Just posted:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: May 30, 2018
More information contact:
Lisa Rudley (917) 414-9190; nys.allies@gmail.com
Jeanette Deutermann (516) 902-9228; nys.allies@gmail.com
NY State Allies for Public Education – NYSAPE
Link to Press Release
Parents Demand the NY Legislature Repeal the Education Transformation Act & APPR; Stop Playing Political Games with Our Children’s Education
NY State Allies for Public Education, a coalition of over 50 parent and educator groups active across the state, vehemently opposes the new teacher evaluation bill, passed by the NYS Assembly and now being considered by the NY Senate as S08301. This bill would change the teacher evaluation system in the state for the fourth time since 2010. This bill, like the current evaluation system, fails the most important measure, it does absolutely nothing to alleviate the impact a test-and-punish system has had on our children.
Contrary to the claims of some of its supporters, a careful reading of the bill indicates that it continues to link teacher evaluations to growth scores, using either state standardized exams or alternative assessments approved by the State Education Commissioner. The bill also leaves the controversial HEDI rubric and corresponding weights in place.
NYSAPE recognizes that the American Statistical Association and the National Science Foundation have concluded that rating teachers based on student growth scores yields statistically invalid and flawed results.
Jeanette Deutermann, a co-founder of NYSAPE and leader of Long Island Opt Out, said “Backroom deals and political leveraging have resulted in an Assembly and Senate bill that purposely fails to decouple test scores from the teacher evaluation system, fails to reverse the destructive receivership law, fails to remove the arbitrary and capricious growth model, and leaves room for grade 3-8 state assessments to once again be used in our evaluation system. Teachers and students deserve a bill that reverses the destruction caused by the Education Transformation Act.”
NYSAPE shares the concerns of the New York State School Boards Association and the New York Council of School Superintendents that this bill, if passed, could mean even more testing. If districts decide to tie teacher ratings to student scores on alternative assessments, those assessments would come in addition to the annual state tests that are required by federal law.
Education historian Diane Ravitch points out, “The current teacher evaluation law (APPR) was passed to make New York eligible for federal funding from the Race to the Top program in 2010. Under this law, 97% of teachers in the state were rated either effective or highly effective. The law is ineffective. It should be wholly repealed, rather than amended as proposed. Let the state continue setting high standards for teachers and let local districts design their own evaluation plans, without requiring that they be tied to any sort of student test scores.”
“The entire idea of basing teacher evaluations on student growth is a farce. Districts will create new metrics that are just as unreliable and invalid as the grade 3-8 test scores. It is time that politicians cease meddling in matters they do not understand and return teacher and principal evaluation back to professionals and elected school boards,” said Carol Burris, the Executive Director of the Network for Public Education and a former New York State High School Principal of the Year.
“The worst outcome would be if this faulty bill passed in exchange for more concessions to charter schools, either increasing their funding or raising the charter cap. Already charter schools in NYC are given preferable treatment in being able to claim free space at the city’s expense, when more than half a million of our public school students are crammed into overcrowded schools, with no hope of relief,” said Leonie Haimson, Executive Director of Class Size Matters.
Parents and educators have been demanding for a long-time that the APPR system be entirely repealed so districts can design their own evaluation plans untied to student test scores. It’s time Albany stands up for children and stops playing political games with their education.
NYSAPE is a grassroots coalition with over 50 parent and educator groups across the state.
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Diane Ravitch's blog 
YES!
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What is happening to teachers and students has become horrific! Keep fighting! I’ve done after school programs for years and have 42 years of Scouting and quite a few years with religious education programs. We need to help children discover what the CAN do and achieve without being labeled by scores from testing. I’ll keep fighting too.
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Let’s support legislation across the country that will punish billionaires that use the power their wealth buys to meddle with the public sector like the unionized, traditional public schools. A 90-percent tax rate on their overall wealth (based on net worth) and annual earnings would be a good place to start.
For instance, Bill Gates net worth is about $92.4 billion. With this new proposed legislation to change the tax code, Gates’ tax bill for that one year would be $83.16 billion stripped from his net worth.
David and Charles Koch would end u paying $73.98 billion.
The Walton family combined net worth of $140 billion would cost them $126 billion.
This is just a few examples. When we started to add up the list of meddling billionaires, there would be a lot more net worth to tax at 90-percent.
And that special one-time tax would all go to the public schools to be used to renovate the schools and hire more teachers so they could all lower class sizes.
Should we feel sorry for these meddling billionaires if they lost all that net worth?
Poor Bill Gates would only have $9.24-billion left. I mean, who could survive on such a small sum of money? Would Bill Gates end up homeless and starving?
