Secretary Duncan wants to rate colleges of education by the test scores of students taught by their graduates.
Read this post by VAM expert Audrey Amrein Beardsley to learn why this is a very bad idea and how you can register your protest against it.
Steve Cohen, superintendent of schools in Shoreham-Wading River (NY), wrote a column in Ling Island newspapers criticizing the state’s heavy-handed method of mandating change.
For his courage in speaking truth to power, I add Superintendent Steve Cohen to the blig’s honor roll.
Cohen points to a letter from Merryl Tisch, chancellor of the Néw York State Board of Regents, to Governor Cuomo’s representative, outlining her goals.
He writes:
“What’s striking in Ms. Tisch’s recommendations to the governor is the unstated proposition that there is a big difference between public education and state education, and that state education is far superior. From the chancellor’s point of view, public education hasn’t just failed poor, black and Hispanic children the most, but has somehow even failed kids in Great Neck, Jericho, Scarsdale and Garden City — even though many of them go on to the best universities in the nation.
“The remedy? State education.
“Public education is an old and very familiar institution. To be sure, school districts get their authority from New York State. But despite state guidance, school boards, and the administrators and teachers who work for these boards, have broad latitude to define curriculum and instruction.
“These boards and the superintendents they hire have authority over hiring and evaluating teachers and principals. The boards have a duty to propose a spending plan every year to district voters. Public education, in short, means “local control.”
“Public education is democracy in action. It has all the virtues and vices of our form of self-government. This democratic system has worked well in many districts, especially in those whose residents are relatively wealthy and thus able to afford the resources commonly found in thriving schools.
“But in poorer districts, and especially in large cities, democratic “local” control of education has not worked as well as we would all wish. The state Legislature has wrestled with this problem for generations and, in fact, is now under a Court of Appeals order to address fiscal inequities among districts.
“Public education is a complex, immense, difficult institution. Poverty and wealth more than anything tend to determine the outcome of its efforts.
“But it’s also among our most democratic institutions.
“Ms. Tisch, most of her non-elected colleagues and our current governor, however, seem to have arrived at the conclusion that local control of education does not, and cannot, work.”
“Now comes the chancellor’s suggestions that locally elected school boards should no longer have control over determining whether teachers and principals do a good job and that all teachers and principals who do not meet the state’s standard of successful teaching or supervising two years in a row must lose their jobs.
“Chancellor Tisch suggests that the content all children must learn and the methods teachers must use to teach that content will be determined by the state, not local residents in accord with professional educators, acting through democratically elected school board members. She suggests that charter schools, over which local residents have little if any control, would be completely free to flourish (or not!) and to replace democratically run local schools….
“So the non-elected chancellor and the current governor believe local control of education has failed. The great experiment is dead. What will take its place is a technocratic process so complex that it is almost impossible for parents, residents and educators to understand — much less embrace.”
Arthur Camins, director of the Center for Innovation in Engineering and Science Education at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J., remembers when the idea of revolution was about social equality and a just, humane society. That was then. This is now.
But something has happened to the revolution.
He writes:
“Strangely, we are now confronted with a different brand of revolutionaries, education reformers who seek not to expand democracy, but instead to restrict it and not to wage a war to end poverty, but instead to make a path for a lucky few to escape from poverty. Lennon lyrics may now have meaning when self-proclaimed “game-changers” advocate improvement through disruptive innovation. Their vision is at once expansive — disrupt the basic structure of democratically governed public education — and pathetically small and selfish — provide competitive opportunities for advancement for the few.
“Today’s education revolutionaries believe that they need to destroy the current structures of education in order to improve it. The problem is not so much the idea of destroying structures — after all the legal structures and cultural practices that supported segregation needed to be destroyed. The problem is reformers’ values, what is in their queue for destruction and their disregard for consequences. Their list includes eliminating elected school boards and teachers’ unions and opposing class-size reductions. It includes replacing the joy of learning with the joy of winning competitions for top test scores. The casualties of such destruction are parents’ and citizens’ democratic voices through state take-overs of school systems, mayoral appointment of school boards rather than elections, and governance transfers to privately run, but publicly-funded, charter schools and vouchers. The victims of that destruction are children whose unstable lives, already disrupted by poverty, are made even less stable by school closings and dismissals from charter schools. The victims of that destruction are those students whose motivation to learn is replaced by the drudgery of test preparation. The list goes on….
“When Lennon referenced evolution in the lyrics to “Revolution,” he might have been unintentionally prescient about another feature of the current education reform mantra. The prime mechanism for biological evolution is natural selection — the interaction of natural variation and random mutations in populations with changes in the environment. With their advocacy for planned competition among schools for students, among parents for student entry into schools, and among teachers for pay increases, reformers appear to be misapplying biological evolution to social policies, favoring a long discredited survival of the fittest social strategy.
