Archives for category: New York
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How State Aid Is Rigged Against the Poorest Districts

By dianeravitch
December 21, 2012 //
7

Bruce Baker has written an illuminating and disturbing post about how New York is underfunding its highest-need schools.

Governor Cuomo likes to complain that the state spends far too much on education but sees little improvement. Baker demonstrates that the formula hurts the neediest students. The governor goes on to say that he will take money away from those districts if their teacher evaluations are poor. In effect, he is punishing them for enrolling students with high needs and threatening to make things worse.

Here is a small part of this very disturbing analysis of how New York State cheats and punishes the poorest districts:

“Riding the national, Duncanian wave of new normalcy (which I’ve come to learn is an extreme form of innumeracy) & reformyness, the only possible cause of lagging achievement in New York State is bad teachers –greedy overpaid teachers with fat pensions – and protectionist unions who won’t let us fire them. Clearly, the lagging state of performance in low income and minority districts in New York State has absolutely nothing at all to do with lack of financial resources under the low-balled aid formula that the state has chosen to not even half fund for the past 5 years? Nah… that couldn’t have anything to do with it. Besides, money certainly has nothing to do with providing decent working conditions and pay which might leveraged to recruit and retain teachers.

“And we all know that if New York State’s average per pupil spending is high, or so the Gov proclaims, then spending clearly must be high enough in each and every-one of the state’s high need districts! (right… because averages always represent what everyone has and needs, right? Reformy innumeracy rears its ugly head again!).

“So it absolutely has to be the fact that no teacher in NY has ever been evaluated at all, or fired for being bad even though we know for sure that at least half of them stink. The obvious solution is that they must be evaluated by egregiously flawed metrics – and we must ram those metrics down their throats.

“In fact, the New York legislature and Governor even found it appropriate to hold hostage additional state aid if districts don’t adopt teacher evaluation plans compliant with the state’s own warped demands and ill-conceived policy framework.

“As I understand it, legislation passed this past year actually tied receipt of state general aid to compliance with the state teacher evaluation mandate. That, in order to receive any increase in state general/foundation aid over prior year, a districts would have to file and have accepted their teacher evaluation plan.

“That’s it – we’ll take away their general state aid – their foundation aid – the aid they are supposed to be getting in order to comply with that court order of several years back. The aid they are constitutionally guaranteed under that order. I’m having some trouble accepting the supposed constitutional authority of a state legislature and governor to cut back general aid on this basis – where they’ve already failed to provide most of the aid they themselves identified as constitutionally adequate under court order? But I guess that’s for the New York Court system to decide.

“If nothing else, it is thoroughly obnoxious, arbitrary and capricious and grossly inequitable treatment. I hear the reformers (who understand neither math nor school finance) whine… But why… why is it inequitable to require similarly that poor and rich districts follow state teacher and principal evaluation guidelines. Setting aside the junk nature of that evaluation system and the bogus measures on which it rests (and the fact that the reformers’ fav-fab-charters have largely rightfully ignored the eval mandate), it is inequitable because districts serving higher poverty children stand to lose more money per child as a result of non-compliance. And they’ve already been squeezed.”

Categories Budget Cuts, New York, Teacher Evaluations

A Member of NY Regents: Are We Asking the Right Questions?

By dianeravitch
December 19, 2012 //
11

For the past year and more, the New York State Board of Regents has spent a huge proportion of its time designing and debating a test-based educator evaluation system. The system was developed by AIR (American Institutes for Research) and has been criticized as inaccurate by Bruce Baker, who says that even AIR recognizes how flawed the system is. Yet Governor Cuomo, Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Tisch say “full speed ahead.”

Regent Roger Tilles, who represents Long Island on the state Board of Regents, wrote the following letter and distributed it to many people. He asks the right questions:

Last Thursday, Chancellor Tisch and I had a chance to tour some of the schools most affected by Hurricane Sandy. We met with teachers, principals and superintendents, hearing stories of how teachers, many of whom had lost their own homes, had gone door to door in an effort to determine where their students were living and trying to insure that their one constant, their school, would continue as best it could.

