New York's teacher tenure and seniority laws, contending that they violate children's constitutional right to a sound basic education by keeping ineffective teachers in classrooms.

Campbell Brown, a former CNN anchor who has been a critic of job protections for teachers, launched the group, Partnership for Educational Justice, in December. She said six students have agreed to serve as plaintiffs, arguing they suffered from laws making it too expensive, time-consuming and burdensome to fire bad teachers.

The preparations to challenge the state's tenure laws this summer follow a landmark ruling in California earlier this month. Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Rolf M. Treu struck down the state's laws on tenure, dismissal and seniority, saying they disproportionately saddled poor and minority students with incompetent teachers. Evidence that ineffective teachers hurt learning, he wrote, "shocks the conscience."

California unions that intervened in the case, Vergara v. California, said they would appeal, and legal analysts predicted the ruling would inspire similar suits around the country.

Carl Korn, spokesman for New York State United Teachers, said his union believes the Vergara decision will be overturned, and the facts are different in New York than in California. While he said that New York's new evaluation system has flaws, it aims to bolster teacher quality. 

"The system is designed to help all teachers improve, and for those who struggle or don't belong in the system, to remove them in an expedited hearing," he said. 

Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers in New York City, said by email: "It is a shame so many so-called 'reformers' can't find a way to do something that would actually help students, teachers and schools."

Ms. Brown wants a verdict in her group's case to spur legislators to come up with better education policies. "My hope is this would be a wake-up call to politicians who failed to solve these problems for years," she said. 

Her team has been meeting with parents to find plaintiffs. One is Jada Williams in Rochester, who wrote a seventh-grade essay complaining about teachers who she said gave no real instruction and failed to manage unruly students. Her mother, Carla, said in an interview: "When a child in class is educationally neglected, that's a criminal act."

David Welch, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur who financed Students Matter, the advocacy group that filed the Vergara suit, has given Ms. Brown guidance, and came to a meeting of about 30 people at her apartment in April to discuss it, she said. A mother of two children in private school, Ms. Campbell said she gave seed money to the Partnership for Educational Justice. She declined to disclose other donors. She has applied for nonprofit status.

Jay Lefkowitz, a senior partner at Kirkland & Ellis, is leading the New York case pro bono. Mr. Lefkowitz, a former deputy assistant to President George W. Bush, fought for Wisconsin's school vouchers and prevailed through the U.S. Supreme Court.

Mr. Lefkowitz said "it boggles the mind" that in the New York education system the vast majority of teachers were rated effective or better last year even though 69% of students in grades three through eight didn't pass state proficiency tests.

"The system lacks integrity and students are being forced to pay the price," he said. Unions often note that many factors affect learning, such as poverty and parent involvement.

Mr. Lefkowitz said he plans to challenge statutes mandating that during budget cuts, districts must dismiss the newest teachers first, with no consideration of their performance. Unions have long argued that without seniority rules, districts would lay off more highly paid veterans to save money.

He said he will also challenge what he said are overly complicated disciplinary procedures that dissuade administrators from trying to revoke tenure; some of these cases have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees. 

Union officials emphasize that tenure doesn't guarantee a job for life, but enforces due process to shield teachers from arbitrary firings, nepotism and vindictive bosses. A district may seek to revoke tenure if a teacher gets two bad annual ratings in a row. 

Mr. Lefkowitz plans to argue teachers are granted tenure before it is clear they deserve it. In New York, teachers generally get tenure at the end of three years of acceptable service, but principals can add another probationary year. 

In the California case, the plaintiffs brought an equal-protection claim, arguing that a disproportionate share of bad teachers end up in schools serving disadvantaged students. 

The New York constitution says children have a right to a "sound basic education." Mr. Lefkowitz plans to argue that laws leading to the retention of ineffective teachers hurt students no matter what their background. He said he plans to file the suit in New York Supreme Court in Albany.

I've dealt with some of this before in a post which you can see here.

