Please read this article that appears in the latest issue of the journal of the New York State School Board Association.
It describes how many teachers, principals, and superintendents are feeling overwhelmed by the changes raining down on them.
Then comes these paragraphs:
“John King is on the wrong side of history,” author and blogger Diane Ravitch told On Board. “He is acting like a petty dictator, threatening to hurt the children to retaliate against the adults who did not do his bidding.”
“On the other hand, “If you don’t put teeth into the system, no change is going to happen,” said Allison Armour-Garb, who served as chief of staff to former Education Commissioner David Steiner and is one of the architects of New York’s accountability system.
“Although the Obama administration’s approach is research-based, the RTTT states are the first to take it to scale, Armour-Garb noted. “I’m confident that the Common Core, data-driven instruction, and teacher and principal evaluation are going to lead to improvement in student outcomes – over time.”
“Armour-Garb has a personal interest in school accountability because she is the mother of two children, 10 and 12, who attend public schools.
“In her school community, Armour-Garb tends not to bring up her professional background, which includes working on New York’s RTTT application and being a point person in developing regulations that defined New York’s APPR system. “Change is hard,” she said. “And testing and accountability are provocative topics that don’t lend themselves to a quick conversation.”
Notice that Armour-Garb is careful not to let anyone in her school community know her role in developing the onerous regulations for the state’s educator evaluator system. A wise decision. More than a third of the principals have signed a petition opposing that system, and if people were not afraid for their jobs, the petition may well have been signed by more than 90% of the state’s principals.
She is right to hide her role in this tightening of the testing noose around the necks of the state’s teachers and principals. She is a lawyer and public-policy consultant, not an educator.
While she asserts that Race to the Top is “research-based,” she fails to mention what part of it is research based. Certainly not the educator evaluation system, which has never been applied successfully anywhere. John King described it as “building a plane in mid-air.” That is not research-based.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
PaPar for the course. Why would reformers want input from someone who actually may have been in front of 30+ students? David Coleman, one of many Common Core advisors, hold a degree in classics lit, not pedagogy.
We can only blame the profession for remaining blue collar. Would the AMA or Amer Bar Assn allow non-MDs or non-JDs to drive the discourse of the respective professions? Than why do we?
Coleman ought to tear up his Classics degree, since most of that involves literature and not “informational text.”
The difference between teachers and doctors/lawyers is that most teachers work in the public sector whereas most doctors/lawyers work in the private sector. Talk to some doctors who work in public settings and you’ll hear a lot of the same things you’ll hear from teachers. And the AMA isn’t swooping in to save them.
Oh yes the reformy talking points about change. Teachers have endured change after change and changes to changes before they were even implemented. She doesn’t have a clue what actually happens in schools and classrooms. This isn’t change…..this is destruction. Spend a year in a classroom responsible for educating children Allison and then talk to the real teachers about change and accountability.
When will the “leaders”‘ be held accountable? When are they evaluated?
It doesn’t even take a year – I volunteer in my daughters’ classes a handful of times each year, and every time I’m reminded anew why I’m not a teacher. For what it’s worth, my hat is off to those of you who can do it day in and day out.
Is “initiative fatigue” the side-effect of edu-predators’ need to keep reinventing the wheel in order to justify themselves and to create new edupeneurial opportunities for themselves?
Or, it possible that “initiative fatigue” is by design? A FUD strategy to keep those opposed to edu-predation reeling and unable to resist effectively?
As a 27 year veteran teaching in NY , I can say I’m fried by all the new initiatives.
It’s the Shock Doctrine applied to education. It has nothing to do with actually educating children. Now Coleman has moved on to destroy the College Board. sad.
This is a long-standing complaint of mine as well. Each time one of these “initiatives” comes along, the enthusiasm for it at whatever level is imposing it blinds them to the fact that teachers’ plates are already so, SO full (they’re full even before we even talk about the nuts-and-bolts, teaching kids part of the job). It isn’t necessarily that any given initiative isn’t a good one, but just like at the Golden Corral once an item is on your plate you’re not allowed to put it back just because you saw something that looked better a little further down the line (and if you don’t believe THAT, just try it sometime and see what happens next!)…
And so we dutifully take those overloaded plates to our desks, and diligently try to eat everything on our plate, because that just part of a teacher’s DNA. But anyone who has tried it knows it can’t be done, and it isn’t even really very healthy to try…
And then, when the time for us to be evaluated rolls around, we learn to our dismay that that assessment will largely focus on counting the number on uneaten or half-eaten foodstuffs that remain on the plate…
But it’s all good though, because teachers get summers off…
Last year, in RTTT Delaware, I taught a middle school support math class to ESL students, some of whom knew no English beyond their version of “bathroom”. Twelve students, three grade levels, five languages.
When asked what I needed, I responded, “could we provide a translator (hand held) for each?”
The response: “Sure! As long as you have research to support that request.”
Research? Really?
Why use common sense, when requiring research would save so much money?
It is typical of authoritarian regimes to impose an endless series of tasks, campaigns and initiatives, one after the other, often conflicting, so as to keep people continually off balance and “out of compliance.”