 

Friday, we were all witnesses to the horror of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings. As the story unfolded, we learned of the selfless devotion of the teachers and administrators, putting themselves in danger while trying to protect their students, their children.

 

In trying to put these events in a context that we, as policymakers must try to do, I asked myself these questions:

1.      What kind of algorithm measures the kind of devotion that we saw and I am sure we would see in crisis after crisis in all of our schools?

2.      How do you establish a pre- and post-test for the kind of personal responsibility that these professionals demonstrated?

3.      How do we measure the trust that these children and their parents have placed in us as educators “in loco parentis”?

4.      What kind of virtual teacher would be able to foster the communication needed to create a trusting atmosphere where learning can take place?

 

Let us remember these questions as we are asked to develop policies that insure the future of our children and our country.

Roger Tilles, Member

New York State Board of Regents

Categories Accountability, New York, Teacher Evaluations, Testing

Common Core Tests Likely to Cause Passing Rates to Plummet

By dianeravitch
December 17, 2012 //
28

New York officials are warning parents and the public to be prepared for a big drop in the proportion of students who are proficient on new tests aligned with the Common Core.

The English language arts tests contain vocabulary that most children are not likely to know and the math tests contain concepts that may not have been taught.

Members of the Board of Regents express concern that neither students nor teachers are prepared for the tests or the standards. Some worry that the tests will have a devastating effect in schools that enroll poor and minority students.

The linked article gives examples of test questions.

When Common Core Test results were recently released in Kentucky, passing rates fell and the gaps widened.

I am reminded of Rick Hess’s recent article in which he said that reformers are hoping that the terrible results of the Common Core tests will persuade suburban parents that their schools are awful. They too will then clamor for charters and vouchers.

Read this article about the widespread drop in passing rates that is expected across the nation, and pay attention to Jeb Bush’s gleeful anticipation. Now, former Governor Bush is described as an “education expert,” although most of his time is spent selling technology and privatization. The collapse of test scores and passing rates is good news for his business and his ideology.

Categories Common Core, New York, Testing

Teacher Ratings: Charters say “No, Thanks!”

By dianeravitch
December 12, 2012 //
6

Students for Education Reform and StudentsFirst have brought pressure on the New York City teachers’ union to agree to a deal with the state to rate teachers by their students’ test scores.

But what these groups have overlooked is that the overwhelming majority of charter schools have said no. Few have turned in their teacher ratings, and most don’t intend to comply.

They say no deal. Forget about it.

The public schools should learn from the best practices of the charters and do the same.

Categories Charter Schools, New York, New York City, Race to the Top, Teacher Evaluations

A Scholar Joins the Honor Roll

By dianeravitch
December 12, 2012 //
1

Bruce Baker of Rutgers joins the honor roll, not as a champion of public education, but as a champion of honesty, accuracy and integrity.

Scholars must go where the evidence takes them, not where it is popular or politically expedient,

Today, Baker is outraged that the Néw York state education department continues to press for adoption of its flawed evaluation system.

He is outraged that the creators of the system–AIR–recognized its flaws, yet blessed it anyway.

He is outraged that the state and city of Néw York will force these flawed metrics on educators.

For his devotion to the best ideals of scholarship and his fearless championing of them, Bruce Baker joins the honor roll.

Categories Honor Roll, New York, NYC, Teacher Evaluations

Baker: New York Educator Evaluation Is Fundamentally Flawed

By dianeravitch
December 6, 2012 //
9

Bruce Baker of Rutgers says that New York state’s educator evaluation system is biased, inaccurate and unfair. Even the consultants who created the system, he writes, acknowledged the high rate of error. But the state says “full speed ahead.” Baker urges educators to “just say no.”

Categories New York, Teacher Evaluations

Chancellor Tisch, You Are Wrong!

By dianeravitch
November 30, 2012 //
4

Merryl Tisch, head of the Néw York State Board of Regents, says full speed ahead with the state educator evaluation plan.

Bruce Baker of Rutgers says she is wrong, wrong, wrong.

Categories Accountability, New York, Principals, Teacher Evaluations

More Evidence That VAM Is Junk Science

By dianeravitch
November 27, 2012 //
7

New York is very proud of its new Educator Effectiveness Evaluation model, which claims to measure which teachers and principals are effective, relying in part on the increase (or not) of test scores of students.

