In an earlier post, Arthur Goldstein explained the absurd
evaluation scheme adopted at his school, where teachers will be
allocated the score for the whole school if they do not teach a
tested subject. This reader asks the question that Butch Cassidy
asked the Sundance Kid: Who ARE these Guys? Meaning, this is so
crazy, it makes no sense, why are they doing this to us?
This reader wonders too:
“Then Da Vinci was right. “”The supreme misfortune is when theory outstrips performance.” Because depending on some of the choices NYC schools will have to make, good teachers may suffer just because they are in a low performing school while poor teachers may shine because they are in high performing schools. The whole thing sounds like “luck of the draw” to me. It’s either that or we have entered a dystopian novel where the present will suffer only to hopefully let the future try to understand our mistakes. The problem is that real and honest people are involved here. Honest, hard working teachers with mortgages and family. Honest and hard working teachers with rents to pay. Honest and hard working teachers who dreamed of making a difference who now have loans. Honest and hard working teachers with plans to grow a family. Your reply confirms the absolute absurdity of the whole thing. If no one understands it, then how in the world did it come to be? Is everyone who participated in this confusing mess idiots? As a native New Yorker I can only ask: what neighborhoods did these people grow up in? Who raised these people?”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This may surprise you, but if the measure is fair and achievable, it is one of the better options. Faculties work best when they work together. A good whole school measure is better than pitting one teacher against another. The trick is to create one that is achievable so that it becomes invisible. My teachers all earned the full 20 points.
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Carol, none of “these guys” has any interest in creating measures of anything that are fair, achievable or invisible.
Whoever they are, they want to take control of public schools away from people with any connection to the children in them. Teacher evaluation metrics, school performance metrics, and other “accountability” tools are wrecking balls to accomplish that end.
Can your reassurances about whole-building evaluations survive this chilling language from NY governor Cuomo, as quoted in the Buffalo News story, “Cuomo sees ‘death penalty’ to deal with failing schools”:
“Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo told reporters here Thursday that there has to be “a death penalty for failing schools, so to speak.”
“In response to a question about Buffalo’s low-performing schools, the governor said that such schools – in Buffalo or any other district – should be given a short period of time to improve, “and then something dramatically has to happen, because we can’t allow these failing schools to continue.”
“In Buffalo, three-fourths of the district’s 59 schools are considered by the state to be failing, based on test scores and graduation rates.”
“Cuomo said that there are various options, including state takeover of a district, mayoral control of a district and takeover of a school by a charter entity. ”
http://www.buffalonews.com/city-region/buffalo-public-schools/coumo-urges-death-penalty-for-failing-schools-20130829
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“Teacher evaluation metrics, school performance metrics, and other “accountability” tools are wrecking balls to accomplish that end.”
Sadly, I have to agree with you.
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“but if the measure is fair. . . ”
That’s a mighty big if. So big in fact that it is insurmountable as there is no logical “measure” of the teaching and learning process. That supposed “measure” is logically invalid from the start ontologically and epistemologically speaking. And if it is invalid it can no way be considered fair.
The game you are playing with the students lives to get those oh so valued 20 points is wrong.
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Who raised these people? Answer: People who live their lives via their children and who raised entitled, self-centered individuals who can only think of themselves and their pocketbooks. Heck…the yahoos are already campaigning.
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I’m a special education teacher. My sped license is in emotionally handicapped. I have another license in Art that I never worked under in the NYC schools. I am an ICT (integrated co-teacher) in Global History 1, 2, 3, 4 and US History 1 and 2. Up until this year I went into earth science classes as well but a new sped science teacher was hired because all sped teachers must be linked with the classes (subjects) they tgo into but don’t actually teach. I am not linked to my sped kids. I will be rated on the scores of the whole school in History (which I am not licensed in) even though I might not have set foot in the class of most of the students I’m being rated on. I will also be observed and rated in an area I enjoy (history) but am not licensed it. This is insane. I have given up. The only thing I care about are my sped kids. I’ve been teaching a long time so I don’t give a crap about my actual rating so I will continue to do what I do and make my kids whole. Hopefully I can stick around until the grassroot movements take hold and education can be taken back by the people who live it everyday.
