In the midst of a story about a teacher who walked 150 miles to deliver a letter to Governor Cuomo, there was mention of a statement about the opt outs by the State Education Department.
Basically the SED said that the opt outs will not derail its determination to rate teachers based on test scores.
The State Education Department released a statement saying, “We are confident the Department will be able to generate a representative sample of students who took the test, generate valid scores for anyone who took the test, and calculate valid State-provided growth scores to be used in teacher evaluations.”
The SED did not say how it will generate valid ratings for teachers whose students opted out, especially in districts where the majority of students did so; nor did it say how it would generation valid ratings for the 70% teachers who don’t teach the tested subjects. Even if only 10% opted out, how will the SED know if they were high-scoring students or low-scoring students? The SED will succeed in making a process of dubious value even less valid. The SED is determined to do the wrong thing with or without adequate data.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.”
“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”
Mark Twain
The State Education Department is telling a good story that will interfere with education.
Dumb, Dumber, and Double Down Dumber
When do the law suits begin?
Exactly! This has to be fought!
Until the testing companies say these test MEASURE teacher effectiveness they should not be used for that purpose. Just ask Duane.
They can’t say that and they know they can’t, I’ll give em that much credit. But that’s it!
“Russian to Junk”
Test-based teacher culls
Are just like Russian dolls
When inner doll is broken
The outer ain’t worth the open
This has to come from Tisch. Beth Berlin the acting Commissioner never was in a classroom and never leaves her office. She knows nothing, will not entertain questions, and is absolutely useless. By doing nothing Berlin is doing less harm to NY than KIng John inflicted with his silliness. Every time Tuschie does something like this she just fans the flame for more parents to OPT OUT their children. These tests should be cancelled–kids should get three days more of uninterrupted instruction not 35% of kids sitting around while 65% of kids are forced to take a developmentally inappropriate assessment.
“Doing nothing is the same as collaborating.”
We had a lot of students in our district who sat and took the exam but didn’t even try. They put their heads down, drew pictures, finished in 20 minutes. Students later bragged to their peers that they just wrote anything and didn’t make an effort. Perhaps they were angry that they had to take a test that some of the other classmates didn’t have to. How do you hold a teacher “accountable” for this? It is absolutely insane. SED will do whatever they want to ruin this profession and our unions will continue to hold rallies, churn out buttons that say “Respect public education,” wear red on Tuesday and put up billboards. All this is fine, but there has to be some action taken besides this. There has to be disobedience to regulations which are patently UNFAIR. Otherwise we are willing sheep going to our own slaughter.
It will be interesting when teachers who score the ELA writing component start reporting on the number of silly or defiant samples they see.
One day these writing tests will be subpoenaed and read to a jury trying to decide if they can be used to fairly evaluate their teachers. Case closed.
I hope and pray that you are right . My daughter teaches third grade in Brooklyn. I am sickened by this mass destruction of the public school system, and l believe that the tests should be made publec, since they are imposed upon the children of a society whose politicians have chosen to rob them of an education and view them as commodities. What they have done to teachers is immoral. The article should read, ” The opt outs will not change the department’s determination to derail teachers.”……because that is what the truth is. So sorry.
We were told to keep track of students who finished early or who didn’t make an effort so that their parents could be notified.
We can only sum up what’s being done in New York as the work of what Kurt Vonnegut addresses as psychopathic personalities, or PP for short. These are smart, personable people who have no consciences. Hence, this ridiculousness of what NY State Ed is continually force-feeding the public with tremendously ill-effects, without any provable data as to closing any gaps, improving teaching, helping lives, even the oft-touted “curing poverty.” Instead, it’s the Stay the Course mentality of Cuomo’s Hedgefund 9ers, those who are hellbent on privatization and who have surrounded themselves with those who will stand to benefit from it. With politically correct language infused with Orwellian doublethink, PR representatives, and reinforced talking points with all the buzzwords for propaganda, they have insulated themselves with enough money from reason and logic. Capitalism (nor religion for that matter) does not function according to these concepts. How can this all be called conspiracy “theory” when the Hedgefund 9 actually admitted in an article in The Nation that they’re ready to disrupt everything about public education in the name of “creative destruction”?
Exactly right. There is no secret agenda. The governor has been clear about his agenda as has been the other supporters of this misguided reform movement. Destruction and churn are at the heart of their process. Unfortunately none of this is good for kids.
“Conspiracy theory” and “Conspiracy theorist” are almost always used to dismiss arguments and people out of hand without considering any evidence and logic.
One’s use of such terminology is a very good indication that one does not take a scientific approach to issues and hence, that one is not a real scientist.
I say “real scientist” because there are lots of people trained and even practicing as scientists who use such terminology to dismiss ideas and people.
A real scientist keeps an open mind, considers the evidence and bases conclusions on that rather than on arguments from incredulity.