“When they talk about that kind of socially destructive competition as the route to improvement, Don’t you know, you can count me out.
“Great vision, citizen action, social movements and public investment brought us great achievements. These include: an end to slavery and much later and an end to legalized segregation. Other achievements include unemployment insurance, overtime pay, child-labors laws, Social Security, Workman’s Compensation Insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, food, medical, occupational heath and safety regulations, the interstate highway system, the Internet and great widely-accessible K-12 and post-secondary education systems. The revolution we still need builds on the values of equity, democracy and community responsibility that drove these advances. The revolution we still need seeks even broader racial, social and economic justice. Of course, we need to elect people who support these values. However, only a reemergence of the spirit and reality of a mass social movement will realize these values in people’s day-to-day lives.
“For that revolution, you can count me in.”
Beth Dimino, an eighth grade science teacher in the Comsewogue district on Long Island in Néw York, will not administer the Common Core tests this spring. Her superintendent, Dr. Joseph Rella, supports her. For their act of courage, I name both to the honor roll.
The Long Island Press reports:
“More than 20,000 LI school children refused to take the state tests last April. No teacher, however, has gone so far as Dimino to publicly voice his/her intention to refuse to even proctor the exams. She tells the Press her unprecedented decision is simply a matter of conscience, and spelled out as much in a recent letter to Comsewogue Superintendent Dr. Joe Rella, who’s also gone on record as a staunch Common Core dissident.
“I find myself at a point in the progress of education reform in which clear acts of conscience will be necessary to preserve the integrity of public education,” she writes. “I can no longer implement policies that seek to transform the broad promises of public education into a narrow obsession with the ranking and sorting of children.
“I will not distort curriculum in order to encourage students to comply with bubble test thinking,” continues her letter. “I can no longer, in good conscience, push aside months of instruction to compete in a state-wide ritual of meaningless and academically bankrupt test preparation. I have seen clearly how these reforms undermine teachers’ love for their profession and undermine students’ intrinsic love of learning.”
Douglas Harris is an economist at Tulane University who was recently appointed to lead the Education Research Alliance in New Orleans. Harris has written extensively about value-added measurement (VAM). Mercedes Schneider is a high school teacher in Louisiana with a Ph.D. in research methods and statistics; she is also an outspoken critic of privatization and corporate style reform of the kind that has eliminated public education in New Orleans.
Mercedes recently attended a meeting convened by Professor Harris to discuss the choice program in New Orleans. Afterwards she talked to parents who participated on a panel, and she talked to Doug Harris, who made a point of meeting Mercedes. She had written some strong blogs (cited in her post) wondering whether a research organization like Harris’s could be neutral. In her conversation with Harris, she was blunt, as you would expect. Face-to-face contact is always useful when people disagree. Mercedes had a chance to size up Harris, and Harris now knows Mercedes. We hope that both of them benefit by the introduction.
Mercedes followed up that post with another one expressing her disappointment that the 3-day conference on the New Orleans reforms is heavily weighted towards advocates of privatization and has little representation of those affected by the reforms or local researchers. She says there is “too much Tulane” and not enough local community to judge the reforms.
An article in Salon reports that exposure to wi-Fi devices may be carcinogenic, especially got children.
It says:
“A new article published in the Journal of Microscopy and Ultrastructure called “Why children absorb more microwave radiation than adults: The consequences” analyzed previously published peer-reviewed studies on RF/EMF and found that not only are children much more susceptible to certain kinds of radiation, but that our current exposure limits may be inadequate.
“Forbes’ Robert J. Szczerba reports:
Children and fetuses absorb more microwave radiation, according to the authors, because their bodies are relatively smaller, their skulls are thinner, and their brain tissue is more absorbent.
“More generally, the studies cited in the paper found RF/EMF exposure is linked to cancers of the brain and salivary glands, ADHD, low sperm count, and, among girls who keep cell phones in their bra, breast cancer. They also noted that the average time between exposure to a carcinogen and a resultant tumor is three or more decades.”
Another analysis cited in the article is less alarming:
“Another study was recently launched jointly by Imperial College and the University of London to collect information about the effect of Wi-Fi and mobile technology on children’s brains. “Scientific evidence available to date is reassuring and shows no association between exposure to radiofrequency waves from mobile phone use and brain cancer in adults in the short term,” said Professor Paul Elliot, director of Medical Research Council Centre for Environment and Health at Imperial College. “But the evidence available regarding long term heavy use and children’s use is limited and less clear.”
Now that most testing will be online, the term “toxic testing” takes on a new, more sinister meaning.
Mercedes Schneider says that Governor Andrew Cuomo in 2015 sounds remarkably like Governor Bonby Jindal in 2012.
