NY: Cuomo's Common Core Nothing Sundae

They said it couldn't be done, but today NY Governor Andrew Cuomo's Common Core Task Force delivered a big old report in less time than it takes my students to complete their major research project. And it's a big ole Nothing Sundae with a few scoops of Fluff on the side, with a cherry on top.

The announcement came with the same stock photo student we've seen before, and I want with all my heart to believe that his expression of, "Heh. Yeah, this is some ridiculous baloney" is the blow struck by whatever intern had to cobble this together. But the nothing in this announcement announces its nothingness right off the bat. Here's the head of the Task Force, Richard Parsons, Senior Advisor, Providence Equity Partners, LLC and former Chairman of Citigroup (because when you want to look at education policy, you call a banker):

While adoption of the Common Core was extremely well intentioned, its implementation has caused confusion and upheaval in classrooms across New York State. We believe that these recommendations, once acted on, provide a means to put things back on the right track and ensure high quality standards that meet the needs of New York’s kids. The recommendations will provide the foundation to restore public trust in the education system in New York and build on the long history of excellence that preceded this period.

So there you have it-- the purpose of the report is "to restore public trust." Which is a little different than "meet educational needs."

But that's the PR. How does the report look? Let's just see.

Getting Started 

The report kicks off with a the short summary (for those who want to skip straight to the highlights) and a recap of what the Common Core is (spoiler alert: it's exactly what all the PR from Common Core says it is, apparently, so you already know this part). From there we move to the bulk of the report, which is the findings and twenty-one recommendations. Let's see what the task force came up with, shall we? The recommendations are grouped by specific issues.

Issue One: Establish New High Quality New York Standards

Well, if you had any doubts about how deeply the task force was going to dig and how carefully they were going to probe to reach heretofore undiscovered frontiers of understanding, just look at this sentence:

The Task Force has learned that New York educators had limited input into the Common Core before their formal adoption in New York.

Stay tuned for the moment in which the Task Force learns that the sun does not revolve around the sun.

The Task Force accepted input for a whole month and heard from 10,500 respondents.But they single out the Council for a Strong America, the New York State Business Council, and an unnamed NY higher education administrator. Many people are unhappy, yet somehow there is widespread agreement that the goals of CCSS are all swell.

Recommendation One: Adopt some high quality NY standards with all stakeholders in a transparent process.

Mind you, they need to be high standards that promote college and career readiness. And they shouldn't just be a name change, and they should be New Yorky.

But-- the changes should include all the "key instructional shifts set forth in the Common Core Standards." So they should be totally different from the Core, but they should do exactly what the Core does. Got that? NY will rewrite the standards without questioning any of the foundation or goals of the standards. So, more than a name change-- there will also be wording changes. Probably fine changes, too. Just no changes to the actual goals and substance of the standards, Which will make it hard to do

Recommendation Two: Fix the early grade standards.

Well, not fix exactly. The Task Force doesn't want to lower the standards, but recognizing that children develop at different rates, they recommend "banding" to give teachers a wider time range in which to drag tony students across the finish line. They're talking Pre-K through 2. Up through grade 2, everyone can move more or less at their own pace, but by grade 3 the little slackers should be on point and meeting those one-size-fits-all standards. So what we'd like to take those special moments where live humans meet incorrectly written standards and just sort of move them to a later point in the students' lives.

Recommendation Three: Some kind of flexibility for special populations.

Basically, let's make sure that students with disabilities and ELL have more than just the option of vocational certificates instead of a regents diploma. But every student should be prepared to succeed after high school. Convene some experts and figure something out.

Recommendation Four: Ensure standards do not lead to the narrowing of the curriculum or diminish the love of reading and joy of learning.

The Task Force hasn't the foggiest notion how to actually do this, but they recognize it's an issue to many people. So they recommend that the new standards just kind of do this, somehow. It does not occur to them, for instance, that focusing all measurement of schools, teachers, and students on the results of a couple of standardized tests might have the effect of narrowing the curriculum. Nope. Like Arne Duncan, they have no idea how this happened, but they recommend that it stop happening, right now.

Recommendation Five: Establish transparent review and revision process for standards.

It's a mark of just how far the Common Core has driven us down the Crazyland Turnpike that this idea-- that there should be a way to review the standards and change what needs to be changed-- qualifies as a new recommendation. No, David Coleman saw his Creation, and he saw that it was Good, and he decreed that nobody could or should ever change it. The Task Force is not wrong, but the state of New York and a whole lot of other folks are dopes for having waiting till the end of 2015 to come up with this.

Issue Two: Develop Better Curriculum Guidance and Resources

Bzzzzt!! Wrong "issue." The issue is not, "how can the state do a better job of micromanaging classroom teachers." The issue is, "how can the state back itself up and let teachers do their jobs." But the closest the Task Force can come is acknowledging that "teachers develop and select elements of curriculum within the context of student learning goals and objectives established by state and local authorities." So while in their straightjackets, teachers are free to wiggle their noses and roll their eyes.

The Task Force also notes that EngageNY is being used as mandated curriculum in many districts, even though NYSED swears up and down it told people not to do that. Also, many people think the EngageNY modules and website suck.

Also, the Task Force is one more group that is fuzzy on the difference between standards and curriculum. For all these reasons, the following recommendations pretty much miss the point.

Recommendation Six: Educators and local districts should be free to develop and tailor curriculum to the standards.

And you can get a Model T in any color, as long as it's black. The TF actually notes that high-performing schools give teachers autonomy. And yet, somehow the recommendation "Give teachers autonomy" does not make it onto the list.

Recommendation Seven: Release New! Improved! curriculum resources.

Make a new, more better EngageNY. Oh, and occasionally collect feedback on it, just in case it's not more betterer enough.

Recommendation Eight: Set up a digital platform for teacher sharing.

Another moment of candor breaks out. "Teachers and students are not one-size-fit-all. So why are our modules?" Yeah! So let's see if teachers want to fill in the huge gaps in our materials offerings, for free. Let's see if teachers and schools want to give away materials that might help other teachers and schools beat them in the stack rankings. Using the interwebs!

Recommendation Nine: More better Professional Development 

Responding to the complaint that the Core were implemented without enough explanation of How To Do It, the TF suggests that lots of super-duper PD be deployed so that people will totally know how to do it the next time. Because implementation is always the explanation. Hey, question. Do you think anybody out there is researching better ways to spread cholera? Or could it be that some things can't be implemented well because they are inherently flawed and un-implementable?

Issue Three: Significantly Reducing Testing Time and Blah Blah Blahdy Blah

Tests are inevitable and universal, we say. People apparently have complained about Common Core testing. A lot. Who knew? (Oh, wait-- everybody who's read that at least 250,000 students in NY refused to take the test). The Task Force is aware that Pearson has been replaced and that the education chief has launched an initiative to get test compliance back up, complete with a hilariously handy propaganda kit. The Task Force is aware that nobody thinks they're getting useful information from the tests. Of course, the Task Force also accepts NYSED's estimate of how much time any of this testification sucks up, and they think that the President's Test Action Plan actually said something useful and meaningful.

Of course, the way to significantly reduce testing time, a goal everyone allegedly supports, would have been for the ESSA to NOT require the same amount of standardized testing as previously mandated. But under ESSA, states that really wanted to do something about the testing juggernaut could push the boundaries of what the tests are and what they are used for (because test prep would be less prevalent if everybody's future weren't riding on test results). But (spoiler alert) the Task Force is not going to recommend any of these obvious means of achieving their alleged goal. They are like a spouse who, caught cheating with somebody they picked up in a bar, promises not to go to that particular bar on Wednesdays.