This conduct confirms that Cuomo will use whatever he can to extract the pound of flesh he has been ordered to deliver by his hedge fund handlers. Validity is inconsequential.
March 23, 2015:
“At present, the Opt Out movement is small — a few thousand students in Colorado, several hundred in New Mexico, and smatterings of ad hoc parent groups in the East. Some might view these small numbers as no threat to the accountability assessment industry. But the threat is more serious than it appears. Politicians and others want to rank schools and school districts according to their test score averages. Or they want to compare teachers according to their test score gains (Value Added Measurement) and pressure the low scorers or worse. It only takes a modest amount of Opting Out to thwart these uses of the test data. If 10% of the parents at the school say “No” to the standardized test, how do the statisticians adjust or correct for those missing data? Which 10% opted out? The highest scorers? The lowest? A scattering of high and low scorers? And would any statistical sleight of hand to correct for “missing data” stand up in court against a teacher who was fired or a school that was taken over by the state for a “turn around”? I don’t think so.”
Gene V Glass
Arizona State University
National Education Policy Center
University of Colorado Boulder
http://ed2worlds.blogspot.com/2015/03/can-opt-out-movement-succeed.html
It is easy to think that the tests and draconian use of these is a localized problem.
The same tests and the same criteria for evaluating teachers are in place in many states. The use of test scores to make inferential leaps about the achievement of students, teachers, and schools has been marketed as if perfectly objective and a necessary, totally benign component of accountability. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
And, there has been no accountability for the frauds perpetuated on students by these bizarre tests, or the use of the scores from these tests to rate teachers and schools.
The opt-outs, together with some conspicuous objections to the Common Core from the left and right, have spawned a new bilionaire-funded effort to give credibility to the CC and PARCC/SBAC test scores. The messaging campaign seems to be aimed at having these rest scores replace ACT and SAT…with the head of the Califoria State Board of Education and Dean of Education at the University of California, Davis serving as the leaders of the band wagon.
With a little funding from the National Governor’s Association and space for a commentary in Ed Week, they are trying to create a national consensus around the use of the CC test scores for college admission, placement in majors and specific courses, and as an occasion to ” rethink” teacher education programs.
The billionaire-funded Superpac (my term) for this messaging campaign is called the Collaborative for Student Success. One part of the campaign is called Higher Ed for Higher Standards. Another is called Conservatives for the Common Core. There are other arms of the octopus.
The targeting of interest groups is very much like that used by operatives in a political campaign, with the Gates, Broad, Walton, Hewlett, and other foundations footing the bill..the visible part of the funding stream, with the National Governor’s Association doing the jumpstart.
The good news for opponents of this sustained and dangerous effort to standardize American public education Is this: The noise being made and the informed criticisms of policies have been seen as a threat by the purveyors of this standardiization scheme, including the National Governor’s Association. Otherwise, this elaborate and expensive messaging campaign would not have been launched.
The bad news that all of the foundation money flowing out to national organizations has also created obligations. So, the number of endorsers of the CC and testing regime is huge, and it extends to both teacher unions and largest networks of administrators in public institutions of higher education. It includes the PTA, and those civil rights groups who have supported the testing regime as if tests solve problems of inequity in education.
So, participants in this and other blogs should make even more noise and contribute to a reversal and restoration of sanity.
One way is linking up with Network for Publication Education, soon to meet in Chicago. I can’ t be there except in spirit. Make noise and make news.
Ipad not checked. NETWORK FOR PUBLIC EDUCATION
The NY Times comment section for this article is now open. I posted something but it has not appeared yet. I think if enough people post the truth others will be informed.
Time to show our children what perseverance and resilience really looks like.
I think sooner or later there will be grounds for a class-action lawsuit on grounds of negligence, not just in New York but in all the PARCC states (I’m not familiar enough with SBAC to be able to say). There’s already plenty of evidence that the state departments are rushing into high-stakes “accountability” testing without exercising a professional standard of care, especially when research suggests teaching has a minimal (1-14%) impact on the test scores that are used for a metric. Statements like this one from NYSED are just further evidence. We’ve had a few lawsuits already, on Long Island and in Tennessee, and I think the time is coming for a lot more.
“We are confident the Department will be able to generate a representative sample of students who took the test, generate valid scores for anyone who took the test, and calculate valid State-provided growth scores to be used in teacher evaluations.”
REALLY?
“Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it.”
The Peter Principle (1969), p. 69, Laurence F. Peter & Raymond Hull
The latter!
The geniuses at NYSED are in violation of the first “rule of holes”.
This is good news because decisions like this make the eventual litigation that much easier to win. Arbitrary and capricious on steroids!
Oh what a tangled web they weave, when first they practice to deceive.
“The State Education Department released a statement saying, “We are confident the Department will be able to generate a representative sample of students who took the test, generate valid scores for anyone who took the test, and calculate valid State-provided growth scores to be used in teacher evaluations.”