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Lloyd: You have good ideas and I support you totally. This is a much better idea than the huge tax cut put out by the GOP and Trump. [There is only so much of that ‘wonderful Christmas present for the middle class’ that I can stand.] Do the wealthy really need that much money when the poor are starving? Why not cut Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, SNAP and CHIP since they are programs the US cannot now afford due to the huge deficit? The GOP is working to raise housing costs for the poor…US can’t afford helping. [Those are perceived to be black and brown people but in reality it also includes a majority of whites.] Can’t afford to give help to the poor who have difficulty paying their heating bills in the winter.
Yes, America is certainly getting better since Trump came into office. He boasts of his great achievements. When, if ever, will those ‘great achievements’ be noticed by his loyal voters who have been screwed? [Some of his supporters are wealthy and are rejoicing in the tax cut.]
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The whole moral question is “How much is enough?”
Obviously the poor do not have enough to live comfortably, lacking the funds for food, shelter, and the other essentials that our society in the United States value.
At the other end of the spectrum, how much money does a billionaire need to feel he has “enough”? And if they answer they are using their money for philanthropic causes, please tell them that money making schemes (even those which are well intentioned) do not qualify as helping humanity, especially when profits are the main focus versus those individuals who are supposedly the recipients of their largess.
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It is a safe bet that most billionaires and millionaires will fight ruthlessly to hold on to every cent they can and even steal from people living in poverty to increase that wealth. If they could, they’d find a way to pay thugs to rob people and even hold people down and pull any teeth out of their mouths that had gold in them without wasting any money on pain relief. Then they’d pay the thug 10 percent or less of the value of what the thug stole and add the rest to their net worth (the billionaires and millionaires).
Trump is the perfect example.
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“Why not cut Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, SNAP and CHIP since they are programs the US cannot now afford due to the huge deficit?”
I couldn’t resist writing a response to that one pull quote regardless of the total context of your comment. So I’m isolating that pull quote from the rest.
I have never read or heard anyone point out where the deficit came from. The huge federal deficit did not come from Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, SNAP, and CHIP.
There has always been enough to pay for those social safety nets — at least until the tax revenue falls below the cost of those social safety net programs.
There has never been a tax to pay for this country’s endless wars. The last tax to pay for a war was for World War II and before paying off the cost of that war, President Ray-Gun declared his war on taxes and introduced a massive increase in deficit spending that increased more under both Bushes. Even Trump is contributing to the growth of the deficit.
I’m sure that one of Trump’s supporters, if any of them read my comment here, will jump in and blame Obama for the growth of the national debt under his presidency. I wonder if they even know how much new spending Obama added to the national debt.
The willing bias and ignorance of most Republicans and of Trump’s deplorable supporters probably do not know anything about the interest on the national debt that every new president inherits, mandatory spending that every president inherits, and discretionary spending that no matter what a sitting president submits to Congress annually in his suggested budget, it is Congress that votes on the final budget and sends it back to the WH for the president’s signature. Without cooperation from Congress, presidents have little control over adding new spending programs to the mandatory list of spending or what the tax rate will be.
Anyway, I digress.
To make this short, I took the time to compute how much the U.S. has spent on its military since the end of World War II and the number I came up with was about $40 trillion dollars and that was five years ago.
The current federal-national debt is more than $21 trillion. How can anyone ignore the fact that without all those wars … for instance, the one in Vietnam (that lasted almost 20 years) that was based on a lie and the war in Iran that was based on a lie, there would be no national deb t and the social safety net would be safe and not facing drastic cuts and/or a faked bankruptcy by the GOP so they can continue to fund their endless war machine.
The U.S. spends between 500 and 750 billion annually on its military. China, the 2nd biggest spender spends less than $200 billion annually. If the U.S. matched China’s spending or even Russia and China’s spending and did not exceed that total, there would be no federal national debt.
In 2017, China spent $228 billion and Russia spent $66.3 billion vs the US spending $610 billion. For this year, the US budget for its military is just under $700 billion and far above 2017’s budget.
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Lloyd: “The current federal-national debt is more than $21 trillion.”
I agree with you that spending for the military, and NSA, are outrageous. I am against the killing and destruction the US is doing. I’m sure even Congress isn’t aware of how many countries we are militarily involved in.
In my mind there is no excuse to bomb a country for 15 or more years. We have totally destroyed Iraq and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians all in the name of spreading democracy. I read that between 400,000-500,000 or more have died.