Recommendation Ten: Involve all sorts of stakeholders in reviewing the state standardized tests.

Interesting. Does this mean that teachers and other stakeholders will actually be allowed to see test questions? I don't think this recommendation will make it past the test manufacturing lobby.

Recommendation Eleven: Gather student feedback on tests.

Good idea. I suggest checking twitter starting roughly five minutes after the test is handed out.

Recommendation Twelve: Provide ongoing transparency,

They call for releasing test items (good luck with that), the standards weighting and more detail in student scores. I'd suggest adding to the list how the tests are scored, how the test items were validated (if at all), and how the cut scores are set.

Recommendation Thirteen: Reduce number of days and duration for standardized tests

Sure. Good idea. Next, reduce punitive uses of test results so that nobody feels compelled to spend half the year doing test prep.

Recommendation Fourteen: Provide teacher flexibility to use authentic formative assessment.

What?! Trust teachers to do their jobs??!! That's crazy talk, Task Force. Unless.... Uh-oh.

The State and local school districts must support the use of standards-based formative assessments and authentic assessments woven into the routine curriculum along with periodic diagnostic and benchmark testing. The goal of these assessments is to monitor student learning to provide ongoing feedback throughout the school year that teachers can use to improve instruction and students can use to improve learning.

Okay. That could mean "let teachers teach" or it could mean "bring on the highly profitable Competency Based Education."

Recommendation Fifteen: Check out an untimed approach

Another surprising finding. When you give students a high stakes test with a time limit, they get anxious.

Recommendation Sixteen: Provide flexibility for students with disabilities.

Recommendation Seventeen: Protect and enforce accommodations for students with disabilities.

Recommendation Eighteen: Explore alternative options to assess the most severely disabled students.

These are aimed directly at the feds, who, as part of their ongoing program to make all disabilities to vanish by just expecting real hard, denied New York's request to make testing accommodations for students with disabilities. It's hard to predict how hard Acting Pretend Secretary of Education John King (whose previous job, you may recall, was making a hash of education policy in New York) may push back on this, and the real battle will come down to the future Secretary of Ed.

Recommendation Nineteen: Prevent students from being stuck in academic intervention based on one test.

Once again, we are mystified by how anybody ever put sooooo much emphasis on one standardized test. How did such a thing happen? It;s a puzzlement. But a student definitely shouldn't be automatically put in a remediation just because she did poorly on the test used to rate schools and teachers. A more holistic approach is called for, with parents and teachers working together to determine what is in the best interests of the child. And nobody should ever tell a student that the student is too unsatisfactory a student based on just one test (unless it's the state making that determination based on one test, in which case it's totes okee dokee).

Recommendation Twenty: Eliminate double testing for ELL students

New York has an exam for English Language Learners to take. The feds only give a one-year exemption for ELL students, leaving ELL students often taking double tests-- during the years that they have not yet shown English proficiency. The Task Force thinks this is dumb. They are correct.

Issue Four and Recommendation Twenty-One

"The implementation of the Common Core in New York was rushed and flawed," says the task force, which does not go one to say, "because the Common Core were the rushed, flawed work of amateurs, and you can't do a good job of implementing a bad policy." So they have this half right.

But they recommend that "until the new system is fully phased in" (which will be determined how, exactly?) test results should only be advisory and not used for any teacher or student evaluating. They are assuming it will take till 2019-2020 to get everything up to speed, which is pretty awesome, because that gives many governors, many legislatures, and many various policymakers and lobbyists ample time to do God knows what in the meantime. Might as well pick any old year, since nobody knows how long such an undertaking should, would or has taken ever.

Bottom line?

So the Task Force has basically hit three areas. They have lots of ideas to clean up the administration of testing, but nothing that addresses the fundamental problems with the testing. They have several ideas for trying to clean up the curriculum and pedagogy tied to the standards, but nothing that addresses the incorrect assumptions and ideas underlying the state's approach. And they have an idea about rewriting new standards, but nothing that would address any of the foundational problems and incorrect assumptions underlying the Common Core.

So, change without change. We'll keep the same twisted frame and try to drape it with pretty new cloth. It's a big bowl of nothing, and it's not even a new bowl.

Cuomo & Emanuel: What Really Matters

When the budget gets tight or the lifeboat is crowded or the villagers are outside the gate, pitchforks in hand, you have to make some choices about what is really important, what you really want to save.

Two pieces of breaking news today underline how that works in politics, and why we have to pay close attention to actions marketed as victories.

In Chicago, Rahm Emanuel's office announced a "compromise" with Dyett High hunger strikers. Well, not with them with them, because they were in no way part of the deal that the mayor's office hammered out.

The mayor was up against the wall. Demonstrators made a shambles out of last night's meeting, and fifteen protesters were arrested for blocking doors, and all of that makes for terrible optics. And so today a mid-level agent of the Chicago Public Schools announced that Dyett High would re-open as an open-enrollment arts school, a move billed as a "compromise" because it includes elements of all three proposals for Dyett-- i.e. 1) from the actual members of the community, 2) from an arts group with no school-running expertise and 3) from a group that put their hand in after the deadline for proposals. The new school will be open enrollment, but operated by some of the private contractors preferred by CPS-- hired guns who have been neither invested nor involved in the development of the school.

This is not what the hunger strikers wanted. Not that anybody in the pretty press conference could find that out directly

MT @OCPress:#FightForDyett hunger strikers not allowed into #CPS to hear decision on school. (photo: @sarahdashji) pic.twitter.com/t0MTi34hCX

— WBEZeducation (@WBEZeducation) September 3, 2015

Emanuel faced an ever-growing mess, and he had to decide what to save, what absolutely could not be sacrificed in salvaging some sort of end to the public hunger strike. And he decided the one thing that he absolutely could not give up was the policy of keeping community voices silent. Okay, let them have open enrollment. But don't let them speak. Don't let them have a say in making any decisions about the school. And just to make it clear, don't use their years of research and planning for the school design-- because that'll make it clear who's still in complete control of what happens in their school.

The press will announce "Dyett will stay open" and many folks will say, "Well, hey-- they won!" which turns out to be a small sacrifice in the name of keeping the Lessers silenced and in their place, which turns out to be the Most Important Goal. They'll get-- probably-- a neighborhood school-- kind of. But they'll still have no say in how it's run. Not exactly a sweeping victory (nor are the strikers fooled). But the news about an open Dyett will strip traction from any continued strike.

Meanwhile, in New York, Andy Cuomo was badmouthing the Common Core. Like Emanuel, Cuomo has been noticing too many barbarians at the gates, with MaryEllen Elia's announcement that she was going to Get Tough with opt-outers being rapidly walked back because, well, the barbarians weren't scared by her threats-- just pissed off. So Elia walked back quick-style, and today Cuomo allowed as how many experts were still saying that the Core and the Big Standardized Test (and EngageNY and a whole raft of other reformster wonderment) have Serious Problems and now he's just going to get on that right away by turning one of his handpicked Education Commissions, previously installed to help rescue his nutburger teacher eval system. The commission will kick up some folks who can defuse criticism of the Core make recommendations about standards, though certainly not by including input from members of the public. Whatever old wine in new skins standards Cuomo gets, he will get them his way, with his people.