They know you’re guilty of something; they just haven’t yet determined what it is.
Research is a protected entitlement that no one dares speak ill. Maybe I am jaded but this seems like more of the same…3-5 years from now we will still have the same problems only much worse.
I do not know where to post this, but perhaps this story will give a hint of hope at stalling the juggernaut of reform in Nevada. The task force charged with implementation of test based assessment of teachers has found that the current proposal, the student growth model for Nevada, which is based largely on the model Dwight Jones implemented in Colorado is not defensible. I have tried to link to the article in the Las Vegas Review Journal. http://www.lvrj.com/news/practice-lags-policy-in-school-reform-194762101.html
With best regards,
I have really had enough of “research-based” anything. In the education industry, “research-based” is simply a marketing term. It literally means no more than “new and improved”, “whiter and brighter”, “more dentists choose”, or “the name you trust”. Anything would want to sell in the education marketplace must carry the “research-based” label, or it must be junk.
Drill down on the research behind the claim of “research-based”. You usually find the research is bogus. A study performed by the vendor in one classroom; an article published in a NON peer reviewed journal, or better yet, a white paper sponsored and published by the vendor.
I for one, intend to only purchase research-based toilet paper from this point forward.
Let’s not forget to give a shout-out to “research-based”‘s kissin’ cousin “data-driven.” Do you know I have actually heard and read people who chain these cousins together, in ways like this: “Our reforms must be research-based and data-driven to have any value…” Yes, that AND really sold me. Guy must be head of the Tautology Division of the Department of Repetitive Redundancy Department…
I love all of my brothers and sisters in the teaching profession, but those of us who toil in the ELA part of the forest have our own special cross to bear when dealing with these reformers…these folks are not just killing the profession, they’re murdering our beautiful language right in front of us while they do it…
I can put a code name to anything this is normal in Orwellian think worlds. Whatever they call it use the opposite meaning for the real meaning of what they intend. Beautiful is really ugly and peace is war. Watch the T.V. commercials on drugs. They play beautiful butterfly pictures and music while they tell you of the 100 ways you can die from this drug. Advertising which is really psychological warfare of one type. Just look at who Obama has put in charge again, not for our benefit.
Did you see this NY Times piece about what the JOBS Act really is? “A Sneaky Way to Deregulate” http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/a-sneaky-way-to-deregulate/
I forgot one thing and that is does anyone really think that this mess is actually “Research Based” of any kind except destruction?
This might be a stretch, but it has occurred to me that these tactics ARE research based. The question must be asked then, what are their desired results?
They can only be to disempower, to control. Administration manages via fear and intimidation. And, yes, in our building, teachers know they’re doing something wrong. We may not know what it is, but eventually it will be determined. Cameras throughout the building are used to monitor teachers, not student behavior, and all are at least thankful they are not yet in our classrooms.
Additionally, administrative strategies have successfully divided staff into “us” and “them”.
I believe this is no mistake, no coincidence.
And yes, probably research based.
If anyone has been exhausted by “initiative fatigue,” it’s Chicago teachers, as they have been inundated with three eras of education “reform,” dating back to at least to 1988, after Reagan’s then Secretary of Education William Bennett declared Chicago Public Schools “the worst in the nation.” Some teachers were actually scared into action first by Reagan’s 1983, “A Nation at Risk” shock doctrine campaign (though it had no research-base) and made concerted efforts individually to improve practices. But the formal “initiatives” started coming down the pike regularly from about 1990 on, so we’re talking about over 20 years of “initiatives,” causing an overabundance of fatigue for veteran teachers (See Trends in Chicago’s Schools Across Three Eras of Reform: http://ccsr.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/publications/Trends_CPS_Full_Report.pdf
That’s why Chicago’s teachers were poised to take the initiative themselves and act, collaborating with colleagues, parents and communities in the lead up to and throughout the strike last fall.
To borrow the catchphrase from the movie “Network,” say to yourself, “‘I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” You may not have much mainstream media supporting you right now. but you do have a broad array of social networking avenues that were unavailable to the masses in years past, Wherever you are located, take advantage of social networking to connect with like-minded people and to inform those who are unaware of the issues facing children, educators, schools, communities and our nation. Make a commitment to take the initiative and work towards effecting the kinds of changes you want to see happening in public education.
Why is Commissioner John King to busy implementing the InBloom transfer of NY students private information(public and private school) to Gates/InBloom to allow parental rights to opt-out? There is no transparency to the parents of NY that their child’s data will be on amazon cloud with no security to be bought and sold to vendors around the world following the student to career? But yet the DOE is marketing the sale in advance to educational vendors to make profits.
The DOE doesn’t have the right to sell our students and family private information, including IEP information, related services, teachers, attendance, interests, affiliations, Tests, attendance, free lunch, email, address, full names, social security#, and Medicaid data.
Call John King for parental rights to opt-out of this invasion of privacy at 518-4745844.
Another “toss a grenade and leave” story. Allison Armour-Garb no longer with NYSED.