Peter Goodman has been covering New York State and city education politics for many years.
In this post, he reports that Commissioner MaryEllen Elia is planning to punish schools that have high opt out numbers, treating them as”failing schools” even though they include some of the highest performing schools in the state.
Elia is out of control. She doesn’t know how to listen but she sure knows how to crack the whip.
On the teacher evaluation front,Goodman reports that the Legislature is prepared to turn the issue back to districts. It’s fair to say that the Legislature’s efforts to base teacher evaluation on test scores and computer algorithms has been a disaster.
Uncertain: even as teacher evaluation is returned to districts, Will it still be based on test scores, a measure proven to be flawed and inaccurate?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Clearly to measure the teachers based on test scores is unethical. There are way too many variables out of the control of teachers. An example is childhood stress..
According to Dr. Kara Fitzgerald, “when something stressful or threatening happens, it’s not just our brain that is involved. We have to recruit everything from the immune system, to the fat system, to the heart. And therefore, what I believe is early in life, children are getting this information, life is going to be tough. And they are kind of altering multiple systems to deal with hard life. And hard life involves social threat, it involves food threat, lack of food. It involves bacterial infestation, so it prepares for all of this.” Learning is affected!
With this information we must remember the purpose of teacher assessment. Assessment is only as good as the information gathered and it’s application to the improvement of teacher quality. Assessment is not there to rank and sort teachers. It is there to be a support system for teachers with the ultimate result being a quality school.
It’s time to get politicians out of education and for teachers to take back their profession!
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Here’s the link: https://mets2006.wordpress.com/
Districts will be determined to be failing as determined by an indecipherable algorithm. Here we go again with voodoo math that the state can blame if parents attack with spears. I am heartened that Regent Judy Johnson asked the important question on the issue of district punishment for Opt-Out participation. In true bureaucratic style, Elia sidestepped the issue.
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Great summary, Peter. I should be reading your stuff all the time. This piece makes me want to make the drive to a Board of Regents meeting one of these days. Thanks. P.S. Commissioner Elia, it’s time to applaud the brave people who stood up to all the testing nonsense which harmed our kids. These districts should be REWARDED.
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Hopefully our NYS legislators will come to their sense and de-couple teacher evaluations from test scores. Passing the buck to local districts will do the trick, as I can’t imagine any Superintendent or BOE wanting to continue this counter-productive policy. Nor would they want to end up on the wrong end of a class action lawsuit. Instead, why don’t they insist that building principals stop hiring and granting tenure to teachers who can’t.
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The beatings will continue until morale improves. 🙂
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