And so we find that what matters most to Cuomo is not the Core (by name) or his educational reformster baloney. Nope-- the most important thing is to get the Lessers to Shut Up and Behave.

In Chicago and New York, today's actions are intended to convince a whole lot of folks that the fight is over, the powerful caved, nothing to see here, everybody go home and turn on some Netflix. And in the months (or years) ahead, the battle over the fate of Dyett High and NY Standards will be a long, battle-by-battle slog. Emanuel and Cuomo will have sacrificed some of their stated goals, but not the most treasured goal of all-- keeping the Lessers quiet and voiceless. Maybe they think they'll relax now and quit and go home, leaving the Leaders with what the most want-- power without interference.

That's the immediate lesson today. Nobody stood up for closing Dyett high or New York's Core as a matter of deeply held principle. Both were sacrificed easily and publicly. The immediate lesson is in what Cuomo and Emanuel were not willing to sacrifice. They were and are not willing to make the sacrifice of letting citizens come sit at the table or to have a voice when policy is set. Sacrifice anything, as long as you score a PR outflanking of the commoners without having to let them speak.

Were today's announcements no victory at all? No, the Big Guys sacrificed some peanuts. Dyett will be open, and that's not nothing. And for all their big talk about education and reforms and bringing communities what they need, Cuomo and Emanuel showed their true goals-- keep the people in those communities voiceless and in their place. That's what really matters to these guys. When the house is on fire, what people grab tells you what really matters to them, and these guys grabbed scepters of power and boots for stomping on citizens.

So, Charters Can Cheat, Apparently

The New York charter school that had the highest jump in ELA test scores is also the charter school that decided to score their own tests.

English scores at the Teaching Firms of America Charter School (a school that is under the gun to show the state that it shouldn't be closed) jumped from 20% proficiency to 40% proficiency. And according to NY Chalkbeat, the principal doesn't find anything odd about it.

Founding principal Rafiq Kalam Id-Din II said he was confident that the English gains are an accurate reflection of how far his students have come.

“The growth is the result of authentic instruction,” he said. “That’s what happens when you don’t do test prep.”

In NY, charter schools aren't part of the test-grading consortium that scores exams for public schools, but they have a similar system set up which most reportedly use, so that nothing looks, you know, suspicious. Like a doubling in test scores after you score them yourself.

Id-Din said he decided to allow his staff to score students’ answer sheets because he wanted teachers to better understand the state’s test-development and grading process and because it saved money for the school.

Does it really matter who runs score sheets through a scantron machine? Well, no (and we should note that the school saw no such leap in its math scores). But the ELA test of course includes writing elements, and if your students respond to a prompt just the way you taught them to (in your totally authentic non-test-preppy way) well, wouldn't that constitute a bit of an advantage.


Should anyone be worried about going to jail, Atlanta style? Of course not, silly. This is a charter school in New York, and everything they did is perfectly legal and okay. A reporter from a NY news outlet indicated on twitter that the NYDoE had told him they had no intention of investigating.

And the story is clear-- nobody anywhere is accusing these guys of tampering. But all I can think of is how subjective writing scoring is, and how much better my students would do if I were grading them based on the same assumptions and techniques involved when I taught them.

Maybe the school didn't cheat, even a little. Maybe scoring your own writing samples from your own pupils written according to your own teaching standards doesn't result in an inside track to scoring excellence. But we will never know any of those things because what the school did IS PERFECTLY LEGAL AND OKAY BY NY RULES!

In other words, maybe this school did not cheat. But now we understand a little more clearly just how easily they could, if they wanted to.

NY Charter in Trouble

Riverhead Charter School was first opened in 2001 in Calverton, NY. They started out as a K-5 school and have since moved up to K-8 status. And Standards & Poors thinks they have some problems.

On the upside, Riverhead has just moved into a shiny $14.1 million new school, financed through two bond issues, including the first federal Qualified School Construction Bond ever awarded a charter school. Now students can eat in a cafeteria and have PE in a gymnasium. I'm sure there are plenty of public school students in New York State who are envious. Back in 2004, Riverhead also became one of the first charter schools in New York to unionize.

Riverhead has also had its share of controversy. Much of the more recent controversy appears to center around Principal Raymond Ankrum. This video clip will give you absolutely no real information, but watching this board meeting spin completely out of control gives a real sense of the level of volatility. Ankrum was brought in after a national search; he's an experienced charter hand, but he had been at the school only a couple of years before all hell broke loose.

At the Great Schools site, ratings are either very high or very low-- there's no in between. While these can be taken, always, with a lump of salt, they seem to lay out the issues pretty clearly:

The principle [sic] Mr. Arkrum has worked very hard to filter out all staff members who chose to believe in a Union including the Union President. There are all new teachers with less than 2 years experience and are under Mr. Arkum rule!! There are no bad kids only bad behavior that need to be redirected. I like to know why bad kids don't deserve a place at that school? I know they are not special needs friendly.

The principal and teachers of this school do care and Mr Ankrum has worked very hard this past year to filter out poor staff and bad kids that don't deserve a place there. Children are pushed and encouraged a lot but for their own good. Any child under Mr Ankrum's watch is safe and this can't be stressed enough.

Ankrum apparently called a staff meeting, invited teachers to share how they felt about the teachers union, and then those that supported it were fired, some as soon as two weeks after the meeting, including a teacher previous lauded as "Teacher of the Year." Then the school filed a petition to have the school's union decertified. Ankrum reportedly reminded staff that he could fire them at any time. NYSUT did not take kindly to any of this, and the labor wrestling and lawsuits began. Ankrum (actually titled "executive director") is still in place.

Oh, and this is the school where the union president was fired over using eggs in a classroom experiment with an egg-allergic student in the room.

Then, just last week, this:

The Riverhead Charter School’s bond rating was downgraded this week following a state report indicating it’s at risk of closing due to poor performance in various areas, including communication and oversight.

That's the bond issued on the new school building. S&P has downgraded that to a negative outlook, based on the state's on-site analysis that the school may not have a future ahead of it. Ankrum responded to the downgrade:

 
“The Riverhead Charter School continues to strive for excellence by providing a rigorous education in an environment where students are put first,” Mr. Ankrum wrote in an email. “We are confident that S&P will upgrade our next rating since parent satisfaction surveys are in the 90th percentile, we have made academic gains over the past year and have a 92.5 percent staff retention rate for next year, which is well above the 81 percent national charter school average.”

Well, maybe. The state says that when given the chance to speak anonymously, parents and staff describe a school where Ankrum and the Board don't communicate effectively and establish an atmosphere where parents and teachers are expected to shut up and do as they're told. The descriptive phrase “in a degrading fashion to parents and staff” turned up. And folks are still concerned about the union-related purging of staff. A former board member is suing over her removal after she was critical of board policy. And the state criticized the lack of any formal job performance review system for Ankrum.

It all adds up to one more example of the instability that comes with charter schools, as well as the sorts of chaos that comes without job protections for teachers and a chartery hatred for unions in a system that doesn't have to listen to the taxpayers if they don't feel like it.

NY: Toxic Dollars

Polishing the Apple might well have been entitled Poisoning the Apple. The new report from Common Cause delineates just how much money has poured into New York education politics, from where, and to whom. It is not a pretty picture.