Amazing resemblance:
“In Louisiana in 2012, second-term-elected Governor Jindal commanded the legislature. As for his test-driven education agenda, Jindal had the legislature pass Act 1, commonly known as the Teacher Tenure Law, in short order. That is the legislation that officially ushered in Louisiana teachers’ being graded using their students’ test scores, with 50 percent of the annual teacher evaluation based on student scores and 50 percent, on administrative evaluation. Teachers are rated in one of four categories–“highly effective,” “effective,” “effective emerging,” and “ineffective.” An “ineffective” rating via test scores is enough for a teacher to be declared “ineffective” overall.
“For teachers to have tenure, they must be rated “highly effective” for five out of six years.
“Looks like Cuomo has taken his 2015 State of the State teacher evaluation ideas from Louisiana in 2012.”
Jindal didn’t get far with his teacher-bashing agenda. Most of it was declared unconstitutional by the courts. It’s time for teachers in Néw York to Send In the Lawyers to stop Cuomo from destroying the profession.
Governor Andrew Cuomo said in his State of the State message today that he wants teacher evaluations to be based 50% test scores, 50% observation. Any teacher “ineffective” in raising test scores will be found no better than “developing” regardless of observation scores. Any teacher rated ineffective two years in a row may be fired.
“According to a book outlining Cuomo’s policy and budget speech on Wednesday, the governor will propose a “simplified and standardized” evaluation system that rates teachers 50 percent on state test scores (or a comparable measure of student growth for teachers in subjects that are not tested) and 50 percent on observations.
“Rather than being locally negotiated, the “scoring bands” for both components would be set at the state level under the proposal, and if a teacher is rated “ineffective” on either portion, he or she may not get a score higher than “developing” overall. (The ratings are assigned on a scale of “ineffective,” “developing,” “effective” and “highly effective.” Two consecutive “ineffective” ratings could be grounds for termination.)
“Cuomo’s plan calls for at least two observations, one of which would be conducted by an “independent observer,” which could be a principal or administrator from within or outside the school district, a SUNY or CUNY professor or “trained independent evaluator” from a list to be provided by the State Education Department.”
Cuomo’s staff evidently did not read the American Statistical Association statement on value-added models. It says:
As I wrote in an earlier post,
“Most VAM studies find that teachers account for about 1% to 14% of the variability in test scores, and that the majority of opportunities for quality improvement are found in the system-level conditions. Ranking teachers by their VAM scores can have unintended consequences that reduce quality.” The ASA points out: “This is not saying that teachers have little effect on students, but that variation among teachers accounts for a small part of the variation in scores. The majority of the variation in test scores is attributable to factors outside of the teacher’s control such as student and family background, poverty, curriculum, and unmeasured influences.”
“As many education researchers have explained–including a joint statement by the American Educational Research Association and the National Academy of Education– the VAM ratings of those who teach children with disabilities and English language learners will be low, because these children have greater learning challenges than their peers, as will the ratings of those who teach gifted students, because the latter group has already reached a ceiling. Those two groups, like the ASA agreed that test scores are affected by many factors besides the teacher, not only the family, but the school’s leadership, its resources, class size, curriculum, as well as the student’s motivation, attendance, and health. Yet the Obama administration and most of our states are holding teachers alone accountable for student test scores.
“The ASA warns that the current heavy reliance on VAMs for high-stakes testing and their simplistic interpretation may have negative effects on the quality of education. There will surely be unintended consequences, such as a diminishment in the number of people willing to become teachers in an environment where “quality” is so crudely measured. There will assuredly be more teaching to the test.. With the Obama administration’s demand for VAM, “more classroom time might be spent on test preparation and on specific content from the test at the exclusion of content that may lead to better long-term learning gains or motivation for students. Certain schools may be hard to staff if there is a perception that it is harder for teachers to achieve good VAM scores when working in them. Over-reliance on VAM scores may foster a competitive environment, discouraging collaboration and efforts to improve the educational system as a whole.”
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This is a startling blog post that has been going viral. It was written by Michael Lambert of the Gloversville Teachers Association. It warns that Governor Andrew Cuomo and Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch are together planning changes that would destroy public education in New York and end the careers of many teachers who ran afoul of the state’s evaluation requirements. Those evaluation requirements are based on value-added-measures that expert Audrey Amrein Beardsley recently described as “idiotic.”
Eric DeCarlo, president of the Scotia-Glenville Teachers Association, adapted it from a letter written by Mike Mosal, president of the Burnt Hills Teachers Association; these teachers work in small districts in upstate New York. The letter has been spread widely among teachers, parents, and community members upstate. Ric and Mike see the handwriting on the wall, and they think it is menacing.
