The Cuomo Commission held a “hearing” in Buffalo too.
And once again, pride of place went to charter school leaders and their supporters.
Charters enroll about 5% of the students in New York state.
Why does Governor Cuomo think they should own the agenda?
Why not listen to public school principals and teachers?
Principal Carol Burris is one of the co-founders of the Long Island principals’ revolt against high-stakes testing. When she heard that Governor Cuomo’s commission would be holding hearings in New York City, she joined up with fellow principal Harry Leonardatos and they headed for the hearings.
Read their gripping account of the proceedings, where the deck was stacked in favor of the corporate agenda.
They were among the first to register, but soon discovered that they would not be allowed to speak.
Who was allowed to speak? Campbell Brown, an ex-anchor for CNN who spoke about sex abuse in the schools (her husband is on the board of Rhee’s StudentsFirst, which she did not disclose); the TFA executive director for New York City; someone from the New Teacher Project (founded by Michelle Rhee); an 18-month-veteran of teaching who is now heading a Gates-funded group of young teachers who oppose tenure and seniority. “…they all represented organizations that embraced the governor’s policies, and they all advocated for the following three policies: state imposition of teacher evaluation systems if local negotiations are not successful, elimination of contractually guaranteed pay increases, and the use of test scores in educator evaluations.”
Although the two principals were told that the last 30 minutes would be reserved for those who signed up first–which they had–they were not allowed to testify. Instead the commission heard from the leader of Rhee’s StudentsFirst in New York. They thought they would be allowed to testify against the NY system of grading teachers on a bell curve, which guarantees that half will be found “ineffective.”
Please read this article. It is alarming. Governor Cuomo and his commission have aligned themselves with the enemies of public education.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City and Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York state had a disagreement.
The mayor wanted the power to publish the names and evaluations of all teachers in the city, as happened earlier this year when the New York City Department of Education released the single-number ratings of 18,000 teachers, based solely on test scores. The mayor says the public has a right to know the job ratings of every teacher. The teachers’ union (among others) objected because the ratings are highly flawed and inaccurate; and it humiliates teachers to have their ratings made public. Others objected to the public release because the job evaluations of police, firefighters and corrections officers are shielded by state law; why single out teachers and open their ratings to the public? Even Bill Gates wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times opposing public release last winter, a day before the ratings went public, on the ground that they are useful only as part of a discussion between teachers and their supervisors about how to improve. Public release turns them into a tool for humiliating people, not a means of helping them become better at their work.
The governor argued that the parents have a right to know the ratings of their child’s teachers, but that the ratings should not be made public.
The state legislature overwhelmingly passed a law reflecting the governor’s view. The ratings will not be published but parents have a right to know the ratings of their child’s teacher.
Mayor Bloomberg became very angry that the Legislature sided with the governor and rejected his view. So he said on a weekly talk show that the city would contact every one of the city’s parents or guardians of 1.1 million children and make their ratings known. Many people saw this response as the reaction of a petulant billionaire who can’t stand to lose. Be that as it may, the New York City Department of Education now has the burden of enacting a policy or program to do as the mayor directs because New York City has mayoral control and the department must carry out the mayor’s wishes, no matter how odd they may seem and no matter if they violate the spirit of the law that was just passed.
GothamSchools published an account of how the Department of Education intends to carry out the mayor’s wishes. It appears that every principal will be required to contact every parent to inform them of their right to know, but it is not clear how or if this information will be released. Maybe it won’t be, as that would clearly be illegal.
Based on this article, it appears that the mayor thinks that parents are consumers who should be able to go teacher-shopping. If they don’t like Mr. Smith’s rating, they should be able to transfer their child into Ms. Jones’s class because she has a higher rating. The problem here is obvious and I wonder if this occurred to the mayor. Unlike a business, where consumers may decide to shift their patronage, a teacher can accommodate a limited number of children. If a school has 500 students, and Ms. Jones has the highest rating in the building, her classroom can still enroll only a certain number of students, between 25 and 34, depending on the grade. What happens if the parents of 200 students or all 500 students want to be in her class? It doesn’t work, and it makes no sense.
Furthermore, given what we already know are the huge margins of error built into the ratings, Ms. Jones may not be the best teacher at all. The consumers may be misinformed.
Mayor Bloomberg has a faith in the value of the standardized test scores that shows how little he knows about measurement. The scores measure student performance, not teacher quality. When used to assess teacher quality, the rankings produced are inaccurate, unreliable and unstable. A teacher who appears to be effective one year may not be effective the next year. And the more that schools use test scores to rate teachers, the more they incentivize behaviors that actually undermine good education.
As it happens, I just read a blog by a teacher in Los Angeles who announced that he had changed his mind about using test scores to evaluate teachers. He concluded that they are misleading, that they needlessly demoralize almost all teachers, and that they aren’t good for students or for education.