The full report runs over fifty pages, so I'm not going to try to capture the full Brobdinagian wreck here. But let me share some of the most striking findings.

The report lumps pro-ed-reform groups under the heading "privatizers," and I have no disagreement there.

2014 was a huge year for reformsters spending, with the privatizers outspending the union for the first time. There is a whole other conversation to be had about how much the union does or does not represent actual opposition to the privatizers, particularly those who fly the Democrat flag, but we'll let that go for now.

The union is not outspent in all areas-- between 2005 and 2014, the union (and friends) spent over $144 million on lobbying, while reformsters dropped a measly $44 mill. Reformsters are, however, catching up, with a staggering jump in reformster lobbying spending in 2014, when those expenditures jumped up to $12-ish million, over twice what the unions spent.

Who are the major players?

The biggest reformster player by far is the group Families for Excellent Schools, Inc; these guys are pumping tens of millions of dollars into the political arena. FES was founded in 2011 by five individuals, four of them Wall Street players. The group became the high-profile face of opposition to Bill DeBlasio, staging rallies and running expensive ad campaigns to thwart his plan to put a leash on NYC charter expansion. The group, which shares the same address as StudentsFirst of NY, has steadfastly refused to admit where their funding comes from. Mercedes Schneider has pierced a little of that fog, and the results are unsurprising-- FES has close ties to (among others) the Broad Foundation, the Walton Foundation, and the Tapestry Project, a group whose executive director is Eva Moscowitz's husband. The group also tried to produce some "research" to support their point of view, but as Bruce Baker showed, that research probably didn't cost them more than a couple of bucks. The FES motto is "Don't Steal Possible," which appears to be short for, "Don't Steal Possible When You Can Just Go Ahead and Buy It."

Families for Excellent Schools, Inc, is spending more money on NY politics than anybody-- and nobody otside of their organization knows where that money is coming from.

How to raise money

The union and reformsters have different techniques for raising money, and the difference tells us a great deal.

Pro-privatization campaign contributions totaled $46.1 million raised through 5,700 contributions from less than 400 wealthy individuals, associated organizations and PACs.

Got that? The reformsters gathered over $46 million from just 400 contributors. The top five: Michael Bloomberg ($9.2 million), James Simons ($3 million), Paul Singer ($2.2 million), Daniel Loeb ($1.9 million) and David Koch ($1.6 million).

Meanwhile, the union raised over $87 million in campaign funds from over 18,000 contributors.Their top five contributors were organizations, including the union itself.

Befriending Andy Cuomo

Between 2005 and 2014, privatizers contributed a little over $3 million to the Cuomo campaign coffers. During that same period, the union contributed $153,892.06 to Cuomo's campaign (it is not clear whether that includes the cost of Randi Weingarten's 11th-hour robo-call in support of Cuomo's Lt. Governor).

Privatizers also kicked in $5 million to the Senate GOP Housekeeping Account (because "housekeeping" is a prettier word than "slush") while the union contributed less than half a million-- so less than a dime for every every reformster dollar.

Patterns of Campaign Support

This may seem like an arcane point here, but once the union and the reformsters collect their money, they spend it differently, and those differences have implications for the exercise of influence.

The vast majority of union money goes to PACs, and that translates mainly to advertising and PR campaigns to support particular positions, to sway the public in a particular direction. However, the reformster money goes not only to PACs, but to the party and candidate committees.

So even though the union had twice the money to spend that the reformsters did, the union only gave about $1 million to the candidate committees, while reformsters gave $14 million to individual candidate committees. The union gave under $7 million to the party, but the reformsters contributed almost three times the amount.

In other words, the union is trying to influence the election, but the reformsters are influencing the candidates and the parties. We can argue (and should, really) just how separate from the candidates the individual PACs are, but the PACs are certainly one more step removed form the candidate than his actual campaign committee. This is the difference between saying, "We're going to help you by cleaning up the neighborhood," and "We're going to help you by giving you money to furnish your house." This is about reformsters stocking up on favors.

Does this pay off?

I cannot recommend enough that you go read this entire report to get all the details, specifics, and painful facts and figures. But the bottom line here is that where you find heavy contributions from reformsters, you find New York legislators working hard to make sure privatizers can make a profit.

FES, Inc.'s visible lobbying and ads and rallies in Albany may be the more obvious exercises of their money and reach, but when the Senate GOP Committee is raking in $5 mill from charterific contributors and then making sure that the State of New York sets aside tax dollars just to support charters, that should give us pause as well. Andrew Cuomo has announced his intent to break public education; privatizers are getting their $3 million's worth.

One can argue that the money is not corrupting the system, but simply following its own interests. In other words, maybe it's not that Cuomo attacks public ed because he's been paid to, but that reformsters support him because he is already a public ed-hating troll. But if Cuomo and the GOP are already firmly on your side, why do you need to give them more money the God? Sure, you support the people who favor your interests-- that's politics. But this isn't support-- this is SUPPPOOOORTTTTTT!!!!! And it's support given straight to the politicians, not to organizations that support their interests. This kind of money doesn't just say, "Keep up the good work." This is the kind of money that says, "Don't forget who your friends are."

The Marketplace of Ideas

This sort of toxic money flinging, repeated in state after state across the country, is a reminder of the weakness of the reformster ideas.

Remember when it took millions of dollars to politicians to get Civil Rights legislation passed? Or the way that a small group of billionaires convinced a few states' legislators to legalize same-gender marriage?That's right-- those things didn't happen. They didn't need to.

If the people of the US overwhelmingly, strongly desired to tear down our system of public education and replace it with privatized profit-making charter schools, we'd be there. If the system of disenfranchising local people and replacing their community schools with smaller, more exclusive, more expensive charters was really appealing, folks would be outside state capitals clamoring for it. Groups like Families for Excellent Schools would have actual real live grass roots support instead of relying on 400 shadowy contributors who don't even have enough courage of their convictions to be public and visible.

Not that the collective political voice of America is always wise or right. But if you have to buy friends for your child, that tells you something about your child. If your political agenda can only survive on the strength of your checkbook and the depth of your pockets and the powerful friends you can buy to look after it, maybe you are backing the wrong horse.

NY: Eval Overhaul In Scary Hands

The expert names for the New York teacher evaluation high speed overhaul panel are in, and it is, at best, a mixed bag.

* Thomas Kane, an economist from Harvard. Kane thinks that evaluation should be directly linked to the Common Core via high stakes testing; he likes to compare this to using a bathroom scale when dieting. He thinks too few NY teachers were evaluated as sucky last year, and he imagines that maybe video-based observation would be swell. And he was an expert witness for the Vergara trial (can you guess on which side?) He headed up the Gates Measures of Effective Teaching study, and he thinks Cuomo is pretty much on the right track.

* Catherine Brown, vice-president of the Center for American Progress, a thinky tank invariably billed as "left-leaning" despite their general on-boardedness with assaults on the teaching profession. CAP has issued any number of sloppy and ill-supported attempts to push Common Core and VAM.

* Sandi Jacobs, vice-president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, a group that has taken the position that US teachers are low-quality hacks. These are the guys who help US News and World rate college teacher programs (including programs that don't actually exist) and who cobbled together a report on the rigor of college teacher prep programs by sitting in their offices and looking through a stack of commencement programs.

