For the past year and more, the New York State Board of Regents has spent a huge proportion of its time designing and debating a test-based educator evaluation system. The system was developed by AIR (American Institutes for Research) and has been criticized as inaccurate by Bruce Baker, who says that even AIR recognizes how flawed the system is. Yet Governor Cuomo, Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Tisch say “full speed ahead.”
Regent Roger Tilles, who represents Long Island on the state Board of Regents, wrote the following letter and distributed it to many people. He asks the right questions:
Friday, we were all witnesses to the horror of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings. As the story unfolded, we learned of the selfless devotion of the teachers and administrators, putting themselves in danger while trying to protect their students, their children.
In trying to put these events in a context that we, as policymakers must try to do, I asked myself these questions:
1. What kind of algorithm measures the kind of devotion that we saw and I am sure we would see in crisis after crisis in all of our schools?
2. How do you establish a pre- and post-test for the kind of personal responsibility that these professionals demonstrated?
3. How do we measure the trust that these children and their parents have placed in us as educators “in loco parentis”?
4. What kind of virtual teacher would be able to foster the communication needed to create a trusting atmosphere where learning can take place?
Let us remember these questions as we are asked to develop policies that insure the future of our children and our country.
Roger Tilles, Member
New York State Board of Regents
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This is a wonderful letter. Mr Tilles is an educational leader who understands that teaching is about relationships and connections, not about value-added algorithms and 57 page observation rubrics with a checklist on each page.
Thank you Mr. Tilles for asking the right questions and pointing out the values we should hold up as “good teaching”.
So, is Mr. Tilles prepared to turn his back on the whole corporate “accountability” strategy that’s demanding all these bogus measurements, and start again toward our real mission as educators and protectors of our children?
What is it we need to measure? The common bond that motivates our efforts to teach inexorably produced teachers who would lay their own lives down to protect the children?
The inexorable logic of corporate profit, on the other hand, helped produce and armed a killer who broke into an elementary school. Yes, what he spread is the culture wrought by Walmart and Microsoft in the market place. We high school teachers are more accustomed to thinking about that conjunction, because we see what it’s doing to live kids.
The first question on this Walmart customer help page for the Bushmaster rifle is, “How old do you have to be to buy this gun?”
http://answers.walmart.com/answers/1336/product/19235996/questions.htm
Here’s a 2007 ad for Microsoft’s X-Box that was banned:
It’s ironic that these dynastic Walton and Gates family fortunes have now also invaded our schools through the corridors of power, demanding control of our teachers and children through “accountability” to their political and economic might.
Surely, the regents can muster the courage to oppose them? Their whole profit-driven business model, wildly successful as it may be for their own success, demonstrates they don’t understand the mission.
It’s better if this comment doesn’t run on this story, now that I look at it. The links are very depressing, and Mr. Tilles has made a good statement which should stand for what it is.
He may indeed go further with it.
Why can’t leaders like this get a foothold in the current system? Why?
Not many of our current leaders have the ability to think for themselves or of others!
Stand tall Mr. Tilles, courage is not welcome in all circles.
Thank you, Roger Tilles. Those are the right four questions–and whatever else we do we must always ask ourselves how it impacts on the answer to those four.
At least one Regent has a brain…and a heart.
Amen
I had been hoping that logical powerful people like Roger Tilles would start to to step up. Thank YOU.
We need a healthy combination of ‘high tech’ and ‘high touch’ strategies implemented into our schools. We also need to attempt to measure both and not be blinded only by the percentage of high school graduates by fooling the public while the Regents keep lowering those academic standards! We need to educate the whole person and not just measure reading, writing and arithmetic. Even though the Common Core State Standards encompass much more, those academic subjects are the ones being assessed!!! How narrow minded are we? How ’bout encouraging the social/emotional development of students by screening those qualities AND providing preventative programs as other states have done while also measuring that progress.
Yes, teachers are going to be evaluated under the new system by more than those academic numerical progress charts (e.g. those statistics are PART of the total score). However, the emotional/social development is not part of ANY summative evaluation formula which is what I am classifying as the ‘high touch’ part of the definition.
To add to this, teacher involvement into the community is a tremendous asset to have as a professional educator. Certainly ‘profeesional development’ can encompass that as much as those numerous inservice programs presented and sometimes mandated by the administration! Since students get high school credit for ‘Service Learning’ (volunteering to provide a minimum hours of service to others), can’t this type of community involvement be incorporated into teachers’ professional development?
We need both!