It is the GOP, being led by the conservatives, who want more military spending. My saying is we can never kill our way to peace. We are hated by more and more countries and are even loosing our allies due to Trump’s huffing and puffing.
With a national debt of at least $21 trillion the GOP is saying that we need to cut Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, SNAP and CHIP.
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The GOP wants to cut Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, SNAP and CHIP because they can’t support the war machine and afford to pay for the social safety net on the tax rate the GOP keeps voting lower and lower and lower.
The GOP has been playing limbo with taxes since President Ray-Gun while raising the spending limit at the same time and printing dollars to pay for the endless wars.
I’ve read that it is estimated that since the end of World War II, the US is responsible for 20 to 30 million dead around the world and even more displaced because of all the wars. I have a friend that served in the military for 14 years and spent 9 of those years in special forces. He says special forces operate in about 130 countries a year and most of those countries have no idea that our special forces teams slipped in and out and those operations are all marked top secret.
The federal government learned long ago that all they had to do was slap top secret on operations to hide something horrible the US military or US intelligence agencies did in or out of the US.
And anyone that wants to blow the whistle on these top secret atrocities knows they will be hunted down and tried as traitors, found guilty and sent to a federal military prison for decades to life.
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LLoyd
Don’t forget to divide up Bill Gates’ houses.
Do you suppose he could live in just 10% of his 66,000 square foot mansion in Washington state?
Only 6,600 square feet? Who could ever live in such a small house?
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The test-based “Value-Added Method” (VAM) of evaluating teachers has been “slammed” — quoting The Washington Post — by the very people who know the most about data measurement: The American Statistical Association (ASA). The ASA’s authoritative, detailed, VAM-slam analysis, titled “Statement on Using Value-Added Models for Educational Assessment” and has become the basis for teachers across the nation successfully challenging VAM-based evaluations.
Even though it’s anti-public school and anti-union, the Washington Post said the following about the ASA Statement: “You can be certain that members of the American Statistical Association, the largest organization in the United States representing statisticians and related professionals, know a thing or two about data and measurement. The ASA just slammed the high-stakes ‘value-added method’ (VAM) of evaluating teachers that has been increasingly embraced in states as part of school-reform efforts. VAM purports to be able to take student standardized test scores and measure the ‘value’ a teacher adds to student learning through complicated formulas that can supposedly factor out all of the other influences and emerge with a valid assessment of how effective a particular teacher has been. THESE FORMULAS CAN’T ACTUALLY DO THIS (emphasis added) with sufficient reliability and validity, but school reformers have pushed this approach and now most states use VAM as part of teacher evaluations.”
The ASA Statement points out the following and many other failings of testing-based VAM:
“System-level conditions” include everything from overcrowded and underfunded classrooms to district-and site-level management of the schools and to student poverty.
A copy of the VAM-slamming ASA Statement should be posted on the union bulletin board at every school site throughout our nation and should be explained to every teacher by their union at individual site faculty meetings so that teachers are aware of what it says about how invalid it is to use standardized test results to evaluate teachers or principals — and teachers’ and principals’ unions should fight all evaluations based on student test scores with the ASA statement as a good foundation for their fight.
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MOOOOO
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if the new York chancellor doesn’t agree with you, he doesn’t deserve the job.
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basing teachers evaluations on test scores is a very bad idea. Glad people are opposing this.
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Glad you said this.
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It has always felt transparent to me that punishing teachers for test scores clearly means strategically punishing those teachers who step up to work with our nation’s most complicated children: however, the easy-to-see correlation of VAM evaluations to racism/culturalism/elitism is seldom front page news.
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Thanks, parents!
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Fortunately, New York has what so many other states need for their children, active, informed parents that value their public schools. States continue to pander to the privatization lobby. However, if they organized and made a united stand against all the harmful policies that states are inflicting on teachers and students, they would be in a stronger position to countermand bad policy. I recently read an analysis of the right wing by a progressive blogger. He said, “We the people are the government. If representatives aren’t doing their job, we must get rid of them.” There is power in numbers. That is why the right wing is working so hard to destroy unions. United parents can demand better policies.
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What government leaders forget is that the same sorts of parents who join the PTA or PTO are the same sorts of parents whose major focus is their children. They recognize the lies and are willing to fight for what is best for the public schools..
Oh, and they also vote.
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NYSAPE is a godsend.
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Every state should have an advocacy group like NYSAPE–parents and educators who speak out based on evidence, who care about kids above all, and who are unafraid.
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Lisa Rudley is a very powerful parent leader and exquisitely intelligent.
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The “logic” of teacher “accountability”
1) If a teacher teaches effectively, then students will learn.