* Leslie Guggenheim of TNTP (The New Teacher Project), a group that really wants to see more personnel decisions, including pay, based on test results. They'd kind of like to get rid of tenure, too. Their big claim to fame is a paper called "The Widget Effect," that argues that teachers are not interchangeable widgets, but are in fact interchangeable widgets of varying degrees of quality.

I will go out on a limb and predict right now, today, that these four will declare that Cuomo's evaluation plan is okee dokee. But in the interests of not-entirely-kangaroo courtage (and perhaps additional entertainment value), the group also includes:

* Jesse Rothstein is a professor at Berkeley who has spent some time shooting holes in the research of both Kane and Raj Chetty. Starting with the same data, he found far less to love about VAM.

* Stephen Caldas is a professor at Manhattanville College who tagged the NY evaluation system with the delightful term "psychometrically indefensible."

* Aaron Pallas of Teachers College. He's been busily pointing out the problems with VAMmy systems for a few years now.

Those of you who have scored proficient in counting will notice that the majority of the committee seats are occupied by fans of reformy nonsense. But wait-- there's more.

Cuomo's insanely accelerated timeline (why get things right when you can get them done quickly) means that the usual 45-day post-draft comment period on proposed regulations is being waived because, well, if you had it, people might comment. Hey, it's not like anything else about supposed ed reform has suffered from being rammed through too quickly.

So NYSUT (which you may or may not love-- honestly, you New Yorkers and your intra-union alliances and battles) is on point when they say that everybody had better start making comments and making them now. President Karen MaGee says that folks need to speak up.

"NYSUT is well aware of the unrealistic deadlines contained in the governor's convoluted and unworkable plan, and the pressure that puts on the Regents and SED to try and mitigate the worst of it. Still, those deadlines do not absolve them of their responsibility to listen carefully to parents and practitioners and make any necessary adjustments to the draft regulations they wind up writing," Magee said. "One month is plenty of time for SED and the Regents to hold public hearings and still meet their deadlines."

So if you're a New York teacher or parent, it's time (right now-- the committee meets May 7) to get word to a Regent or the State Education Department. Tell them you want hearings on the draft. Tell them what you want in the evaluation system. Tell them why the stuff the committee is about to okay is a bunch of hooey (I'd suggest a more professional word than "hooey")


You can find a guide to individual Board of Regents members right here, complete with email links. You can find some NYSED phone numbers here and a whole department index starting with the A's right here. The clock is ticking. Time to make some noise. You might want to let the non-junk-science portion of the group know you support them-- they may be feeling a bit lonely soon. Heck-- you can even send word to Andrew Cuomo himself. It looks like this whole mess isn't going to be pretty-- but it doesn't have to be ugly and quiet both.

NY: Opt Out More Popular Than Charter Schools

The number of students opting out of the Big Standardized Test in New York State is still fluid, and we'll have more numbers shortly when this week's BS Test in mat inspires families to keep children out of the test-taking mess.

But a fair middle-of-the-road estimate would seem to be 175,000 students who chose not to take the BS Test.

175,000.

On a whim, I went looking for the number of charter school students in New York State. I found this number for the 2013-2014  school year in the report from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, a group that certainly has no reason to low-ball the number of charter students. Here's the number.

91,813.

New York leaders like Andrew Cuomo and Merryl Tisch have been vocal in their support of charters. Back when Bill DeBlasio was daring to stand in the way of charter expansion, Andrew Cuomo stood up at a charter rally to defend the charters and declare their importance to the state's education.

Those 91,813 students were deemed worthy of being defended by the governor of the state:

"We are here today to tell you that we stand with you,” Mr. Cuomo said. “You are not alone. We will save charter schools.”

So my question is this: if 91,813 students deserve the full-throated defense of Governor Cuomo for their educational choices, then how soon can we expect him to stand up for the educational choices of the 175,000? If this week's numbers hit the projection of 200,000, will he be twice as vocal in defense of twice as many students?

Opt Outers Face Confusing Summer

Given the heightened alarm of some New York official, this, I imagine, is what the news from this coming summer will look like.


“Those who call for opting out really want New York to opt out of information that can help parents and teachers understand how well their students are doing,” said Jeanne Beattie, a state Education Department spokeswoman.

Summer vacation is supposed to be a time of camps, family vacations, and growth experiences for students and their families. But the massive opt out movement of last April has led to a confusing collapse of summer traditions.

Back in April, Jeanne Beattie, a state education department spokeswoman said “Those who call for opting out really want New York to opt out of information that can help parents and teachers understand how well their students are doing." Now in July, she has reportedly issued another statement-- "I told you so."

Evelyn Topdraggle of East Bestwig, NY, explains how opting out turned into a vacation nightmare.

"My daughter did not take the Common Core tests in April," said the working mom. "Consequently, when the year ended, I had no idea how she had done. Usually we reward our children with some fun outings to the City in July, but I suddenly realized that I have no idea whether my daughter deserves a reward or not."

Bob Wobble of Upper Wangdoodle, NY, echoes her sentiments. "Since my son didn't take the test, I have no information about how he is doing in his education. I have no idea how well he is doing. I have not been able to decide whether to ground him or to raise his allowance."

Some opt outers report family stress because of the lack of information from the tests whose results will not be reported for another two months. Said Keisha Tripsocket of Dumonde, NY, "I do not know whether to be angry or loving with my daughter. Did she do great, or terrible? Without the information from the tests, I don't know whether I should be affectionate or stern with her."

999 families report having made some serious mistakes with these summer months. Says Flerd Wadley of Boughgidie, NY, "We played it safe and enrolled our son in a summer remedial reading program. It cost us a bunch of extra money and we gave up some extras for the summer. One day I come home and find out he's read an entire stack of Charles Dickens and Toni Morrison. Damn kid could read all along! I sure wish I'd had him take that test so I had known."

Summer camps report declined enrollment as 999 families across the state are paralyzed, lacking even the most fundamental knowledge of how their students are growing and achieving educationally.

Not all families have been stumped. Said Tessa McNoodle of Vistaville, NY, "I was really confused at first since we opted out. But then I just talked to my child's teachers, paid attention to her homework and tests, looked at her report card, spent time with her, paid attention to her, and used my brain and common sense and was able to figure it out. I'm pretty sure that when those Common Core test scores eventually come out, they won't tell me anything I don't already know."

NY: Shut Up, Parents

The reports keep rolling in. New York families are opting out of the Big Standardized Test in unprecedented numbers, massive numbers, numbers that will make virtually all of the "data" about school performance "gleaned" from the BS Test suspect.

The state has responded by, well, trying to get the problem to shut up and go away. On Tuesday's All In with Chris Hayes, Chancellor Merryl Tisch tried valiantly to make the problem go away. "We didn't explain the purpose of the test well enough," said Tisch, who proceeded to botch her gazzillionth attempt in at least three years to explain the purpose of the test. Then she shifted over to explaining the opt out movement as a byproduct of a "labor dispute," the result of teachers leading poor parents and children astray.

That would be exactly backwards.

Teachers are, by nature, good little soldiers. We are regular apologists for bad national, state and local policies. We are on the front lines where students and their parents say, "So why do we have to do this? It seems like a stupid waste of time." That's when, time after time, use our reassuring teacher voice and bring our charges to peaceful coexistence with policies and procedures that we might not even love, but they are the rules, and as teachers, we're generally fans of the rules.