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Perhaps the disconnect between ‘leaders’ and the impact of their actions is encouraged by the legacy of transient America – corporate culture emulating the military’s practice of moving employees from location to location, creating a wardrobe of geography with abstracted loyalty, transient in a geographic community, locales traded and disposed as careers grow. The most advantaged Americans are also the most transient, looking to advantage themselves further with each move, discarding the locations that no longer offer such promise. Schools are community institutions of substance and history; institutional memory nourishes practice and pedagogy. What are our brightest and most advantaged to do with a community institution that reinforces community culture? Disparage, discard, replace with the dominant culture of rootlessness and privilege. Hail the advantage of streamlined progress, relieved of investment in community and culture. The most advantaged Americans have forgotten how roots are designed to nurture, connect, stabilize, inform.Their vapid superiority must not be allowed to undermine the foundation of our rooted communities. Profound teaching happens in communities whose roots are essential. Unfortunately, this may never be understood by those empowered to make such important decisions. We have no choice but to fight to preserve these crucial institutions whose roots grow through profound history and into the future.
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Excellent comments!
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I retired out of an overseas system where middle school student evaluations contributed to teacher’s professional evaluation. Who’s in charge of these mad houses???
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First, in a large diverse district like N.Y., Chicago or LAUSD the only fair way to see what teachers do is to take those in the wealthy easy schools and put them in the inner city and take the inner city teachers and put them in the wealthy schools and then average the scores and then see what is happening. Crazy, isn’t it.
Now, for the fun part, evaluating administrators, especially those at the top. After all, doesn’t the fish rot from the head? Sure does. Teachers do not spend the money, determine curriculum or policy, they do not assign employees, they are told what to do right or wrong, they have to accept responsibility for others decisions every time they come up with a new crazy idea that will solve all problems. Administrators do all of that. They also break the child abuse laws and falsely charge and illegally without “Due Process” terminate employees. So why are they bagging on teachers. To take the eyes off of the real culprits, administrators who are the ones controlled by the billionaires. There is their simple plan.
They are hoping you will all be asleep on the real game going on until it is too late to do anything. Gig is up for them.
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Exchanging the teachers wouldn’t work because the schools are unequal at so many levels. Even with recent budget cuts, the better schools offer so many other services and personnel. Elementary schools have social workers, psychologists, and guidance counselors to help children with their problems. Even without after school buses, there are programs after school and the child can either walk home or be picked up. In the city, there are less support staff to help a larger population of students with overwhelming personal issues, including shootings, imprisonment, and extreme poverty. There is a lack of after school activities because the kids don’t go to school in their own neighborhoods, plus the buildings are closed an hour after school lets out. Unless you’ve lived it, you cannot grasp the difficulties facing an inner city school. Add in refugees, immigrants, and students with learning or emotional difficulties, and you have an almost insurmountable situation. Plus you want them to get an A on an exam written for the privileged class? Not gonna happen in the current scenario. I’m not even sure the top schools can do well (they didn’t excell on this past year’s exam).
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It’s just not working. Whatever direction the state dictates seems to always be the wrong choice. Maybe it is because decisions are being made by politicians and their appointees, not professional educators with experience in the field.
So many of their choices don’t make sense. Why close a charter school in Buffalo with over 500 students the week before school starts. The better schools are already overflowing with students and there are another 2200+ waiting for transfers. The suburban schools don’t want kids from the city – their test scores from April are already nothing to brag about.
These are children who need to gow and be nourished as much as they need to learn the 3 Rs. They must be the first priority, not an after thought. There’s a lot more ego than common sense at play in education right now. Get over yourselves and stop playing education’s version of “The Hunger Games” where only the top students survive.
