Dennis Walcott, the chancellor of the Néw York City Department of Education, has announced the selection of Andrew Buher, age 27, to be Chief Operating Officer of the 1.1 million student school system.
Buher graduated from college in 2007. He came to wirk for the DOE in 2010. He started at $75,000 but soon doubled his salary to $152,000 as the chancellor’s chief of staff.
The salary for his new job is $202,000.
I am speechless.
In a brilliant post, Bruce Baker of Rutgers demonstrates that states are imposing teacher evaluation systems that are flawed.
This is what Arne Duncan and Bill Gates demanded, and this is what states are doing. And it is wrong, it is factually wrong.
Who will hold Duncan, Gates, and all those state officials accountable?
Chris Cerf in New Jersey and John King and Merryl Tisch in New York assure the public that the evaluation systems will work because they take many factors into account. But Baker demonstrates that they are wrong. The evaluation systems are fundamentally flawed and they will not work. They will do damage to schools, principals, teachers, and students.
Baker writes:
“The standard retort is that marginally flawed or not, these measures are much better than the status quo. ‘Cuz of course, we all know our schools suck. Teachers really suck. Principals enable their suckiness. And pretty much anything we might do… must suck less.
WRONG – it is absolutely not better than the status quo to take a knowingly flawed measure, or a measure that does not even attempt to isolate teacher effectiveness, and use it to label teachers as good or bad at their jobs. It is even worse to then mandate that the measure be used to take employment action against the employee.
It’s not good for teachers AND It’s not good for kids. (noting the stupidity of the reformy argument that anything that’s bad for teachers must be good for kids, and vice versa)
On the one hand, these ridiculous rigid, ill-conceived, statistically and legally inept and morally bankrupt policies will most certainly lead to increased, not decreased litigation over teacher dismissal.
On the other hand… The anything is better than the status quo argument is getting a bit stale and was pretty ridiculous to begin with.”
Someone in the District of Columbia education department leaked a memo to John Merrow about the cheating scandal. The memo warned Chancellor Michelle Rhee about the likelihood of widespread cheating in the DC Public schools. Rhee did not act on it. She should have. The allegations were not investigated. They were brushed aside.
This is a very important post.
It is a bombshell.
Merrow calls the post “Michelle Rhee’s Reign of Error.” It is funny that he borrowed the title of my new book, which will be published September 3. The “Reign of Error” applies not only to Rhee but to No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and the whole lot of “reforms” that are in reality a soul-crushing, data-driven approach to education. The so-called reform movement is bad for students, bad for teachers, bad for principals, and ruinous to education.
Jersey Jazzman is really steamed about NY State Commissioner John King.
Is it because he wants to share the personal, confidential data of ll the state’s public school students with a marketing consortium?
Is it because he is pushing the Common Core standards without first determining how they will affect real children?
Is it because he came from the charter sector, from a no-excuses school with military discipline?
Or it because his own kids attend a lovely Montessori school that promotes respect, loving kindness, independence, critical thinking, and other things that most parents want for their children?
Readers of this blog are familiar with the writings of Carol Burris, principal of South Side High a school in Rockville Center, New York.
Her fellow principals across the state just named her Principal of the Year..
Carol is a dedicated, passionate educator who is a leader of the fight against the state’s educator evaluation system. She and her colleague Sean Feeney created a petition drive and signed up more than third of the other principals in the state to oppose this ill-considered approach. Thousands of parents and fellow citizens signed their petition.
It is not too late. You can sign too.
Congratulations, Carol!
American education has always been characterized by the principle of federalism–until now.
Federalism meant a careful balancing among districts, states, and the federal governments. Schools had a fair amount of autonomy within that framework.
The federal government role was to level the playing field by providing resources for the schools with large number of poor kids. The state set general guidelines and supported the work of the schools. The districts oversaw their schools.
All that changed with NCLB. Now the federal government controls every school, tells it how to “reform,” punishes it if it fails to comply.
The state education departments mimic the federal government. They now tell the districts and schools what to do. They demand compliance.
Unfortunately many state commissioners are not experienced educators. Several have meager experience, coming out of the charter sector.
Peter DeWitt, a principal in upstate Néw York, decided it was time to stand up and ask questions, even to say no.
It is time for more principals and superintendents to say no to the blizzard of mandates.
Realize that you are on a runaway train and the engineer does not know what he is doing.
Bedford Central Superintendent Jere Hochman poses the inevitable questions:
How did we let this happen?
Could we have stopped it?
What can we do now?
It must end. It will end. What is happening in education today is nothing less than educational malpractice. It is not education. It is bad for students.
Hochman writes:
Absolutely no excuse for cheating, threatening teachers, and the culture of lying.
But where were we in 2002 when NCLB was passed unnoticed under the shadow of 9/11? Why did those of us writing and criticizing the testing movement not press harder? Where were the professional organizations (NCTE, NCSS, NCTM …)? Why did we allow Mr. Obama to drink the Kool-aid left on the DOE table? Why didn’t we expose the Michelle Rhee’s, the quick fix reformers, and charter scammers when we saw what was happening Why did we allow our state legislators to fall into line so they could get re-elected based on test score results (or criticize the other guy for not getting them)?
Atrocities in history raise two questions: 1) How in the world could anyone be so evil, so toxic, so driven that such atrocities occurred? 2) Where were the bystanders and how could they let it occur?
Occupy DOE, keep writing, and then let us all make 2013-2014 be the year the professionals and parents took back public education.
Count on G.F. Brandenburg to read the fine print, have a long memory, and share what he has learned with his readers.
The excerpts from the Atlanta indictments may remind you of the PBS Frontline special about Michelle Rhee. Remember how she interviewed each principal and asked, “How many points will your scores go up?” “What can you promise?”
Maybe it is time to look at that episode again.
Here is a link to the episode, the PBS ombudsman comments, and the controversy that followed.
According to the story in the New York Times, the schools in Atlanta where the scores soared lost federal aid for struggling learners. One school where cheating is alleged lost $750,000 that could have been used for reduced class size and to provide enrichment classes and tutoring. And that was only one school among many.
The rise in scores gained Beverly Hall a bonus of $500,000.
That must be one of the strategies that the Atlanta school board learned when they received training by the Broad Foundation about reaching targets and using incentives to succeed.
Remember the stories about the “New York City miracle”? That’s when the passing rates went up so fast and so high that very few children were eligible for extra tutoring. When the state revealed in 2010 that the state scoring was defective, the “miracle” disappeared. But the children never got the extra help that they needed as officials crowed about “their” accomplishments. NYC even won the Broad prize in 2007 for its vastly inflated test scores. The prize was announced just a few weeks before NAEP reported that NYC had made no gains at all.
A report in the New York Times says that Dr. Beverly L. Hall was indicted by a grand jury for her role in the Atlanta cheating scandal.
The story says, in part:
“Investigators laid blame for the biggest standardized-test cheating scandal in the country’s history on the superintendent, Dr. Hall, who led the 50,000-student school system from 1999 until her resignation in 2011. Dr. Hall, who was hailed as National Superintendent of the Year in 2009 for her role in making Atlanta’s once-failing urban school district a model of improvement, had “emphasized test results and public praise to the exclusion of integrity and ethics,” the report said.
“The report asserted that Dr. Hall, while not tied directly to cheating or the direct target of a subpoena, tried to contain damaging information and did not do enough to investigate allegations, especially after 2005 when “clear and significant” warnings were raised. As superintendent, she received hundreds of thousands of dollars in bonuses tied to bogus improvements in test scores.”