So when teacher leaders in NY threw their weight behind opting out, what happened was not a state-wide brainwashing by teachers. I don't believe for a moment that NY teachers started poking holes in the dike that was holding back the opt out floodwaters. The floodwaters were already high, near to bursting at places like tiny Ken-Ton school district where the board wanted to lead a face-on charge against the state and the voters showed up to egg them on. I'll bet you anything that in school after school it was teachers who had been standing there with their fingers in the dike. All Karen McGee had to say was, "We're done. Just step back."

Meanwhile, GOP Senator Jack Martins is trying to put another of Tisch's bright ideas into play. She suggested that top NYC schools could be exempted from teacher evaluation rules; Martins would like to make that law for the whole state. Under his proposal, the schools in the top 20% of test results would be exempt from using the tests to evaluate their teachers. This is only a good idea if

1) You believe that the only purpose of the test is to find and fire "bad" teachers, and all the rest of that baloney about the benefits of the test was actually baloney.

2) You are hoping that this will somehow make the teachers union happy enough to go back to being good little dike-plugging soldiers.

3) You are hoping that this will shut up the parents for those top schools.

I'm willing to bet that the top 20% schools are also the schools which serve the more affluent, better-connected, most knowledgeable-about-how-to-give-the-system-a-headache parents. In other words, the parents that Tisch most wishes would shut up.

It remains to be seen what the fallout of from Optoutmageddon is going to be, but it's a sure bet that continued attempts to dismiss, marginalize, and silence opt-outers will not be enough to make Tisch and Cuomo happy campers again. When people want to say something important, they keep raising their voices until they feel they are heard. Albany had better start listening soon.

NY: How Charters Game the System

Democracy Builders is a New York group whose goal is "to increase quality public school choice by recruiting, engaging and activating authentic parent voices." Their big motto is "Choice + Voice" and they are also the group that confirms several of my expectations about the charter sector.

1) As competition increases in hot charter markets, and charters have to compete with each other and not just the public system, the knives will come out.

2) People who want to run charters the right way for the right reasons will eventually become openly upset with the profiteers who have invaded the charter biz.

Democracy Builders chief Princess Lyles and Dan Clark wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal back in February calling out the practice of not back-filling seats. Their position is the position that would, to me, make sense if you were a charter operator who really believed that you had something valuable to offer-- "One seat left open is one seat to many" and every "precious seat" that opens up in a charter should be filled immediately.

Refusing to backfill seats works two ways. It can mean leaving a seat open if a student leaves during the year, but it can also mean refusing to fill an empty seat in a cohort-- if you don't get on the charter bus in grade three, then you can never get on it.

Democracy Builders has collected the data and make the charts to show how these practices let charters fake success. (Note: I couldn't get these to display properly on anything except a tablet).

The principle is simple-- as you push more and more students out the door, the number of proficient individuals you need to get your percentage up decreases. So, for instance, KIPP New York tested  around 88 third graders, 41 of whom were proficient. By eighth grade, KIPP is testing 61 students, of whom 45 are proficient. That's a growth of 47% up to 74%-- based on only four more students testing well.

Democracy Builders' independent charter category shows schools that are trying to keep seats filled and are paying the price for it in their numbers. Achievement First seems to do a better job of keeping empty seats filled.

But per the data here, the absolute queen of using empty seats to make herself look good is (surprise) Eva Moskowitz. Success Academy posts awesome numbers by percent, growing from 91% proficiency in third grade and growing to whopping 97% in eighth grade. But in raw numbers, that represents an astonishing drop from an average number of students who were actually proficient-- 88 in third grade and 31 in eighth grade. The grades in between show an steady and consistent drop. No other NY charter has enrollment that simply drops off a cliff like SA.

Lyles point is pretty clear. If charters want to call themselves public schools, they can start by following a basic rule of public schools and take in every student who shows up at their doors.

Why don't they? Because they don't want to hurt their numbers, because for charter profiteers students exist only to generate the kinds of numbers that keep the dollars flowing.

The interactive charts are rich and deep and well worth your time and examination. They are also an excellent reminder that public schools are not the only system suffering under the test-and-punish theory of education. The charter system, which really could be a rich and worthwhile addition to the public education scene, is also completely bent out of shape by an accountability system that holds schools accountable for all the wrong things and none of the right things.

Look. Success Academy is a charter system that should be closed down for fraud. It is a system based on doing absolutely everything wrong, from oppressive rules to manic focus on test scores instead of actual education, on top of pushing students out the door if they won't toe the line and help the shcool make the numbers that is uses to keep the money flowing.

But under our completely upside down and inside out accountability system, Success Academies look good. And they don't just suck the money and resources out of the public school system-- they make it that much less likely that a decent and worthwhile charter school could spring up in New York.

Go look at this data-- keeping in mind that it was all put together by charter school advocates, not opponents-- and let it sink in just how screwed up the system has become, to the point that the only path to "success" is to lie, cook books, and abandon the true mission of public education.

Ken-Ton Schools Yield To State Pressure

The Kennmore-Town of Tonawanda Union Free School District (generally known as the Ken-Ton district) has decided to stand down.

You may recall that about a month ago, the Ken-Ton board president decided to float a resolution to consider opting out of New York state tests as well as the state's teacher evaluation program. After a false start, the board met in front of a highly supportive public crowd, and over the objections of their superintendent, voted to pass the resolution. Push back from the state came almost immediately in the form of threats from Senior Deputy Commissioner Ken Wagner.

This week the standoff came to an end. Tuesday night the board voted to back away from the boycott proposals.

Considering the letter from the state and the gloomy predictions of Superintendent Dawn Mirand, board president Bob Dana was quoted by Joseph Spector at lohud blogs

“With all of that in mind,” School Board President Bob Dana said, “I can’t honestly sit in front of you today and push for a continuation of these proposals.”

Pete Stuhlmiller, the president of Kenmore Teachers Association, had been supportive of the threat to consider the possibility of a test boycott, but he was supportive of the backing down as well. "We realized that our board members faced incredible intimidation from the state Education Department and  threats from the governor's office," he said.

There's some question about whether the Ken-Ton board ever really meant to take this fight to the wall. But by being the squeaky wheel for a month, they added to the growing chorus of objections and resistance to the Big Standardized Tests. The board reportedly plans to form a coalition of local schools to fight back, and they have now given themselves a higher profile for feistiness which may aid in those efforts, and they forced the state to show its face, to publicly show itself depending not on reason or right, but on power, intimidation and bullying.

Ken-Ton schools did not win this battle, but as with hundreds of other tiny battles being fought around the country, they made one more little chink in the reformy status quo armor. Hats off to them for that.

Hatchet Jobs By Video

One of the achingly stupid portions of Andrew Cuomo's budgetary assault on education is the mandated use of outside evaluators.

There has been some spirited discussion of how exactly that would work, or not. Carol Burris looked at it. Daniel Katz broke down all the ways it won't work. The folks at South Bronx School put fake ads for outside evaluators on Craigslist-- and got responses. But it was realitybasededucator at Perdido Street Schools who spotted tweets from a Cuomo flack that hinted at another solution to this boldly baldfaced bowl of balderdash.

The trail of tweetage leads us to an article New York Daily News article by Thomas Kane, the Harvard Graduate School of Education professor who has carried a lot of water for Bill Gates in his day.

