The Rochester Teachers Union is running an ad campaign against the Common Core testing.
The state education department predicts that scores will drop by 30 percent.
“It’s a setup for failure,” said John Pavone of the Rochester Teachers Association. Teachers are worried they will be evaluated based on a curriculum that was rolled out this year. “They’re going to blame me if the kids can’t pass the test and the kids can’t pass the test. It’s set up in such a way that you can’t pass the test.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
As a parent of two children, I also agree that the common core curriculum is set up to fail our students and teachers throughout the country. The purpose behind this is to create more charter schools and demolish traditional public schools (unions). Presently, traditional public schools lack the resources in implementing the common core to their students and it is no fault of the teachers but the system that does not provide the necessary tools. Please don’t tell me about the website “EngageNY” which isn’t beneficial but confusing!!! Of course, it benefits the pockets of publishing companies and the reformers who insist these mandated changes in our schools. As a result of these changes, many students will feel incompetent which will diminish their self confidence and performance in class. Furthermore, my child is in the 1st grade and what he is learning in math is mind boggling and cognitively inappropriate for his age. A child who is in first grade should not be subjected to unneeded stress which raises his frustration level. My child is suppose to enjoy learning not shoving different kinds of strategies down his throat and making it more confusing .
I have been chatting with my classes explaining that we expect the tests to be tougher and that we are taking our best guesses as to how to best prepare them. They (6th graders) have looked at me incredulously and asked, “You mean you don’t know what is going to be on the test?” I have used the “good, better, best” terminology this year to help them ramp up the rigor in vocabulary, reading, and their writing. I replied, “I expect higher than “best”….(for the level they can be prepared for). They looked stricken. They expect me to know and to be able to help them prepare. I know in my heart they think I am letting them down. I have never been a teach to the test teacher. I am flummoxed by this unbelievable plan of teacher destruction.
What has been completely lost in all of this is the students. They are going to have to sit and struggle with these Ela tests for three days knowing by the end of the first day that they are not doing very well. Imagine what this will feel like to our plucky special education students whom we have supported throughout the year. Or, how about the ESOL kids who are valiantly interpreting every thing they read in a second language. Their reward? They will do the same the following week for the math tests. Highly regarded teachers have been in tears trying to understand how to convey very abstract mathematical concepts to our concrete thinking 6th graders. Rigor is important but not at the expense of known developmental benchmarks. The sample sent out by the State Ed. Dept. for Ela had reading passages at levels more than four or five years higher than our middle schoolers read.
Who said yes to this? Who said yes?! And even more importantly, how will this end?
My eyes well with tears as I read your post. I teach a self-contained special education class of some of the loveliest children I have had the pleasure to teach in my 27 year career. They try their hardest, and I am able to adjust the curriculum and materials to meet their needs. We are making progress. My students can decode multi-syllable words and use manipulatives to make sense of numbers. Some of my students have severe learning disabilities, others are on the autism spectrum and others have developmental delays. One of my students took the NYS Alternate Assessment, but his abilities are not much different than his classmates.
Since September I have tried my best to make my students feel successful is math, English language arts, science and social studies (on multiple grade levels!) We also have social, emotional and behavioral goals to address. These kids trust me, and I work as hard as I can to get the best out of them every day.
I feel like I am walking the Green Mile as April approaches. These tests will measure none of the progress that my students have made. For my students, they will be instruments of torture. The saddest thing for me is that I feel like I will have broken trust with my kids. They won’t understand why they will be forced to stare at indecipherable text and math for hours on end. I will be the one forced to administer this atrocity, and I can never let them know how sorry I am for doing it. I hope they will forgive me in the end.
Politicians USE kids to get elected to office. Plus, the corporate folks, who sell those tests are rich fat cats and getting richer.
Even before the “reformers” became well known, teachers were being squeezed by their administrators.
I remember walking in my room and overhearing our in-school suspension person (a relative of our superintendent) telling a parent that “the problem was with teachers only looking to make a paycheck.” This was in reference to one of the top discipline kids in our school.
Same school: when our district data officer (a PhD) talked to we teachers the day before school started and told us that “research shows that teacher effectiveness can make or break a child’s future.”
Those who make 6 figures with great pensions are going to do whatever it takes to avoid accountability.
Someone has to bear the blame. .
This has always been about money and the blame game.
Interesting how the blame game gets worse as you go up the chain. The truth is that even though teachers have almost no control over test results, administrators have even less, unless they truly support teachers. Teachers looking to make a paycheck? Thank you for offering to donate your salary so that kids can have books! Wow. I am sorry to hear that your leaders are a bunch of rheeformers who buy into the teacher hate (or the VAM sham) in order to avoid responsibility.