I agree with him.
Diane
Governor Andrew Cuomo once boasted that he was the lobbyist for the children of New York state. One of his signal claims is the new evaluation system for educators.
Many educators think it is a very bad system because it relies heavily on standardized test scores. More than 1/3 of the principals of New York state signed a protest against the system and continue to fight it. They have said, repeatedly, that reliance on test scores for evaluations will harm their teachers and their students. Governor Cuomo doesn’t listen.
Now a new article was just published in Newsday by Mike McGill, the superintendent of the Scarsdale public schools, one of the best in the state. McGill asks why it is necessary to rank and rate teachers on a 100-point scale. As an experienced educator, he knows the downside of this measurement obsession.
Here is the article, with which I agree.
Diane
Published: May 11, 2012 12:40 PM
By MICHAEL MCGILL
Photo credit: Illustration by Christopher Serra |
The State Education Department has mandated a new evaluation scheme for New York‘s teachers. In what Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo describes as a “groundbreaking” move, everyone now will be rated on a 100-point scale that relies heavily on classroom observations and students’ test scores.
What could be wrong with that?
Pretend you want to evaluate 150 people in your organization. You have three objectives. Assure a high level of effectiveness. Constantly improve everyone’s performance. Screen out anyone whose efforts aren’t acceptable.
You want to base your evaluation plan on several principles. You know that performance improves when people collaborate and when they get good coaching. Good coaches take information from multiple sources and use it to give considered feedback. Their charges get ample opportunity to practice under supervision. Evaluators also need standards and strong evidence to hold employees accountable.
Most of the people in your organization want to succeed. A few are truly exceptional. A larger number have mixed strengths and weaknesses. A smaller group is less competent. Everyone works independently much of the time. You don’t have the resources — enough supervisors or time, for example — to give everyone the continuous, thorough feedback needed to change complex behavior intentionally. So you focus your energies.
Some of your people are relatively new. They need more support and mentoring. You get several supervisors to collaborate in observing these newcomers and in working to bring them along. You’re less interested in comparing them than in whether each is becoming fully proficient — and then getting even better .
Some people are more expert. You check in on them less often to be sure they’re meeting core standards, cooperatively plan for their development, and offer them opportunities to hone their skills and absorb emerging knowledge about their field. Again, you’re less interested in how they might rank and more in their staying vibrant and continuing to grow.
You know from your periodic checks and from informal feedback that some folks aren’t measuring up. Supervisors either collaborate to help them upgrade their performance or develop extensive evidence for their dismissal.
That’s effective evaluation in a rational world. Not in the world of Albany. Albany wants to rank people relative to one another.
But why?
If the point is to help them improve, they need insightful advice and good coaching, not numerical rankings. If it’s to screen out less competent teachers, the only relevant yardstick is whether performance is up to standard. Who cares whether Ms. Jones is number 34, 35 or 36 out of 150?
The state’s rationale is that the metrics will drive people to compete for better scores. But what’s the point when the numbers lack meaning? Everyone knows that standardized tests aren’t good measures of who’s a good teacher, for example. Few, if any, researchers believe they can be used to make fine distinctions among practitioners, as the state plan tries to do.
Regardless, quantification is the name of today’s game. Student test results or classroom observations determine at least 71 points of a teacher’s score. The local schools control the remaining 29 points, but they have to be divided up in some set way: so many for planning, so many for taking part in professional activities, and so on.
This numbers game already drives teachers to spend increasing time prepping their kids for exams at the expense of other learning, and to play the system so they can amass points strategically. It’ll discourage collaboration, as well. As one veteran recently said, “Why should I do anything that could help someone else get a higher score than I do?”
Meanwhile, no rigid scoring formula will anticipate all possible situations. Let’s say Ms. Smith’s special needs kids are constantly the brunt of her dark sarcasms when nobody’s watching. That’s unacceptable. Whatever her strengths, credible student and parent feedback should lead supervisors to judge her performance inadequate. In Albany‘s 100-point world, however, she may well pile up enough points to be “proficient.” All she has to do is deliver a coherent lesson in front of an observer, produce decent test scores and strategically get a few more points here and there.
In short, the supposed strengths of this one-size-fits-all approach are really weaknesses. The “objective” numbers don’t judge people accurately. One state-wide evaluation framework doesn’t make sense for every school, and this one restricts the human judgment that’s essential to effective evaluation.
This is teacher appreciation week. In place of well-meaning sentiment, New York State should appreciate its teachers meaningfully. Rather than impose its uniform evaluation template on everyone, it should enable districts to develop their own plans and their capacity to evaluate effectively. A real service to teachers would be to help them understand whether teaching is the right career for them and, if it is, how to do an even better job of developing the determination, initiative, and thinking skills standardized tests can’t measure.