Kane uses a metaphor that he's been milking for quite a while now-- the idea that you can't diet successfully without a mirror and a bathroom scale. I've addressed his use of this monumentally ill-considered and mis-constructed analogy before-- it's a simple image with a whole lot of wrong packed into it, and you can follow the link for the full treatment if you like. The short answer is this: if you need a mirror and a bathroom scale to tell whether or not you're getting healthier, you are either a dope or the kind of technocratic tool who believes that machine-generated data is more valuable than human sensory input.

Kane also uses Cuomo's own talking point to call for "better" evaluations-- too many teachers were evaluated well last year. In other words, we will be ruled by data, but only data that matches our pre-concieved biases about teacher quality in NY. If the data doesn't match our biases (NY teachers mostly suck) then we will keep tweaking the system until it gives us the "right" data.

Cuomo has done his best to tweak the system by expressly forbidding input from parents, community, students, or the teacher's actual boss-- in other words, anybody who's actually familiar with how the teacher does her job. But Kane acknowledges that the outside evaluator requirement presents some logistical challenges. He has a solution.

A lot of time could be wasted as observers travel from school to school. One alternative would be to allow teachers to submit videos to external observers (and, possibly, to their principals as well).

On the one hand, there is some value in watching yourself work on camera. It takes roughly thirty seconds to spot whatever annoying tic you had carefully blocked from your own consciousness, but which your students use to mock you when you're not around.

On the other hand, handing that video over to a stranger as a means of evaluation is just stupid.

First, the camera can only cover so much of the classroom. So the video observer will only see a portion of what was going on and catch only a fraction of the teaching environment.

Because of that, and because of time lag (shoot video, send video, find time to watch video), the feedback will be less useful to the teacher. And how about that, anyway-- if the observer is going to make the trip to have a post-viewing feedback session with the teacher, how much time and hassle have we actually saved, anyway? Of course, we could save more time and hassle if the "feedback" just came in the form of written comments on a form, or a swift e-mail.

That sort of feedback would be considerably less useful. And you know what else it would do?

It would remove the need for the outside observer to look a teacher in the eye when he's scuttling her career. As an outsider, the observer already has zero skin in this game, absolutely no stake on the line at all. Add the video, and the observer doesn't even have the minimal human stake involved in talking to someone face to face.

The distance created by a video version of observation removes one more relationship from the mix. The observee and the observer remain total strangers to each other. The observer need not be concerned about whether or not he's actually helping the teacher, and the teacher has no idea whether the observer is a wise mentor educator whose advice is worth heeding, or some jackass hack who just breezed through fifty videos in a day and whose advice is no more useful than that of some shmoe off the street. Heck, it might be a shmoe off the street who's just ploughing through videos in a Pearson evaluation video sweatshop. (That is, of course, before the day arrives that Pearson announces they've got software that can analyze videos to determine teacher quality).

Video observation is an almost certain guarantee that the observation process will be even less useful, less helpful, less instrumental in helping teachers improve and grow. Of course, is the only point of your observation process is to play "gotcha" with all those awful teachers that you just know are out there, then a video system should work just fine.

Look, there's no way to implement the outside observation idea that isn't bad, and dumb. But observation by video would be the baddest, dumbest method of all. Unfortunately, it would also be the most efficiently profitable for the company that lands the contract, so I'm afraid we may be onto something here. As always, best of luck and good wishes to my brothers and sisters in New York classrooms.

Brown Wants More NY Teacher Blood

When reflecting on the new laws gutting the teaching profession in NY, I mused that Campbell Brown must be bummed that Andrew Cuomo had done an end run around her. But apparently teaching has not been sufficiently eviscerated to suit the Browninator.

Per Politico's morning education grab-bag, Brown is rolling on ahead with her lawsuit to strip tenure protections from all teachers in New York.

It's an interesting stance. After all, the new NY rules subordinate tenure to testing-- Carol Burris has the clearest breakdown on the new rules at Washington Post today, and it's clear that NY now will give teachers a couple of strikes, and then they're out. Two bad years of test results (which trump any observations by human life forms) seem like enough to end the career of any NY teachers, or keep those careers from ever starting in the first place. So why would Brown still want to tie tenure to the legal whipping post?

Here's the quote from Politico

While the budget reforms have promise, Brown said it’s still way too hard for districts to lay off bad teachers, especially those with seniority. “We are glad that Albany appears to have finally woken up to the crisis in our public schools. But make no mistake, they have a long way to go and there is much work ahead,” Brown told Morning Education. “This will have no bearing on the legal case moving forward.”

This can only mean one of two things:

1) Brown agrees that Cuomo's proposed evaluation method (one part test scores, one part evaluations mostly by strangers) is a lousy way of identifying whether teachers are any good or not. If this is the case, I look forward to hearing her articulate what she thinks needs to be tweaked. If this is not "far enough," what does she think an evaluation should look like? 100% test driven? 100% drive-by evaluation by strangers? Please, Ms. Brown-- spill!

2) Brown wants to be able to fire teachers for reasons other than poor job performance. If the state is going to measure how well teachers do their job (not measure it well, I know, but stay with me here) and fire them if they do their job poorly, and that's not good enough for Brown, then she must want to be able to fire them (especially the senior ones) for other reasons. Could we be on the cusp of hearing a reformsters finally say out loud and in public, "We want to be able to save money by firing the teachers who get paid the most!" Will Brown articulate why being able to fire a tenured teacher for being a bad teacher is somehow not enough for her?

Of course, there's a third possibility, which is that Brown's lawsuit is not about making changes in NY tenure law, but about having a platform from which to reduce the political clout of teachers and their union (although, again, moot point--why bother trying to reduce the clout of the ineffectual NY teachers union at this point). When Brown hired Incite and former Dem political operatives, it was not to build the case, but to mount a PR offensive against teachers. And she made damn sure that hers was the only such lawsuit being filed.

So what more does Campbell Brown want? Does she want teachers to be fireable for any reason at all, from bad hairs to wrong politics to costing too much money? Does she want them to be discredited in the public eye? Does she just want them to be sadder? I guess we'll see in the months ahead. I hope somebody in the court or press has the balls to ask her exactly why her lawsuit needs to go forward.

NY: Teachers Can Go To Hell, With a Heavy Heart

This has truly been the most bizarre thing I have ever seen. An unpopular proposal that guts teaching as a profession and kicks public education in the teeth, sails through the NY legislature.

Yes, "sails through." There's nothing else to call a budget that is approved 92-54.

NY Democrats tried to make it look like less of a total victory-in-a-walk for public education opponent Andrew Cuomo by making sad pouty faces and issuing various meaningless mouth noises while going ahead and voting for the damn thing. "Ohh, woes and sadderations," they cried as they took turns walking to the podium to give Cuomo exactly the tools he wanted for helping to put an end to teaching as a profession in New York state.

I am not sure what Democrats hoped to accomplish by taking to the podium and twitter to say how deeply, tragically burdened they were. I mean, I guess you'd like to know that people who club baby seals feel a little bit bad about it, but it really doesn't make a lot of difference to the baby seal, who is in fact still dead.

Maybe the lesson here is that the craziest person in the room controls the conversation. The person who's willing to ram the car right into the sheer rock face gets to navigate the trip, and Cuomo has displayed repeatedly that he really doesn't care what has to be smashed up. If the world isn't going to go on his way, it doesn't need to go on for anybody.

But if teachers needed reason #2,416 to understand that Democrats simply aren't friends to public education, there it was, biting its quivering lip and sniffling, "I feel really bad about this" as it tied up education and fired it out of a canon so that it could land directly under a bus that had been dropped off the Empire State Building.

