In a remarkable reversal, the member of the New York State Board of Regents from Long Island switched his position on the state’s teacher evaluation plan. Roger Tilles told teachers in Port Jefferson, Long Island, New York, that he will no longer support the test-based evaluation system rammed through the legislature during budget deliberations last spring.
Tilles said to the crowd:
Roger Tilles of Great Neck, now in his 11th year on the state Board of Regents, told a teachers conference in Port Jefferson that Albany faces the risk of growing opposition to the job evaluation system unless it reverses course.
“I oppose the use of standardized tests to evaluate teachers and principals,” Tilles said, drawing applause from about 400 teachers and school administrators at Earl L. Vandermeulen High School in Port Jefferson. “Not admitting a mistake is making a bigger mistake.”
Last June, Tilles voted to endorse the hastily passed educator evaluation plan cobbled together by the Cuomo administration and passed into law by the legislature.
His change of vote means that seven of the 17 Regents oppose the plan. If two more Regents change their votes, a majority will vote down the plan, sending it back to the legislature for a different approach, one that has research and evidence to support it.
The current wave of parental opt outs, most recently 20% of all eligible test-takers in the state, was spurred by the coupling of test scores and educator evaluations. Parents understood that making the tests so consequential would mean more test prep and less time for the studies and activities that children enjoy in school. Parent leaders from groups like Long Island Opt Out and New York State Allies for Public Education have said clearly that they want test scores separated from teacher evaluations.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This is not a reversal. Roger Tilles has been consistent. He’s come out publicly against teacher evaluations linked to APPR since 2011. It’s just that he keeps voting for it anyway. So don’t be fooled into believing this big announcement means anything. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/ny-regent-dont-link-teacher-evaluation-to-test-scores/2011/05/17/AFsJFr5G_blog.html
Oops typo. I mean student test scores tied to APPR
Consistently disingenuous?
Let’s hope this reversal results in his no vote.
Let’s hope all of the Regents are feeling the pressure, that great wave of sanity.
In New York State, the gap between a public official’s sentiment and their votes is enormous. One only needs to look at the “heavy hearts” of the state legislature earlier this year to fully grasp that. As it is everywhere, but exquisitely here in the Empire State, those in public positions vote according to whom they are most afraid of. For New York legislators that tends to be the party or faction leadership which looks more like legitimized gang leaders, and ultimately the Governor…who is currently a master at inducing fear, retribution, and wielding the proverbial pimp hand. For a Regent the fear that is behind the votes comes from Tisch and the legislator. The point is that nowhere is the fear of THE PEOPLE what motivates anyone in public service. The peoples’ voice and will is something to be managed, and that is all. It should be no surprise that Regent Tilles believes one thing and votes another way. It is standard business here in NY.
More importantly, the problem here is that it is not on the table to toss out VAM and test scores used against teachers in New York. Every Regent, legislator, etc. are deeply invested in having some kind of “rigorous” teacher performance review. That means that it is contingent upon anyone who is speaking out against VAM/test scores from a position of power to have an alternative. And that is the problem, there is no tough-sounding, sciencey-sounding, “research based”-sounding alternative. As we all know deep down, teacher performance evaluations are as difficult to have an objective measure on as say police performance evaluations (even shooting unarmed folk turns out to be hard to evaluate “scientifically”), firefighter performance evaluations, etc. Beyond, “yes, they show up to work and do what is asked of them, and seem to be invested in participating in best-practices or not” its murky and smacks of, you know, politics. The fact is that aside from egregious performance problems and gaps, it is difficult to measure in detail the performance of those whose career it is to do the things most people in society would rather not do. Teaching kids, policing, putting out fires, etc etc…..the fact that people are willing to do these jobs is the point. And the definition of a “good job” in these types of fields is, in large part, that the people who do them are willing to show up day in and day out to do them. Does critical observations from experienced hands at these jobs matter? For sure. Are there ways to improve the performance of the people doing them….definitely. But a “scientific measure” to evaluate the person who handles a room of other peoples’ kids all day and tries to make they susceptible to enlightenment? Come on. It strikes me as very telling that there is no similar VAM push for police officers, firefighters, etc etc etc. That we have to deal with the nonsense of VAM and politicized performance reviews at all is a measure of the failure of those entrusted by working teachers to be their voice (unions).