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In my school system, teachers have just been given a thick packet which explains the new teacher evaluations. I looked for the list of individual names credited to creating the document and there Is no such list to be found. Just a few sentences about how administrators and teachers worked so diligently on it were included in the introduction. Publications from our central office always list the individuals who helped develop the content but not this time. I wonder why? I read the packet from cover to cover and I now have more questions than answers.
Is anyone familiar with “Teachscape Reflect”? From what I can gather it seems that my previously confidential professional evaluations will now be stored in a cloud funded by Bill Gates.
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Just a thought, has anyone who posts here or ‘is on our side’ ever gotten a hold of one of those Broad Superintendent manuals that teaches superintendents how to close schools? Because I’m one of those teachers who, if my school did this, would be evaluated this way. I’m a specials teacher. We’ve talked about this at my school and wondered how, we as music, art and PE teachers, would be evaluated…I guess I have my answer and no it’s not fair. But I also think it’s not fair to evaluate teachers based on their students tests scores. We have good classes, bad classes, big classes and small classes, we have classes full of IEPs and 504s most of whom can’t even sit still for a worksheet let alone an hours long test. So is it fair to base a person’s livelihood on that?
So for my part, as a specials teacher, I also have to be involved in learning about ELA Common Core for a test that I have no part in preparing students for. We were told to bring a work of non-fiction to deep read. I’m planning on bringing Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, and I’m going to ask the presenter to deep read it, for us, and let us know what she thinks. Because this is what we are asking out little 1st and 2nd graders to do. Yes, it is a hard book but she is a grown up and it is comparable. These ‘GUYS’ have no EMPATHY..they cannot nor care to imagine the havoc they are wreaking. First they give teachers in the lower grades impossible material to teach then they base these teachers jobs on testing it. These are the GUYS who are trying to destroy one of the pillars of a free American society…a free public education for all by killing it from the inside out, because who will become a teacher under these conditions?
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Orwell’s 1984 is a little slow getting here, but it has arrived.
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“Cuomo says recent systems of evaluating teachers and schools provide hard numbers on which schools are doing well and which aren’t and the bad ones have to go.”
“Cuomo says failing schools face ‘death penalty.'”
http://news.wbfo.org/post/cuomo-says-failing-schools-face-death-penalty
Yes, Cuomo really did say “death penalty” yesterday. This account was written by NPR correspondent Mike Desmond, who has been following school closures in Buffalo.
Please, Diane, give this some attention! Or, better yet, can somebody with investigative skills follow the Turnaround Partner money through BOCES and find out who “these guys” really represent? Two years ago, I was able to track Boces’ for-profit providers online, but now I’m hitting a wall at lead “investing in innovation” partner Johns Hopkins. Any forensic accountants out there?
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Gates funds lots of turnaround initiatives. http://www.gatesfoundation.org/search#q/k=turnaround&contenttype=Grant
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we’ve been gathering some good illustrations from the Orwell literature etc. as well as Alice in Wonderland.
I want to offer this analogy to Pinnochio one of my favorites
quote; “it’s time to march again!” Recognize that we must continue to fight to fulfill the economic goals that remain unmet after years of sustained high unemployment and depressed wages.”
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Instead , the mandarins at the SEA say “use our new test to see if your child is job ready”.
That is a diversion, I think it would be called a ruse…. it is like the Pinocchio story where the
child/puppet sells his school books for a trip to the carnival….
It is an out and out lie to tell people “go to the back of the line; you are not job ready and it is your own fault, or it is your second grade teacher’s fault” etc.
I won’t buy it.
I am not a wooden headed Pinocchio.
jean e. sanders,
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“It’s either that or we have entered a dystopian novel. . . ”
Yep, the novel one as we’ve stepped through the looking glass and need those prior tripping experiences to try to sort it all out. (apologies to L. Black)
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