Michael McGill, superintendent of the Scarsdale Public Schools, is participating in a panel about the misperceptions and realities of the state’s teacher evaluation system on Saturday, May 12, at Bank Street College in Manhattan.
I read in the Daily News this morning that Governor Cuomo will oppose the public release of teacher ratings (http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/teachers/gov-andrew-cuomo-approve-making-teacher-evaluations-public-article-1.1067628#ixzz1t98iGb9q). I am glad he realizes that teachers’ evaluation should not be published for all to see, but I wish he had taken the next step, which is to shield such evaluations as part of every teacher’s personnel file. No member of the public has the right to see the job evaluations of police or firefighters or corrections officers, yet their jobs are no less important than those of teachers.
The Governor’s position is that parents have a “right to know” the job evaluations of their child’s teacher. I disagree, and I’ll explain why.
The first reason that I think this is wrong is that the ratings themselves, as we learned when they were released by New York City, are inaccurate. Why should parents have the right to know a rating that is wrong? We saw examples of teachers who were assigned students they never taught; teachers who got ratings for years when they were on maternity leave. Given the city’s insistence that teachers be compared to other teachers and graded on a curve, half of the teachers fell in the bottom half of the curve, despite their qualities as teachers.
In one case, a teacher of gifted children was rated a very poor teacher—one of the worst in the city—because the children who started in her classroom gained only .05 of a point when the computer said they should have gained .07 of a point. This is not judgment, this is a mechanical calculation that is meaningless. Her principals says she is an excellent teacher but the computer knows best.
Then there was the New York Post’s “expose” of the woman they called “the worst teacher in the city.” The rankings showed her at the bottom. But the rankings did not explain that she teaches new immigrant students who cycle in and out of her classroom as they learn English. In other words, the rankings are bunk.
Aside from the question of accuracy—a very large question given the crudeness of the measures—there is an issue of practicality. What happens when the parents in a school learn that Ms. Smith has a ranking in the 12 percentile? Will they all go to the principal and ask to have their children transferred to a teacher with a higher ranking? If they do, will Ms. Jones have 65 children in her class, while Ms. Smith sits in an empty classroom? What will be their rankings next year? What will parents do with the inaccurate information the Governor wants them to have?
I suppose this will sort itself out and in time will come to mean nothing at all. One thing seems certain. This is not a method that will improve the teaching profession or improve education or give teachers the respect they now feel is sorely lacking.
Many people have wondered how the New York State Education Department permitted the nonsensical story about the pineapple and the hare to get onto the state test.
This is not the first time a really bad reading passage got onto the test and it won’t be the last.
State Commissioner John King was quick to issue a defensive statement saying that people were reading the story “out of context,” as if the full story made sense (it didn’t). And he was quick to pin the blame on teachers, who supposedly had reviewed all the test items. It was the teachers’ fault, not his. In an era where Accountability is the hallmark of education policy, King was quick to refuse any accountability for what happened on his watch. These days, the ones at the top never accept accountability for what goes wrong, that’s for the “little people” like teachers and students, not for the bigwigs. No one holds them accountable, and they never accept any. None of them ever says, as President Harry S Truman did, “the buck stops here.”
So this is the reason that even a stupid, pointless story like the pineapple story–so thoroughly bowdlerized that it was disowned by Daniel Pinkwater, its original author–got past the review panel. I know about this process because I spent seven years as a member of the National Assessment Governing Board and served on a committee where we read every single question that would appear on a national test. When the review committee gets the items, with questions and answers, you are told that this particular item has been thoroughly field-tested. It has appeared in a children’s magazine; it has been used in a state assessment. Here are the results with all the accompanying statistics for this item. You are also told that the publisher’s own technical reviewers approved the item; so did the publisher’s bias and sensitivity reviewers.
By the time the item reaches the teachers or external panel, it has been vetted, you are told, by many others. There is tremendous implicit pressure to go along with the judgment of others whom you assume are very professional. They all agreed it was fine. Who are you to raise a question or complaint?
Since I am by nature a skeptic, I always read test passage and their questions and answers as if no one else had. And on more occasions than I can count, I said, “Stop. Wait. This doesn’t make sense. The question isn’t clear. None of the answers fits the question. There are two good answers,” or words to that effect.
But I understand the social pressure, the social consensus, that discourages questioning and criticism.
And that is how bad questions get onto standardized tests, and why the Pineapple question was not the first and will certainly not be the last to slip past the review panels.
The best remedy for this problem is to publish the questions and answers when the tests are finished. That way, everyone can see them. After all, as Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Cuomo and Secretary Duncan often remind us, when speaking of teacher evaluation ratings, “The public has a right to know.”
Since the tests are the linchpin of every national education policy today, the public has a right to know if the tests are fair, valid, reliable and reasonable ways to assess student learning.
Diane
Diane Ravitch's blog 