The fact is that we lost, a long time ago, the setting of the agenda on performance reviews. Instead of taking a hard and real position which is rooted in stating the unworkable ridiculousness of “scientific” performance reviews in the first place, our leadership invested themselves in the reformers’ agenda of “needing” a “rigorous and scientific” evaluation process. This is what we get for allowing that. Officials who say one thing and vote another, and will continue to negotiate further and further nonsensical and unworkable performance evaluations….all because nobody on the field ever that scientific evaluations are impossible. If we want to fix the Tilles problem, we need to start with strong action within our unions. Getting rid of Weingarten, Mulgrew, and Mcgee would be a fantastic first step.
In my opinion, ed reform gets most of their ideas on management from the private sector except they’re not actually in the private sector so there’s a lag- what they announce as new ideas are really pretty stale. There are as many fads and stupid ideas and follow-the-herd behavior in the private sector as anywhere else- maybe more- because there’s a huge business consulting class who make a living off selling this stuff.
Anyway, these types of data driven ranking schemes have huge downsides and there’s a recognition of that in the private sector. This will eventually filter into ed reform and I think VAM will be discarded. I think it will continue to be promoted by the prestigious people who promoted it for a while, because their reputations and careers depend on defending it to the end, but ed reform reliably follows behind the private sector herd so you’ll see movement away from it, eventually.
“Companies should think twice before adopting data-driven management tools designed to spark friendly competition among employees, say NYU Stern Professors Steven Blader and Claudine Gartenberg and Columbia University Professor Andrea Prat in their new research paper, “The Contingent Effect of Management Practices.” The researchers find that while such tools may work in company cultures that promote employee competition, they are likely to backfire in collaborative, team-based work environments and erode trust between employees and management. In their study, the downside risk was 3.5 times the upside potential.”
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20150414006378/en/Data-Driven-Management-Panacea-Improving-Employee-Performance#.Veg1WigViko
NYCTEACHER: Your clear-eyed analysis of the impediments to change should be read widely. Yes, the corrupt bought-and-paid-for, scared-off politician/legislators whose chief objective is maintaining their incumbency; union leaders selling out their members and profession–while never forming an alliance with parents for fear of sharing power; the perpetuation of testing because it gives the illusion of objectivity but continues to morph into new and improved chimerical versions of the same thing due to inertia and the absence of better alternative measures (which you suggest are also illusory).
What can we say about the Regents–headed by the same person who has been one for twenty years, has been chancellor for six of them, is now on her fourth commissioner and has brought forth (i.e., force fed us) the Common Core? They often vote in the dark; ask enough questions of the Ed. Dept. to cover themselves with deniability when they get no answers or non-answers; and, as the afore-mentioned politicians, most of them speak one way to the public and then act the opposite way. How else explain the unanimous vote for commissioner-of-the-moment Elia? Like the achievement gap, the credibility gap keeps getting wider by the year.
Yes, managing the public and keeping us confused and divided by their double-speak and legalous procedures is how they stifle change. To me, the failure of the public to demand and obtain transparency in all aspects of state government business is the greatest obstacle of all. Transparency is one baby the Governor can’t kiss, one parade our electeds can’t march in, one sound byte they can’t utter. Transparency needs to be brought down on them like the hammer of justice.
By the way, as Diane urged us to contact the Regents on teacher evaluations, I would say much effort should be focused on Lester Young. I watched him at a forum in Brooklyn last May or June (?) on the eve of one of those tedious votes to review or amend or propose of defer action to determine teacher effectiveness. He gave a hand-wringing performance on what a struggle he had been facing in deciding what to do. Still didn’t know which way to turn. But he kept saying that as a Regent he was bound to uphold the law. Everything he had to do must be done consistent with the law. His responsibility was to be mindful of the law and act accordingly. You get it.
So, in light of Ms. Lisa Eggert’s expert understanding of education law and how it was broken vis a vis the steps taken leading to this month’s vote on the teacher evaluation plans (see her posting on this blog), I would say it’s time to remind Mr. Young of his professed concern for legality and to stop posturing about it. Quit the charade, sir. Vote No to this latest effort to put through new evaluation rules that have emerged illicitly through devious lawyerly manuevering.