2) Student learning can be accurately measured using standardized tests.
3) Therefore, standardized test scores can be used to
accurately evaluate teacher effectiveness.
Who could possibly argue against this logic?
Only those who understand that false assumptions lead to useless conclusions.
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Every time NYSAPE calls for the repeal, they should note that Cynthia Nixon has promised such a repeal.
The only thing that will get Cuomo to act is if he thinks people are listening to Nixon.
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Let’s use this knowledge as an effective tool to use for change.
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Cuomo and his allies are pretending that the current bill fixes teacher evaluation. It does not. It just lets districts pick a different test, one that the State Commissioner has approved. So kids take two sets of tests: the state tests for accountability, and the second test for teacher evaluation.
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We are. She is what we need in NY
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I think someone, preferably someone associated with this group, needs to explain how the current bill does not actually de-link teacher evaluations from their students’ test scores. That’s how the bill is advertised and it’s how it’s being reported. The state teachers’ union is holding several rallies tomorrow in support of the bill. This press release says the bill is a scam but it’s utterly unclear how.
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Flerp,
I have not been following this super-closely, as it won’t really affect my kids (and in fact I can faintly see the light at the end of the tunnel that means it won’t be too long before I can revert to not caring one iota about K-12 public education), but I think the upshot of the complaint is that the legislation merely kicks the decision back to districts, who may continue to use state tests.
You know the drill: the tests are unreliable and unfair (unless they are used to keep PS 25 open). Principal evaluations are unreliable and unfair because Leadership Academy and unannounced drive-bys. Evaluations performed by someone who doesn’t work in the school (and who doesn’t have a built-in incentive to rate me positively) are unfair because such reviewers can’t possibly extrapolate from school data or their own eyes what unique challenges individual kids might be going through. Student surveys are an affront to the profession. If someone remarks that this gives off the appearance that you would prefer not to be evaluated at all, you deftly respond by mentioning the Montgomery County (MD) peer review program, which you know will never be implemented here. Carry on.
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Tim, your reading is wrong. In the current revision of the law, there is no repeal. They allow districts to choose their own test by which to evaluate teachers, so long as it is on a list approved by the State Commissioner.
The current evaluation law last reported that 97% of all teachers in the state were either effective or highly effective. This is not worth any time or money.
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The goal of accurately quantifying teacher effectiveness is an impossible one. It is as ridiculous as evaluating the skill and knowledge of a primary physician using the blood pressure and cholesterol data of her patients. Why is it so hard for some non-educators to wrap their heads around the fact that far, far too many variables in the learning process are not within the control of a classroom teacher? That our so-called accountability is completely dependent on the influence of parents, friends, other teachers, and god forbid the attitudes and efforts of our students. We don’t even have time on our side: by the end of 8th grade, a child has spent about 6% of their life in front of a teacher. I am lucky to get 110 hours per school year with each class of 20 students. And I can’t always make them stay serious and focused and cooperative, or pay close attention, ask good questions, complete all assignments, or care about their education as much as I do. I can’t always overcome the problems produced by an imperfect school climate or the incessant interruptions in the school day/year, and try as I might, the inevitable social distractions, bad group dynamics, negative peer influences, chronic absenteeism, trauma of family dysfunction, parental neglect, and food insecurity just won’t go away. So what you see as excuses and the avoidance of responsibility or the rejection of accountability, we teachers see as just a challenging, but rewarding, job that no one should put a number on.
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The bill in question has been misrepresented. It continues the use of test-based teacher evaluations. It says that the district does not need to use the state test, but may choose a test from a list approved by Commissioner Elia.
The bill is a farce. It does not end test-based teacher evaluation. It adds another layer of testing. Kids first take the state test, then if the district wants to use a different test to evaluate teachers, the kids take another test.
I can’t explain why the state teachers’ union likes this bill. It does not repeal test-based teacher evaluation.
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The current law states that half of a teacher’s evaluation must be based on a test score. (It was specified that it be 3-8 tests, but the Board of Regents put in a moratorium on using those). Because of the law, they simply moved it to another assessment. Some chose a Regents HS exam, some the 4th grade science test and some a computer assessment. The moratorium is almost up. All this bill says is that you don’t HAVE to go back to using 3-8 tests. But still has to be a test, still half, still growth models, still receivership law. Tell me how that is a great change.
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“What’s Gneiss for education”
What’s gneiss for education
Is schist for David Coleman
What’s diamond for the Nation
Is coal for the Deformen
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!!!!!!!
Unlike you, SomeDAM, words fail me.
Thanks for this.
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