The SED did not say how it will generate valid ratings for teachers whose students opted out, especially in districts where the majority of students did so; nor did it say how it would generation valid ratings for the 70% teachers who don’t teach the tested subjects. Even if only 10% opted out, how will the SED know if they were high-scoring students or low-scoring students? The SED will succeed in making a process of dubious value even less valid. The SED is determined to do the wrong thing with or without adequate data.
A perfect example of doing the wrong thing righter:
Doing the Wrong Thing Righter
The proliferation of educational assessments, evaluations and canned programs belongs in the category of what systems theorist Russ Ackoff describes as “doing the wrong thing righter. The righter we do the wrong thing,” he explains, “the wronger we become. When we make a mistake doing the wrong thing and correct it, we become wronger. When we make a mistake doing the right thing and correct it, we become righter. Therefore, it is better to do the right thing wrong than the wrong thing right.”
Our current neglect of instructional issues are the result of assessment policies that waste resources to do the wrong things, e.g., canned curriculum and standardized testing, right. Instructional central planning and student control doesn’t – can’t – work. But, that never stops people trying.
The result is that each effort to control the uncontrollable does further damage, provoking more efforts to get things in order. So the function of management/administration becomes control rather than creation of resources. When Peter Drucker lamented that so much of management consists in making it difficult for people to work, he meant it literally. Inherent in obsessive command and control is the assumption that human beings can’t be trusted on their own to do what’s needed. Hierarchy and tight supervision are required to tell them what to do. So, fear-driven, hierarchical organizations turn people into untrustworthy opportunists. Doing the right thing instructionally requires less centralized assessment, less emphasis on evaluation and less fussy interference, not more. The way to improve controls is to eliminate most and reduce all.
Former Green Beret Master Sergeant Donald Duncan (Viet Nam) did when he noted in Sir! No Sir! that:
“I was doing it right but I wasn’t doing right.”
And from one of America’s premier writers:
“The mass of men [and women] serves the state [education powers that be] thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailors, constables, posse comitatus, [administrators and teachers], etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt.”- Henry David Thoreau [1817-1862], American author and philosopher
And even though I concur with comedian Lewis Black’s observation: “I took acid when I was younger to be able to understand times like now” it wasn’t good enough to buffer my brain from the total educational insanities that are being foisted upon public education these days by the privateers, funders, edudeformers and their ilk.
Is it true that students had to write an essay about ephemeral indoor nimbus clouds?
Don’t know about that one jb2.
Here’s what I would have written
“Ephemeral indoor nimbus cloud”
Ephemeral indoor nimbus cloud:
David Coleman’s fart
Ephemeral indoor dimbus crowd:
David’s testing mart
“Defying Gravity”
As long as they deny
They’re headed for a fall
They think they can defy
But gravity will call
Liar, liar, house on fire. This is just more PROPAGANDA and use of MARKETING. After all, IT’s JUST BUSINESS. Gag me. Wonder who’s paying the NY State DoE?
Too bad for the teacher Cuomo decided to jet off to Cuba to mend fences there.
Sent from my iPad
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Reblogged this on Network Schools – Wayne Gersen and commented:
When I read that SED would have the final word, I expected they would be “…determined to do the wrong thing with or without adequate data.” After all, if you buy into a statistically flawed model from the outset why would a flaw in the sample size deter you? It’s like a 6 year old who wants to believe in Santa Claus and keeps using their imagination to explain away the preposterousness of the notion that an old man and a team of reindeer can deliver presents to everyone in the world…
Wait a minute. *Now* they’re saying that they can generate “valid” scores based on a representative sampling of students? Then why did they say the exact opposite when people suggested that perhaps we should only test a representative sample of students?
Please, Dienne, don’t expect that these folks wouldn’t have the capability to believe that black is white, up is down, etc. . . nor that they would be intellectually consistent. Honesty, truth, ethical behavior, etc. . ., is not part of their intellectual makeup.
“Loopy Reform”
Möbius loop
Escher stair
Bottom is top
Cheat is fair
Up is down
Back is fore
Round and round
Reformer lore
(but at least the ditties stay “fresh” as the day they were deposited)
Exc.
The rumor that was spreading stating that districts would lose funding unless they have a 95% participation rate is apparently false.
http://nyscoss_imis20.informz.net/informzdataservice/onlineversion/ind/bWFpbGluZ2luc3RhbmNlaWQ9NDcxMjY0MSZzdWJzY3JpYmVyaWQ9MTA2MTg1OTQxMQ==
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
If teachers are evaluated on their students performance then State Ed should be evaluated on how the teachers perform.
So they’ll use a representative sample? Doesn’t that just acknowledge that the NAEP testing procedure works fine?
Fortunate to have son and daughter who are young leaders in the community with high moral character and outstanding grades and accolades for academic achievement. Sorry to say NY will not have opportunity to see them as educators.