Today, the New York Board of Regents will vote to approve the harsh and punitive educator evaluation plan that Governor Andrew Cuomo rammed through the Legislature last spring as part of a budget bill.

In doing so, the Regents will abandon their Constitutional authority over education policy. The New York State Constitution grants full control over education to the Board of Regents. It grants none to the Governor. The Governor does not appoint a single member of the 17-member Board of Regents. The State Legislature selects them. The Governor does not appoint the state Commissioner of Education. That is the job of the Regents.

Today the Regents will approve Cuomo’s plan to tie 50% of educator evaluations to student test scores. The Governor’s plan was shaped in his office, without benefit of hearings, public discussion, public debate, or expert testimony.

The Regents have the power to reassert their Constitutional authority. But they are weak. They will fold to the will of a Governor whose determination to rule is greater than the Regents’ commitment to the State Constitution. Or to the children, or to the educators, or to the best interests of education in New York.

Parents have been ignored throughout this charade of the Governor flexing his political muscle. They will have a chance to be heard next spring, when the tests are administered. More students will opt out, more than the 220,000 who refused the tests in 2015. Will it be 300,000? 400,000? This is parents’ only means to be heard. They will be heard.

This arrived in my email box. I hope Regent Tilles, a member of the New York Board of Regents, reads it before he votes on the Governor’s flawed and punitive teacher evaluation program.
Dear Regent Tilles,

I am writing to you to share my own experience as a teacher in the hopes that you’ll see how absurd basing teacher evaluations on test scores can be.

Before I reveal my state growth score, let me give you some figures. After all, in any other job in the world, you are judged on performance. And Common Core is supposed to be about getting our students college and career ready, two places where they will be judged on performance. So after my principal gave me my state growth score, I decided to take a look at how my students actually performed on the state ELA test.

I had 31 students take the state ELA test. I am not going to count one student and his Level 1 score based on the fact that on the Part 1, he simply filled in A for each question in column 1 of the answer sheet, B for each question in column 2, C for each question in column 3, and D for each question in column 4 (that alone should be enough to see the flaws in having a test-based evaluation). 14 of my 30 students scored at Level 3. That’s 46.7%. 7 of my 30 scored at Level 4. That’s 23.3%. 70% of my students scored Level 3+4. The percents for the entire grade level in my building were 26% Level 3, 15% Level 4, 41% Level 3+4. In the regional scores given to us by BOCES, 42% of the students on my grade scored on Level 3+4. Other than the SED, anyone would look at my numbers and say not only did I do my job, I did it very well.

Here’s another way to look at the results. My students accounted for 27.5% of those who took the test on my grade level, but they accounted for 48.3% of our Level 3 scores and 43.8% of our Level 4 scores. Let me say that again. My students were a little more than 1/4 of all those on my grade level in my building who took the test and yet I accounted for nearly 1/2 the Level 3 and 4 scores.

Based on that data, the question I have is, “Did I do my job? Was I an effective teacher?” Well if I were a school myself, my percentage of students meeting state standards, 70%, would rank me 8th in all of the county.

So now the big reveal. What was my state growth score based on these fantastic results? A 20 out of 20? At least a 16 out of 20? No, I was a 1 out of 20. Yes, a 1. 70% of my students met state standards, yet based on the ridiculous growth formula SED uses that no one really understands, I was deemed to be an Ineffective teacher. Thankfully, my bosses recognize the job I do and due to my score on my observations and our local 20%, my overall score is enough to rate me Effective (barely).

I hope my situation shows just how deeply flawed a test-based teacher evaluation system is, and that you will do everything possible to make sure we eliminate it. I have no problem being evaluated. Contrary to what the governor may think, he did not create the teacher evaluation system. I have been evaluated every year during my 22-year career. All the governor and our legislators have done is create a system that simply DOES NOT WORK. I’m asking for your help in fixing it.

Sincerely,

A proud teacher beginning his 23rd year

Blogger Perdido Street School reports that 45 percent of the teacher ratings for the public schools of Buffalo, New York, were inaccurate. The ratings were outsourced to a company in Utah that acknowledged its errors. Its miscalculations resulted in 1,089 teachers receiving lower ratings than they should have.

The blogger quotes the story in the Buffalo News:

Lower-than-correct scores were given to educators who teach more than one grade level or subject and are required to meet multiple sets of student learning objectives. The company had rewritten its scoring calculations over the summer to enable it to produce scores more rapidly, Rosenthal said. But in doing so, it inadvertently created the calculation error for this group of teachers.

The district’s data chief, Genelle Morris, said a teacher brought the error to the district’s attention. According to the teacher’s manual calculations, she had met her performance targets, but that was not reflected in the online calculations produced by Truenorthlogic. The district checked her calculations and ran them internally through the district’s Information Technology Department and found it could not replicate Truenorthlogic’s scores.

The company soon uncovered the source of the error and the corrected results were posted online for teachers to view late Thursday morning.

Perdido Street adds this observation about the Governor who insisted on creating the evaluation system (APPR) and who insists it is “scientific” and “objective”:

It will be fun to see Cuomo twist himself into a pretzel to defend APPR even as the Common Core/Endless Testing edifice comes down around him.

Make no mistake – he will do just that.

APPR is his baby – his donors wanted it, he pushed for it, when pushback came, he fought to impose it on the state through the budget.

He will not want to admit it is as flawed and error-riddled as the Common Core implementation (which he can blame on NYSED), the Common Core tests (which he can blame on Pearson) or the Common Core curriculum (which he can blame on NYSED.)

When it comes to APPR, he has no one to blame but himself.

In a remarkable reversal, the member of the New York State Board of Regents from Long Island switched his position on the state’s teacher evaluation plan. Roger Tilles told teachers in Port Jefferson, Long Island, New York, that he will no longer support the test-based evaluation system rammed through the legislature during budget deliberations last spring.

Tilles said to the crowd:

Roger Tilles of Great Neck, now in his 11th year on the state Board of Regents, told a teachers conference in Port Jefferson that Albany faces the risk of growing opposition to the job evaluation system unless it reverses course.
“I oppose the use of standardized tests to evaluate teachers and principals,” Tilles said, drawing applause from about 400 teachers and school administrators at Earl L. Vandermeulen High School in Port Jefferson. “Not admitting a mistake is making a bigger mistake.”

Last June, Tilles voted to endorse the hastily passed educator evaluation plan cobbled together by the Cuomo administration and passed into law by the legislature.

His change of vote means that seven of the 17 Regents oppose the plan. If two more Regents change their votes, a majority will vote down the plan, sending it back to the legislature for a different approach, one that has research and evidence to support it.

The current wave of parental opt outs, most recently 20% of all eligible test-takers in the state, was spurred by the coupling of test scores and educator evaluations. Parents understood that making the tests so consequential would mean more test prep and less time for the studies and activities that children enjoy in school. Parent leaders from groups like Long Island Opt Out and New York State Allies for Public Education have said clearly that they want test scores separated from teacher evaluations.