Cuomo’s Poll Ratings Plummet

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1. Gordon Wilder says:

   May 19, 2015 at 4:04 pm

   You can’t fool all the people all the time.
   at least I hope that still is true.
   Once in a while there is a glimmer of hope.

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2. Jon Awbrey says:

   May 19, 2015 at 4:06 pm

   I think the first number should be 37%

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3. Dienne says:

   May 19, 2015 at 4:16 pm

   Little late now after he was re-elected. Everything people are realizing now was obvious then. Why don’t people pay attention?

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4. wdf1 says:

   May 19, 2015 at 4:21 pm

   Is there any speculation that Cuomo sees any further political future for himself? Senator? VP nomination? POTUS?

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   • Dienne says:

     May 19, 2015 at 4:34 pm

     Don’t they all think they’re presidential material?

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   • dmaxmj says:

     May 20, 2015 at 6:06 am

     I think he recently said he’d be here as long as the people would have him.

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5. retired teacher says:

   May 19, 2015 at 5:23 pm

   This is to be expected. On a brighter note, NYS Assembly is expected to pass this bill today. It allows school districts to use locally agreed-upon measures of student achievement as part of the evaluation system; informs parents of their right to opt their children out of standardized tests; reduces the emphasis on those tests; and decouples evaluations from budgeted state aid increases. http://www.nysut.org/news/2015/may/nysut-lauds-assembly-for-passage-of-education-bill

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6. Donna says:

   May 19, 2015 at 7:26 pm

   I was wondering with these vouchers if he was kowtowing to Tisch?

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7. M says:

   May 19, 2015 at 8:28 pm

   I don’t think he cares what his poll numbers are now. It’s clear he won’t be president. So now his goal becomes to smash and grab and secure a life of luxury for himself by supporting the market fundamentalists in their goals and end up in maybe a secondary or tertiary position of power where he can trade on his influence when this term is done.

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8. Steve B says:

   May 19, 2015 at 10:06 pm

   Cuomo…the perfect example of a “sell-out”.

   A normal human being would look to secure some pride and honor…but not Mr Cuomo…when Common Core is cast aside for ethical educational standards, I recommend Mr Cuomo be used as an example of what children should learn not to be.

   It is not only adults who understand how harmful and evil he is, but our younger citizens, too, see him for what he is. A disgrace to all New Yorkers as he pushes the pen that pulls the money…at the expense of the ones he should be trying to protect instead of intentionally hurting.

   Silver and Skelos may be criminals, but when everything comes out, Cuomo will be exposed as the one who takes crime to a new depth.

   He will eventually be arrested and prosecuted…his fingerprints are all over the billionaire dollars, his signature all over legislation to destroy the lives of the good people of New York, e-mail trails that his office frantically scrambles to shred and purge, and, I’m sure, his voice recorded by the New York Attorney General.

   He won’t see when and where the accusers come from because he is exposed for his numerous acts of criminality on so many fronts.

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   • Duane Swacker says:

     May 20, 2015 at 10:53 am

     “ethical educational standards”

     Please explain how educational standards can be considered “ethical” in light of Noel Wilson’s total destruction of the educational standards concept in his never refuted nor rebutted treatise “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. (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.

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9. Robert Rendo says:

   May 19, 2015 at 10:48 pm

   Oh, god, I hope Cuomo gets arrested.

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10. retiredbutmissthekids says:

    May 20, 2015 at 12:26 am

    Quite right, Dienne. As I commented on an earlier post, all you New York readers keep your eyes peeled for any impeachable offense. Also, something like what Rendo said–ILL-Annoy style (the # of ILL-Annoy governors who’ve been sent to prison escapes me at the moment…)

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    • Robert Rendo says:

      May 20, 2015 at 12:34 am

      ILL-Annoy?

      TAGO!

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      • Duane Swacker says:

        May 20, 2015 at 10:58 am

        rbmtk should know as she lives in Ill-Annoy.

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11. teacher says:

    May 20, 2015 at 6:32 am

    Ain’t it hard when you discover that
    He really wasn’t where it’s at
    After he took from you everything he could steal

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