In a post earlier today (https://dianeravitch.net/2015/03/29/nearly-100-superintendents-sign-petition-to-save-public-education-in-ny/), I reported that “nearly 100” superintendents had signed the statement questioning Governor Cuomo’s agenda for the schools. Some readers asked for a list of names. Here is a letter with the names of 102 superintendents who signed the declaration, plus Board members and PTA presidents who signed. In some cases, entire Boards of Education wanted to sign the statement. As word gets out, expect the list to grow.
For the copy of the letter with 16 pages of signatures, select the link below.
This is a press release from the Alliance to Save Public Education:
Superintendents and community leaders want meaningful reform
A group of superintendents from Nassau, Suffolk and Westchester counties gathered at South Side High School in Rockville Centre to discuss a legislative proposal to establish a special commission that would create a new teacher evaluation system. The educators, members of the Alliance to Save Public Education, first came together in late February to draft and sign a letter that urged legislators to separate education reform from the state budget process.
To date, the letter has 150 signatures, representing support from 13 percent of the school districts in New York State, which span a wide range of demographics – poor and wealthy, big and small, urban, rural and suburban, upstate and downstate. While the group agrees with the idea of a commission, they said the plan to evaluate teachers and principals must be valid and appropriate and reflect the best interests of students. “We want a commission that will create an evaluation system that promotes student growth,” Shoreham-Wading River Superintendent Steven Cohen said. “It should include educational researchers, world-renowned experts in the field, psychometrics, superintendents and teachers.” Members of the alliance said they are in favor of testing that values education and works for students, and indicated that if the state is not willing to create a commission that includes relevant stakeholders, they would create a commission that does.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
10 from Westchester: Pleasantville, Pelham, Ardsley, Dobbs Ferry, Yonkers, Irvington, Rye Neck, Elmsford, Mamaroneck, Ossining
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Proud that Upstate is represented, especially those small schools. You have no idea how hard Cuomo’s Gap elimination adjustment and tax cap have been on small schools. We start with so few resources and battle distance, weather, and lack of resources, such as Internet and wireless classrooms. Pleased our district super signed. We value local control– especially in districts that have existed for over 100 years. We definitely deserve more aid and more valid APPR. Cuomo’s proposed 40 percent test scores and 35 percent outside observers is a disaster in the making.
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“We want a commission that will create an evaluation system that promotes student growth,” Shoreham-Wading River Superintendent Steven Cohen said. “It should include educational researchers, world-renowned experts in the field, psychometrics, superintendents and teachers.”
More edudeformer speak-“promotes student growth”. As supposedly “measured” by what? What else:
“Members of the alliance said they are in favor of testing that values education and works for students,”
More testing, you know better testing as those psychometricians (modern day phrenologists) give them the bestest and latestest test (that would still have all the epistemological and ontological errors and flaws identified by Noel Wilson that renders the whole process COMPLETELY INVALID).
“they said the plan to evaluate teachers and principals must be valid and appropriate and reflect the best interests of students.”
Of course it must!?!??!
A “plan to evaluate teachers and principals” that “reflect(s) the best interest of the students”. What the hell would that be?? More unethical using of student test scores??? More psychometric babble???
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Damn, hit enter too soon.
HEY SUPES (yes that’s a shout out):
Read and understand the COMPLETE INVALIDITIES involved in what you are proposing in Noel Wilson’s never refuted nor rebutted “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine.
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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Pleased that after five years of being pushed by Cuomo educators are starting to push back! Where are the leaders of the NYSSBA–Tim(id) Kremer and the leaders of the Council of Superintendents? Still trying to figure out which way thing will go–certainly not providing leadership and coalescing support behind this document. Shameful!
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In addition, as a result of the superintendents standing up for our children, many children are bringing letters home expressing rights to refuse the exam…an avalanche of letters to principals is about to starve the Common Core and its hideous exams, meant to destroy our public education system…I used to hope for the day when Cuomo would be brought up on charges…now I feel as though it is a matter of weeks or even days…I only hope that prosecutors can add the label of “racketeering” to the charges.
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I hope you are right.
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This is a wonderful document. Thanks for sharing it…
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Yes it is a document, wonderful it’s not. It’s ass covering, Johnny come lately speak that challenges nothing. Only when the shit hit the fan for their personal positions/districts did the vast majority of these folks speak out. It didn’t matter when the educational malpractices were affecting the poor colored others but not them as they thought they could game the system to their advantage, not realizing “first they came for. . . .”
When these supes begin to send back the boxes of tests unopened, when they refuse the pseudo evaluations of their students, teachers, schools and districts and tell the state to shove it, then they might come close to a “wonderful” action and the FAA will have to monitor all the pigs flying.
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