Gary Rubinstein, who teaches mathematics, analyzed Commissioner John King’s plan to evaluate NYC teachers, which he imposed in the absence of an agreement between New York City and the United Federation of Teachers. Gary went a step further and read the law that King based his plan on. Gary concludes that King misread the law and that his plan is fundamentally flawed.
Step back a minute and ask yourself how many other professions are evaluated based on legislative mandates. Even in public sector jobs, like firefighters and police, nurses and social workers, do legislatures dictate how they should be evaluated on the job and by what criteria rpthey should be rated?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Real reform looks nothing like reform looks today. It’s being suffocated by standards and the silly, insidious tests that come with it.
The term “reform” was hijacked by the Overclass a long time ago.
Recall that ending Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), which provided an income floor that no one could fall below, was ended by President Clinton under the title of “Welfare Reform.” Since that time, income inequality and child poverty rates have exploded.
The silver lining, however, is that Bill has reportedly earned over $200 million dollars since leaving the White House, so it’s not a total loss.
The same deceptive language is used regarding Social Security and Medicare, which Obama’s Catfood Commission has also said need to be “reformed.” While Obama can be sure of a handsome payout after leaving office, if only for doing so much to destroy public education (and by allowing Wall Street looters to continue on their merry way without fear of the Department of Justice), the real brass ring for him would be Social Security “reform.”
Whoops, sorry for the space-out: this comment is in response to the previous post.
Whoops, sorry for the space-out and misplacing: this comment was intended for the previous post.
Rubenstein makes a valid point. Perhaps a due process challenge following Laudermill and its progeny might work. But who is going to sue, the UFT?
To control the population you must control the schools and what and how it is taught there. This is the total domination game they are playing. It is KISS. What is so hard to understand?
Rubinstein might be right. It’s one thing to note that, given the way the scoring bands have been drafted, someone who rates “ineffective” in the two student learning categories will necessarily, as a matter of mathematics, be rated ineffective overall. It’s another thing to say that the law’s intent is to ensure that ineffective ratings in those two categories must trump all other factors, regardless of how the math might work out if the scoring bands were revised. If I were Rubinstein, I would do my best to get access to the UFT and DOE submissions in the arbitration and the parties’ testimony. It would be interesting to see if the parties did, as King insinuates, agree that the legislature intended to ensure this result. If not, then King may be drawing tenuous inferences based on the legislative record.
This may be part of what King has in mind. Below is an excerpt from the Governor’s Program Bill Memorandum. This wouldn’t necessarily definitively express this Section’s legislative intent, but it is part of the legislative history and this was Cuomo’s bill. Again, I would like to see what the union said in its written submission and testimony. The union may indeed have agreed that the statute was designed to make it impossible for a teacher with “ineffective” ratings in the two objective growth categories to be rated anything other than “ineffective” overall.
Rating System
The teacher evaluation scoring system to ensure student achievement and teacher performance would be significantly tightened under this provision. The new rating system would prohibit a teacher or principal who is rated ineffective in the objective measures of student growth (40 pts) from receiving a developing score overall. The scoring system would be as follows:
Ineffective: 0 – 64
Developing: 65-74
Effective: 75-90
Highly Effective: 91 – 100
Click to access GPB%20_28_teacherevaluationmemo.pdf
“Step back a minute and ask yourself how many other professions are evaluated based on legislative mandates. Even in public sector jobs, like firefighters and police, nurses and social workers, do legislatures dictate how they should be evaluated on the job and by what criteria rpthey should be rated?”
I’ve been saying this for years, but if a person asks John Q. Public, that person most likely gets the “I pay your salary and my children are exposed to you” argument. Bottom line: People who are not educators see nothing wrong with the current state of legislative affairs.
LG, let me know when any state legislature passes a law about how to evaluate cops and firefighters. They too are paid by the public.
We’ll never see that in our lifetimes. Educators are under such public scrutiny all the time. I don’t know when all this nonsense started, but it makes teaching such a political job to have, whether we want it to be or not.
Eventually only the new teachers will work in this “profession” ie. until they get a job then the revolvoing door will go round and around. There will be no more senior teachers, the grades will be ” good” , they will ALL pass the regents exams, then it will rot. At that point we will see people throw their hands up and ask what happened.