This is part of the letter. It is worth reading the letter in its entirety:
Recently, the Governor’s office and Regents Chancellor Tisch exchanged letters about the future of education in New York. The links to these letters were sent out in an email last week to the Association. You can read the full letters at those links. The conversation between these two can be broken down into the following “reforms” that could be implemented this spring.
1. 40% of teacher evaluation should be tied to growth scores. The local 20% achievement (SLO) should be eliminated.
2. Any teacher deemed “ineffective” on the new 40% state score would be deemed ineffective overall (no matter their scores on the local observation 60%).
3. Any teacher who receives two consecutive ineffective ratings would not be allowed back into the classroom (apparently without a 3020-A hearing or due process. Additionally, all of the current 3020-A hearing officers would be replaced with “state employees”. The Regents seek to replace the last gatekeepers of due process with their own appointees.
4. No student could be scheduled to have an “ineffective” teacher two years in a row (by proposed changes to state education law). This would likely require disclosure of which teachers are “ineffective” for scheduling purposes (and possibly to parents). This is a massive invasion of privacy that was already legislated. Such information is currently not shared outside of the administration and impacted teacher. Parents can only gain this information through a district determined process and, even then, the parents can only know where their student’s teacher falls on the “HEDI” range.
5. Merit pay would be established and, apparently, would not be collectively bargained. Districts would be empowered to “design innovative compensation models based on educator performance”. According to Chancellor Tisch’s letter, our Association would not be privy to the process for how this “compensation” would be doled out and what the criteria would be for merit pay.
6. Teachers would be required to wait five years before they could be granted tenure. Additionally, teacher certification tests would become vastly more challenging.
7. Schools who do not meet the Governor and Chancellor Tisch’s performance expectations, would be closed and replaced with “institutions that are up to the task” which would likely be for-profit charter schools. Additionally, Chancellor Tisch is effectively asking the state legislature for unfettered authority to open and close schools based on metrics (state test scores) that she controls. The Regents and the State Education Department can raise or lower cut scores, and therefore “achievement” gains or losses, at a whim. We have seen this over the past two years as the Common Core assessments become integrated into the APPR. This is, without question, unlimited power for Tisch, the Regents, and the enemies of public education. Furthermore, Tisch seeks to uncap the limit on for-profit charter schools.
These changes are not speculative or “what if’s”. Read the letters linked above, read what NYSUT is saying. This is our FUTURE!!!!
In 2010, all of us (NYSUT included) were caught off guard at the scope and scale of Race to the Top, the Common Core standards, and the APPR law 3012-c. These initiatives completely changed education as we know it. These changes, with very few exceptions, were wholly negative for teachers and bad for children.
Here we are, four years later, with two of the most important figures in state politics and education having an open discussion about how to unequivocally destroy public education in the state of New York. They have become our enemies and our students enemies. They are brash, unencumbered, and openly declaring war on our profession. They seek to eliminate collective bargaining’s impact in the areas of evaluation. They ignore mandatory subjects of negotiation, like compensation. They have so little respect for teachers, and the institutions that represent us, that they openly write about changing due process tenure. This would have been unthinkable five years ago. They do not care about what’s best for kids, teachers, or schools; only headlines and perception. There is no subterfuge here. Governor Cuomo and Chancellor Tisch seek to end public education as we know it. They want to break the back of NYSUT. They want to make our loca irrelevant. If we do not act now, all will be lost.
Simply put, we are at war!
I say to you now, we must become part of the solution. We must take up this cause as we never have before. We cannot be blind to what is about to occur in this state budget cycle.
The Los Angeles Times reports a new survey of 26 school districts showing that many of them are not complying with state law that requires them to evaluate teachers in part by student test scores. Apparently, the district leadership knows this is a flawed and invalid means of judging teacher quality.
Teresa Watanabe writes:
The review of 26 school districts serving more than 1.2 million students found that only Clovis Unified near Fresno and Sweetwater Union High School District in Chula Vista fully complied with the law. Two others, Upland Unified in the Inland Empire and San Ramon Valley Unified in Contra Costa County, were “blatantly in violation” of the law by expressly prohibiting the use of state standardized test scores in their teacher evaluations, the study said. The findings were disputed by both districts.
The other school systems surveyed — which included Long Beach, San Diego, Oakland and San Francisco — offered mixed findings, according to the study conducted by the EdVoice Institute for Research and Education, an educational advocacy organization in Sacramento.
Los Angeles Unified School District is still writing its method for evaluating teachers, in response to a court order telling the district to do it (even though most researchers have said it is invalid).
This is a big problem for “reformers,” constantly having to litigate against states and districts to force them to comply with invalid measures and policies that have negative consequences for students and teachers alike.
Diane Ravitch's blog 