It’s ALL insane.
You know, for all the focus on testing, data, metrics, and algorithms, when you think about it, VAM measures violate the most basic principles of scientific validity that almost any older elementary or middle school student understands (and is tested on in the CMTs, our state’s version of standardized tests). For example, one common test question is to ask students about experimental design. Say you want to test the effect of different soil types (sandy, clay, acidic, etc.) on plant growth. It is basic science to make sure that EVERY OTHER variable is controlled. Otherwise you have invalid results…junk science. If you set up your experiment and vary not only soil type but fertilizers, amount of water, amount of sunlight, type of seeds, temperature, and humidity…what can you say about the effect of soil type on plant growth? Nothing. Well, nothing that is valid. Even if you have somehow determined that soil type is really really important, perhaps the most important factor in the success of your plants, you don’t have any useful data. Perhaps your plant in sandy soil did poorly so you conclude that’s BAD SOIL. Wouldn’t it be relevant to note that you rarely watered those particular plants, put them in a darkened room, failed to fertilize, and had pests eating the leaves?
Leaving my plants for a moment, why can’t the proponents of VAM measures see the nonsensical nature of their “experiment”? If you fail to control variables, you have no basis on which to draw valid conclusions that assign causation (blame) to a single factor.
So here I am, following this year’s CMTs, awaiting the results of the experiment which will be 45 percent of my evaluation. A number of my students have missed more than 4 full weeks of school. Doesn’t matter. I’m the one to be held accountable. Some came in hungry or sick or sleep deprived. Doesn’t matter. I’m accountable. It has become a standing joke in my school that when any teacher expresses concern about a particular student, or family, or event, or condition, the standard answer is “It’s your fault!” Obviously “irreplaceable” teachers easily overcome the effects of no breakfast, a death or divorce or abuse at home, poor health care, limited language proficiency, a home without books, learning disabilities, and gang violence. Here in Connecticut, Hurricane Sandy that shut our schools for a week was obviously the fault of BAD TEACHERS. So was the blizzard that followed.
A number of posts have suggested that “reformers” try taking different types of standardized tests. I have a different challenge for this group: Please respond to this question in essay form: Explain the meaning of the term “validity” in the context of teacher evaluations based on students’ results on standardized tests. Address in detail the concept of causation. Provide examples to support your position.
Great point. The VAM sham is totally based on the worst non-science possible: the self fulfilling hypothesis. The premise of VAM is to use test scores to identify teacher effect AND the definition of teacher effect is increases in test scores. So, they use a totally unscientific predicted score, illustrating the scores that a student should be getting; based on what? Then they compare the actual score to the predicted score and pretend that they have identified a teacher effect. This is the ultimate junk. Not only is there no control group (I guess children who have been locked in a closet for the school year would work) as you point out but there is no teaching practice that is being measured. To use your soil analogy, it is like measuring soil quality by guessing what a plant should do, controlling for a few external factors (but not all) and then seeing what the plant does. In this scenario, the soil is good if the plant is good. To evaluate the soil for real, you need to link attributes of the soil to plant growth and then look for those attributes. Just like teacher effect should be measured in teacher practice.
We also need to define what outcome we really want. Standardized test performance is like measuring how green your plant is, even when it is a poinsettia. Student achievement is not multiple choice bubbling no matter what other junk is piled on top. If they want to pay students for their own gains instead of punish teachers, at least that would solve half the problem.
Bravo. Please send this comment to all major news outlets. The validity of this measure is nil and we need to keep talking about that. That point gets lost behind more humanistic reasons. These big businesses guys should get the validity point. They all took statistics.
Evaluating teachers is critical so the bad ones can be removed (unlikely with tenure) and so the best can be recognized. The problem is that no one has come up with a fair and accurate way of doing such evaluations.
Reblogged this on 70jamsession and commented:
The conversation is spreading across our beloved NYS and our country. We MUST use our voice, for WE are on the right side of logic and love for our young people.
Yes, this is insane. I am so proud to say my 4rth grader is not taking this pathetic test. Many parents here in Long Island are doing the same.
Who here does not understand that Common Core is a national educational curriculum? If a curriculum is mandated from the top down, individual teachers, in individual communities, teaching individual students, will have less individual, or even school-centered control over class instruction. The more you let government in, the more they own the process and the more they own you and your profession. Government has its place in society, but more is not better. Parents ask that you stand up and put students first, not your government.