Bruce Baker of Rutgers demonstrates that the model is biased and inaccurate. It favors classes and schools that start off with higher-performing students.

He concludes with a brief sermon about the importance of ethics:

“I have pointed out that the originators of the SGP approach have stated in numerous technical documents and academic papers that SGPs are intended to be a descriptive tool and are not for making causal assertions (they are not for “attribution of responsibility”) regarding teacher effects on student outcomes. Yet, the authors persist in encouraging states and local districts to do just that. I certainly expect to see them called to the witness stand the first time SGP information is misused to attribute student failure to a teacher.”

“But the case of the NY-AIR technical report is somewhat more disconcerting. Here, we have a technically proficient author working for a highly respected organization – American Institutes for Research – ignoring all of the statistical red flags (after waiving them), and seemingly oblivious to gaping conceptual holes (commonly understood limitations) between the actual statistical analyses presented and the concluding statements made (and language used throughout).”

“The conclusions are WRONG – statistically and conceptually. And the author needs to recognize that being so damn bluntly wrong may be consequential for the livelihoods of thousands of individual teachers and principals! Yes, it is indeed another leap for a local school administrator to use their state approved evaluation framework, coupled with these measures, to actually decide to adversely affect the livelihood and potential career of some wrongly classified teacher or principal – but the author of this report has given them the tool and provided his blessing. And that’s inexcusable.”

Categories New York, Race to the Top, Teacher Evaluations

That Teeny Tiny Number of Irreplaceables

By dianeravitch
November 20, 2012 //
2

Bruce Baker is one of my favorite bloggers. He is smart and irreverent. He is not awed by big names. He actually was a teacher before becoming a researcher. He has the technical skill to crack the statistical analyses that others generate to make spurious claims. Unlike many with the same skill set, he is willing to call a phony a phony. You might say he is our Premier C.D. (Since I have taken a personal pledge not to use vulgarisms on this blog, I will give you a clue to help you figure out what a C.D. is; it is a Cr-p Detector).

In this post, Bruce shows what nonsense The New Teacher Project report “The Irreplaceables” is.

TNTP, you may recall, was founded by either TFA or Michelle Rhee, depending on whom you heard from last. Its purpose was to stock urban districts with shiny new teachers (like TFA) to replace those burned-out veterans with low expectations. Although TNTP is an advocacy group that seeks and wins contracts from urban districts, and although it has a self-interest in certain policies, it nonetheless turns out studies and reports to support its self-interest (fire bad old teachers, hire and retain new teachers). It is not surprising that advocacy groups crank out self-serving “studies,” but it is surprising that the media so often takes them seriously, sort of like taking advice from tobacco companies about the wisdom of smoking.

In his analysis of the latest bit of TNTP puffery, Baker demonstrates how unstable value-added measures are. He reviews the ratings for thousands of NYC teachers and finds that there are very few who remain in the top 20% every single year. In fact, he discovers only 14 in math and 5 in ELA out of thousands of teachers! He writes, “Sure hope they don’t leave.”

Categories New York, Race to the Top, Teacher Evaluations

What Schools Should Do in Crisis Times

By dianeravitch
November 16, 2012 //
8

After the hurricane, Mayor Bloomberg was eager to reopen the city’s public schools as soon as possible for the 1.1 million children enrolled. He worried that they were “losing time” and had to get back to their studies, back to normal. The facts that many of the schools suffered damage, that many were turned into shelters, and that many children were in shock because of their experiences were irrelevant. It was back to the routine.

In this brilliant post, Rabbi Andy Bachman of Congregation Beth Elohim in Park Slope, Brooklyn, has a better idea. He envisions classes across the city studying climate change, learning civics lessons, and engaged in public service to those in need.

This is what teachers call “a teachable moment.” But NYC rejects the moment and opts for normalcy, not fresh thinking. Such thinking and the activities it might inspire can’t be allowed to interfere with the real purpose of school, which these days is higher test scores.

Categories Curriculum, New Jersey, New York, NYC
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