I think the plaintiffs in this case will have a more difficult time getting the verdict they want because 

a) tenure takes longer to get in NY - many teachers are taking 4 or 5 years before they are getting it in NYC - and many teachers never get tenure at all and just leave the system and

b) APPR effectively ended tenure protections - teachers can be fired two years running if they're rated "ineffective"

The plaintiffs can argue that it costs millions to fire so-called "bad teachers" all they want.

Under APPR, it takes two years of "ineffective" ratings to fire teachers - something that is easily engineered the way the system was devised by the state.

Reformers can also claim that 69% of students were less than proficient on the state exams, so 69% of teachers must be less than effective all they want as well.

That argument is easily countered by the moves the governor and the Legislature made to acknowledge how awful the CCSS implementation was, something that directly affected the state test scores, as well as all the publicity surrounding the SED artificially setting the new CCSS test bar a lot higher than the one for the old tests.

I don't think Campbell Brown and her merry men and women in reform are going to have as easy a time in this kind of suit as the reformers had in the initial Vergara case hearing.

But that doesn't mean they're not going to try.

Time To Go After Tenure For CEO's

The noted Communists at Forbes say the higher paid a CEO is, the worse that CEO's company performs:

Across the board, the more CEOs get paid, the worse their companies do over the next three years, according to extensive new research. This is true whether they’re CEOs at the highest end of the pay spectrum or the lowest. “The more CEOs are paid, the worse the firm does over the next three years, as far as stock performance and even accounting performance,” says one of the authors of the study, Michael Cooper of the University of Utah’s David Eccles School of Business.

The conventional wisdom among executive pay consultants, boards of directors and investors is that CEOs make the best decisions for their companies when they have the most skin in the game. That’s why big chunks of the compensation packages for the highest-paid CEOs come in the form of stock and stock options. Case in point: The world’s top-earning CEO, Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison, took in $77 million worth of stock-based compensation last year, according to The New York Times, after refusing his performance bonus and accepting only $1 in salary (he made a stunning total of $96 million in 2012). But does all that stock motivate Ellison to make the best calls for his company?

The empirical evidence before fell on both sides of that question, but those studies used small sample sizes. Now Cooper and two professors, one at Purdue and the other at the University of Cambridge, have studied a large data set of the 1,500 companies with the biggest market caps, supplied by a firm called Execucomp. They also looked at pay and company performance in three-year periods over a relatively long time span, from 1994-2013, and compared what are known as firms’ “abnormal” performance, meaning a company’s revenues and profits as compared with like companies in their fields. They were startled to find that the more CEOs got paid, the worse their companies did.

Another counter-intuitive conclusion: The negative effect was most pronounced in the 150 firms with the highest-paid CEOs. The finding is especially surprising given the widespread notion that it’s worth it to pay a premium to superstar CEOs like Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase (who earned $20 million in 2013) or Lloyd Blankfein ($28 million) of Goldman Sachs. (The study doesn’t reveal individual results for them.) Though Cooper concedes that there could be exceptions at specific companies (the study didn’t measure individual firms), the study shows that as a group, the companies run by the CEOS who were paid at the top 10% of the scale, had the worst performance. How much worse? The firms returned 10% less to their shareholders than did their industry peers. The study also clearly shows that at the high end, the more CEOs were paid, the worse their companies did; it looked at the very top, the 5% of CEOs who were the highest paid, and found that their companies did 15% worse, on average, than their peers.

And where is Campbell Brown when you need somebody to take on the problem of "CEO tenure"?

The paper also found that the longer CEOs were at the helm, the more pronounced was their firms’ poor performance. Cooper says this is because those CEOs are able to appoint more allies to their boards, and those board members are likely to go along with the bosses’ bad decisions. “For the high-pay CEOs, with high overconfidence and high tenure, the effects are just crazy,” he says. They return 22% worse in shareholder value over three years as compared to their peers.

Crony capitalism wins again.