Sorry to have to quote such a large chunk:
‘NYCTEACHER: Your clear-eyed analysis of the impediments to change should be read widely. Yes, the corrupt bought-and-paid-for, scared-off politician/legislators whose chief objective is maintaining their incumbency; union leaders selling out their members and profession–while never forming an alliance with parents for fear of sharing power; the perpetuation of testing because it gives the illusion of objectivity but continues to morph into new and improved chimerical versions of the same thing due to inertia and the absence of better alternative measures (which you suggest are also illusory).’
Is this not the exact opposite of what true accountability should be?
Does this not just scream systemic failure in giant flaming 3D font?
Or am I wrong? Maybe it’s just the lighting on my screen or something? Somebody plays with the dimmer sometimes. I should have that checked out. Who likes having their mind blown with apocalyptic imagery for no reason whatsoever?
NYSTeacher stated:
“Instead of taking a hard and real position which is rooted in stating the unworkable ridiculousness of “scientific” performance reviews in the first place. . .”
Yes, and the best starting point for pointing out the “unworkable ridiculousness of ‘scientific performance reviews’ whether they be of teachers or students begins with understanding what Noel Wilson has proven of the educational malpractices of educational standards and standardized testing that form the basis for the supposed ‘quantification’ and numerizing-the essence of pseudo-scientificity-of assessments and evaluations.
Wilson absolutely destroys the epistemological and ontological bases of the concepts of standards and testing and points to the harms that are caused by those educational malpractices. Read and understand his never refuted nor rebutted treatise “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine.
1. A description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category only by a part of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as unidimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing the descriptive information about said interactions is inadequate, insufficient and inferior to the point of invalidity and unacceptability.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other words all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. And a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it attempts to measure “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self-evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
Ditto to the above comment. Nowhere does Tilles state that he will vote “no”. This is a PR/spin campaign ( the motivation for which that I cannot figure out). Perhaps public figures who are sell outs, who fall short of the mark need to try to convince themselves as well as the public that they are actually “good guys”???
This is wonderful news. I wrote a letter urging him to vote NO. I hope that he will convince others to do the same. Thank you for your tireless work and support of educators. I am a retired teacher, but appreciate all that you do on behalf of all educators who are fed up with what is going on.
That is the best news I have had in a while. I am on a BoE and in August attended a law conference on school law and the attorney’s are advising schools against waivers in a big way. Being a former teacher in my district I try hard to stand for students and teachers. It is an uphill battle. We really need the regents to vote this down or we will see the end of teaching as a profession !
He changed his mind because Flanagan told him to change his mind.
Judith, several people have contacted me to warn that Regent Tilles has a “nuanced” position. He says he is against test-based evaluation but he votes for it because “it’s the law”
The parents of Long Island must remind him that he is supposed to represent them.
Next time you see him in a public forum, ask him how he will vote on September 16
If this evaluation system is not reversed, I think that the number of opt outers will at least double. No principal or supervisor should sign off on any of these evals as they have effectively been cut out of the process –50%=test scores and 35% based on an OUTSIDE OBSERVER??? REALLY?!!– or has this part been altered? No teacher should sign off on it, either! Wonder what effect, if any, the Lederman case will have on this issue.
Speaking right and then voting wrong, huh? Reminds me of Los Angeles politics. A lot.
More misdirection and falsity about high stakes tests and teacher evaluations, a la Weingarten and Mulgrew, and with the same zero integrity.
Since behavior patterns over time are the most honest and informative type of communication, we should watch and judge what these characters actually do or don’t do, and pay little attention to what they say.
The at large members are Tisch, Norwood, Young, and Cottrell.
All four of the at-large members voted “No” in the earlier vote.
“Roger Tilles of Great Neck, now in his 11th year on the state Board of Regents”
11 years on the state Board of Regents is a problem in itself.
Regents members should all be working educators with short term limits.
The Chancellor of the New York Board of Regents, Merryl Tisch, was appointed to the board in 1996. That will be 20 years next spring. Should she be accountable for test scores?