Peter Goodman, long-time observer of Néw York politics, predicts that local and state politics will play a large role in the anti-tenure case that was recently filed in Staten Island. Why Staten Island? It was chosen because it is the most conservative borough in Nee York City. But it is also home to large numbers of public employees.
Follow Goodman as he goes through the politics of Vergara East.
He ultimately concludes that the California decision will be overruled, and the Néw York case will be dismissed. I hope he is right.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
As I noted on this blog some months back, the Vergara decision came from Judge Rolf Treu, who was first appointed to the California bench by former Republican governor Pete Wilson.
Wilson was the prototypical “free” market conservative who subscribed to trickle-down economic nonsense. As governor, Wilson pushed more standardized testing of students, and his tough-on-crime ideas led to Three Strikes legislation. Incredibly costly, Three Strikes laws caused huge racial disparities and resulted in stupidities and injustices like the imposition of life sentences for stealing golf clubs or a $2.50 pair of socks or 5 videotapes. Wilson cut spending significantly on both infrastructure and public education.
Presumably Wilson appointed people who shared his conservative ideology as judges.
While serving on the bench, Treu has been characterized as being irascible and criticized for letting “his personal political agenda control his behavior and decisions” and for doing the entire “legal system an injustice.”
In this particular case, the plaintiff’s attorney told Treu in closing arguments that “most teachers are talented, hard working, doing a good job.” But he also told Treu that “echoes” of Brown v. Board filled the room, and that “evidence demonstrates overwhelmingly” that ineffective teachers do “education harm” and “deprive: students of their rights to a good education.
The “evidence” was mostly this, As Judge Treu wrote in his decision:
“The evidence is compelling. Indeed it shocks the conscience. Based on a massive study Dr Chetty testified that a single year in a classroom with a grossly ineffective teacher costs students $1.4 million in lifetime earnings.”
On the face of it, it’s a flimsy allegation. Think about it a slightly different way. Does one year of bad coaching, or of faulty coaching decisions, bilk a team of young players out of a million-plus bucks in potential lifetime sports earnings. Didn’t seem to interfere with Michael Jordan.
Rolf Treu cannot be said to be a “bright” man. Consider his pedigree. That he bought lock, stock and barrel the Chetty correlations as “overwhelming” proof is testimony enough.
This decision, like other bad ones from the past, will eventually be overturned.
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“Existential Threat”
Staunch reliance
On pseudoscience
Slams the gate
On America’s fate
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The Vergara case and judicial thinking and writing is a joke, if not a mockery of law.
But we are living in corrupt, politicized times. we will not count any chickens before hatching in the Staten Island court.
Wait and watch. But also voice yourselves, vote, and be vigilante.
This issue will probably find its way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Hopefully, some of the conservatives will have – whatever – not be there anymore and more progressive justices will have been appointed.
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Tyranny of Ignorance. People believe what they hear on Fox News or the local paper and buy into the Republican branding. They vote in people who echo their views, yet work against the interests of the followers. If the views are packaged in a slick, pseudo-research paper (Chetty et al), all the better. At least they can post a link to it. Our state Ohio is now 100% Republican. No checks, no balances, absolute power corrupting absolutely. Free market, trickle down silliness is spouted as a religion, and repeated by people barely able to get by on food stamps. Try to argue and you get conservative talking points through glazed eyes. In our school group, the most vehemently anti-teacher, anti-government are on government disability, yet are able to work manual labor jobs or run a business. We have to constantly hear and read the posts about Obamacare, liberal schools, union teachers. Tyranny of Ignorance.
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I also predict that all vam-related evaluations will be found invalid and thrown out with time.
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Those VAMmer evaluations “will be found invalid”.
No they won’t, as they already are COMPLETELY INVALID
Realizing that at least since 1997 it’s been known that they are COMPLETELY INVALID as proven by Noel Wilson’s never refuted nor rebutted Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
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 word 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.
By Duane E. Swacker
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