Archives for category: Principals
Newer Entries »

Andrew Cuomo, No Friend to Public Education

By dianeravitch
August 7, 2012 //
22

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.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Cuomo, Andrew, Education Industry, Education Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Merit pay, New York, Principals, Rhee, Michelle, Teacher Evaluations, Teacher Tenure

How Reform Destroyed My School

By dianeravitch
August 1, 2012 //
10

This reader will not be silent.

I had a principal who stood up for teachers and students. She had 29 years experience, 11 years as a principal at this school. She was forced to “retire” one year short of full vestment or face firing because we failed to meet our AYP goal by 7 points one year and 5 points the year before.

The school maintained a “B” grade from the state for 4 out of 7 years (the grade was “C” the other 3) and the year she was fired we actually missed AYP by only 3 points (special education and ELL students made AYP) making marked progress every single year in every single category. This all happened in a school with the largest special education population in the county, 93% free/reduced lunch, and 34% English language learners. It didn’t matter.

Once she was labelled as a maverick and a troublemaker her days were numbered. This woman made sure every single one of our 680+ students had shoes, glasses, food to eat on weekends and at school, uniforms to wear, and opportunities they would not have otherwise. She knew the name of every single student in the school. knew their parents, and knew their academic standing. She supported students and teachers with an amazing level of skill and was a master of finding funding for whatever needs arose. I was privileged to be hired by her and work for her for 9 years.

The principal hired to replace her came in from out of state and in her first year oversaw the firing and/or forcing out of 16 senior staff members including the head custodian and the school nurse through transfer or retirement. Her second year saw another 21 longtime employees leave the school through transfer or retirement. She then resigned and moved out of state again. I transferred since it was clear that anyone with more than 3 years experience or over the age of 30 was no longer welcome — we were actually forced to resign from all committees and not allowed leadership roles to “allow younger people a chance at growing”.

A school that had served a very troubled, gang-infested, impoverished neighborhood well and with honor and dignity for 3 generations was torn apart, institutional memory was destroyed, longstanding traditions ended, longterm faculty and support personnel, many of whom had attended this very school themselves as children and whose children also attended are gone and replaced by new, inexperienced teachers with a high churn rate and an ever-increasing number of student transfers.

This is what cemented my commitment to fight and to stand up for what is right. I realize that I have paid and will pay a price for my advocacy but I could not sleep at night if I did not at least try. I’m lucky in that I am only financially responsible for myself; I couldn’t take the risks to do this if I had children or a spouse to support.
Categories Education Reform, Poverty, Principals, Teachers and Teaching

A Field Report on New York’s Educator Evaluation System

By dianeravitch
July 9, 2012 //
23

The principals of New York State have been up in arms in opposition to the “educator evaluation” system that the New York State  Education Department has designed. More than one-third of the principals across the state have bravely signed a petition in protest.

The reason for the evaluation system is that New York had the misfortune to “win” Race to the Top. The $700 million did not go to schools for urgent needs, but to meet the mandates imposed by the U.S. Department of Education. One costly mandate requires the state to evaluate principals and teachers, based in part on test scores. Despite the fact that no state or district has figured out how this will work or how it will improve instruction, New York is plowing ahead.

A reader describes his views of this new system:

Earlier this week, I spent two days along with 60 other school administrators (Superintendents and Principals) from the area districts to learn how to become a “Lead Evaluator” for the implementation of the new APPR (Annual Professional Performance Review).
This new law requires district administrators to conduct multiple evaluations on every teacher (60% of the score), then add the teachers’ students’ results (20%) on flawed state assessments (remember the Pineapple story?), and another 20% on the results from local assessments. This score will give each teacher a score based on a 100-point scale and determine whether or not they are “highly effective, effective, developing, or ineffective”. The state will be providing the scores to the districts because they are “secured tests”. Teachers will not be able to glean significant data from the tests to see how they can improve their instructional practice, because the state will not provide schools with the test questions to allow for detailed and accurate item analysis.
It is not difficult to see where this train is going. Teachers will be vying for students that would be considered to have a positive impact on their APPR score and praying that students deemed to have a negative impact will be placed in one of their colleague’s classes. When the scores of individual teachers are made public (parents will be allowed access to their child’s teacher’s score and will assuredly end up on Facebook before they hit the parking lot), they will be demanding that their child be placed with the teacher with the highest score. Teachers will be pitted against other teachers, students, and parents.
This system was put in place allegedly to make it easier to fire ineffective teachers. However, if one looks at the law, it is now much more onerous to terminate an ineffective teacher than it was previously. The law was also put in place in order to be a contender for the infamous Race To the Top (RTtT) money. NYSUT supported the initiative assuming it would infuse more money into a system that desperately needs it. However, the money did not go to school districts to offset the massive decreases in state aid, but rather to the BOCES across the state in order to implement the new APPR.
Mr. Cuomo and Dr. King have cited many “facts” leading up to these massive changes. One example they have used is: New York schools are “Number 1 in spending but 34 in terms of results”. However, this statistic has been discredited. Education Week, which publishes the annual “Quality Counts” guide, ranked New York State No. 2 in the nation in a comprehensive analysis of policy and performance. Other statistics used for US schools in comparison to other industrialized nations have us ranked quite low. For example, scores from the 2009 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) show that US students ranked 14th in reading, 17th in science and 25th in math out of 34 countries. However, when one digs deeper, the “facts” change. Dr. Gerald N. Tirozzi, Executive Director from the National Association of Secondary School Principals dug deeper and found that in order to get a more accurate assessment of the performance of U.S. students would be to compare the scores of American schools with comparable poverty rates to those of other countries. He found that Schools in the United States with less than a 10% poverty rate had a PISA score of 551. When compared to the ten countries with similar poverty numbers, that score ranked first. That’s right folks, the United States ranked FIRST! Finland was second. As Mark Twain once said, “There are three kinds of lies; lies, damn lies, and statistics.”As an educator for 20 years, I am proud of our schools and our teachers. They work hard and deserve our respect. Teachers and students should never be reduced to a number. It is bad for education and it is bad for our nation. APPR as it now stands should be repealed. For the sake of our children, please contact your state Assemblyman or Assemblywoman to get rid of this law. Our children deserve better.
Categories Accountability, Education Reform, New York, Principals, Race to the Top

Brave Principals

By dianeravitch
May 3, 2012 //
12

The principals of New York State are amazing. When the State Education Department began creating its “educator evaluation system,” it called together the principals and showed them what it was up to. It showed them a video of guys building a plane while it was flying. This was called, in self-congratulatory parlance, “building a plane in mid-air.” A few principals noticed that the guys building the exterior of the plane were wearing parachutes, but the passengers didn’t have parachutes. The principals realized that they, their staff, and their students were the passengers. The ones with the parachutes were the overseers at the New York State Education Department. For them, it was a lark, but the evaluation system they created was do-or-die for the hapless passengers.

The principals rose up in revolt, led by Carol Burris and Sean Feeney. They wrote a petition and circulated it to other principals. In a matter of weeks, they had the signatures of more than a third of the principals in the state. All objected to the test-score based evaluation, all objected to being the state’s guinea pigs, and all insisted that the state should do some pilots before imposing its best guess on the principals, teachers, and students of New York.

It took tremendous courage for principals to sign the petition. Sadly, they didn’t even get the support of the teachers’ unions of New York State. Indeed, NYSUT told its members not to sign. I can’t explain why. It made no sense to me. Why would teachers want to be judged by the arbitrary rise or fall of test scores.

The principals created a website, newyorkprincipals.org. Lots of people have signed their petition. I hope more do.

One of the brave principals wrote a letter to Commissioner John King yesterday. It was reported in the New York Times blog, Schoolbook. (http://www.nytimes.com/schoolbook/2012/05/02/long-island-principal-decries-quality-of-state-exams/)

The principal, Sharon Fougner, said the following:

The tests contained:

Unfamiliar, untaught material

Deliberately misleading questions and answer choices

Ambiguous, poorly worded questions and answer choices

Inconsistent directions

Misplaced answer lines

Omitted directional cues

Multiple answers that could be correct

Inappropriately sized work spaces

Extended multiple steps (as many as 5 or 6) in single problems

Incomplete/missing information

Reading levels that are above grade

These errors by Pearson and the State Education Department have caused “confusion, anxiety, miscalculations, distraction, misuse of time, and fatigue.” The “inordinate length” of these exams, wrote the principal, is “beyond the stamina and attention span of eight to ten year olds.”

All of this together adds up to one single conclusion: The New York State Education Department is guilty of child abuse. Let me say it again, this time slowly: The New York State Education Department is guilty of child abuse. And incompetence.

Will anyone be accountable? Don’t hold your breath.

Diane

Categories New York, Principals, Teacher Evaluations
Newer Entries »