Hell, even Campbell Brown must be a little gobsmacked, as Cuomo's budgetary bludgeoning of tenure and job security rules has made her lawsuit unnecessary. The Big Standardized Tests results will continue their reign of teacher evaluation, dropping random and baseless scores onto the heads of New York educators like the feces of so many flying pigs. And all new teachers need to do to get their (soon-to-be-meaningless) tenure is get the random VAM dice to throw up snake-eyes four times in a row. Meanwhile, school districts can go out back to the magic money trees to find the financing for hiring the "outside evaluators" who will provide the cherry on top of the VAM sauce.

If I were a New York teacher, I don't know who I'd aim my rage and frustration at first? Cuomo? Good luck with that, since he is apparently surrounded by a magic force field. The useless Democrats who voted for this mess? Yeah, I'd certainly fire off some tweets, emails and phone calls there, but I'm not sure what sort of central nervous system an organism with no spine has. I'm sure I'd have some words for all the fine union leaders who helped Cuomo hold onto his office and have displayed either hapless ineptness or craven support for Cuomo's teacher crushing agenda.

My brothers and sisters of the classroom in New York, my heart goes out to you. You did not deserve this, and to have it delivered with a chorus of, "I really oppose this. Just not enough to, you know, actually oppose this when it counts" is even more galling. This just sucks. Don't let anybody with a magic spin machine in their hand tell you otherwise.

UPDATE NOTE: I am reminded by some readers that while Assembly Dems folded like a cheap tent and joined in with Assembly GOP, the Senate Dems showed some actual spine.

NY: Have Evaluation, Will Travel

The situation with education as described by the New York State budget could best be described as fluid, like the contents of one of those lagoons of pig poop one finds near factory farms.

In the twitterverse some folks have declared the budget a huge win for education, but as the pig poop flows, it becomes seems that actual specific winning portions are as hard to locate as a tiny daisy at the bottom of, well, a lake full of pig poop.

Earlier today, my esteemed blogging colleague Daniel Katz pulled apart the issue of the outside evaluator, the element of teacher evaluation that's supposed to involve somebody outside the school descending, like the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse, to evaluate complete strangers in a completely unfamiliar setting.

Katz demolished each of the supposed sources of outside evaluators (principals with nothing in particular to do at their own schools, retired teachers who like driving around, college professors who aren't busy not teaching their own classes, or the five teachers who will be found highly effective under the NY system).

But it turns out those assumptions are so Earlier This Afternoon. Sharpeyed tweetists watching NY legislature proceedings have been tweeting the news that actually shouldn't be news to anybody who's been paying attention to the reform biz-- Outside Evaluators don't have to be educators at all.

This gives rise to some hilarious scenarios (what would teacher evaluation by, say, an out of work circus clown look like) as well as some practical ones (at last-- something for all those craigslist-hired test scorers to do in the off season). But we have seen this movie, and we know how it's going to end.

Should the amateur-hour outside evaluation idea stand, we will shortly see the launch of Pearson Teacher Eval R Us. Hell, all they have to do as is adapt the edTPA baloney that's already in place to suck money from aspiring new teachers help launch bold young careers. They will scarf up a team of crack teacher evaluators (keep your eyes on craigslist), train 'em up right, and offer them to your district at bargain basement prices.

There may be other vendors who enter the market, but the effect will be the same-- more money flowing away from classrooms and toward corporate bank accounts while at the same time trashing careers with a rout of random vandalizing that New Yorkers will support with their hard-earned tax dollars. It will be just one more golden yolk to be extracted in the continuing drive to turn public education into a private profit opportunity.

I'll be happy to be proven wrong. Happier than a pig upwind of the giant poop lagoon.

Ken-Ton Schools Receive First Official Threat from State

Well, that didn't take long.

The Kenmore-Town of Tonawanda school board adopted a resolution Tuesday night (two nights ago as I write this) to "seriously consider" boycotting both the state's test for grades 3-8 and the state's teacher evaluation via testing results.

This afternoon, WGRZ (and other Buffalo newmedia) reports that Senior Deputy Commissioner Ken Wagner delivered the state's threat to the board members and the district superintendent (who was never a fan of the resolution to begin with).

You can read a full copy of the letter here.  This particular copy is addressed to school board president Bob Dana at the district's central office, but you can see it has been cc'ed to all the important folks. Cause if you're going to make a threat, make sure you get the maximum number of people involved.

Wagner makes the assertion that administering the grade 3-8 tests "is required under federal law" and also by the state's accountability system and I am wondering, hmmm, exactly which federal law might that be. It could be ESEA's original NCLB requirement, or maybe the waiver requirement, which is sort of an end run around ESEA. What's really fun here is to play the game of what penalty, exactly, the federal law carries. What exactly is he threatening the board with? So, interesting assertion there, Senior Deputy Commissioner Wagner, and one sure to mollify people who are already pissed off about the state government pushing them around. Just wait till your Uncle Sam gets home.

Wagner says this "may result" in a loss of funds from the state, to the possible tune of maybe $1.1 million, perhaps. Between all these conditionals and the board's "seriously consider" resolution, we have a real battle of the possible maybe mights going on here.

Wagner also notes that while the board is only now considering becoming a bunch of rogue scofflaws, should they actually choose outlaw status, "the members of the Board responsible will be subject to removal from office by the Commissioner of Education pursuant to Education Law §306 for willful violation of law, the Rules of the Board of Regents and the Regulations of the Commissioner."

The Buffalo News carried a response from Dana.

“I didn’t see anything in there that we haven’t shared with the community in terms of what the ramifications could be,” Dana said Thursday. “He addressed them specifically and he seems to have a good grasp of what’s going on. Obviously, it would seem that they mean business. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.”

So, no in-boot shaking as yet. The board today scheduled a meeting for April 8 to decide what comes next. Their testing is supposed to begin on April 14.


In the meantime, Dana and the board had intended to send a message to Albany. Clearly, the message was received. We'll see who considers throwing the possibility of what at whom, perhaps, next.

Super Slaps School Board Into Submission

Last night was the night for the Ken-Ton School Board and their president Bob Dana to take a stand against the test-and-bully policies of New York State. Faced with an extremely reluctant superintendent, the board blinked.

On Monday, I reported that the Kenmore-Town of Tonawanda School District, located a bit north of Buffalo, NY, was going to consider two resolutions-- one demanding that NY's teacher evaluation system be de-coupled from testing and the other demanding that Governor Cuomo stop holding everyone's money hostage. The "or else" was that the district would stop giving the test and counting it in teacher evaluations. Superintendent Dawn Mirand released a statement expressing her opposition to the move. The statement was pretty clear, but just in case there were any doubts, she reportedly made herself even clearer at last night's board meeting.

Joseph Popiolkowski had the story for this morning's Buffalo News:

"If the district’s state aid, which is currently 32 percent of its budget, or about $50 million, was withheld by the state as punishment, that would result in a 71 percent tax increase, she said. The average home assessed at $100,000 would see a $1,500 tax increase, “or massive layoffs would have to take place,” she [Mirand] said.

On top of that, board members could be removed from office and teachers who refused to administer the test might lose their certification. Furthermore, fire might rain from the sky, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria.

Mirand just wants everyone to be aware of the risks.

You can see from coverage by tv station WKBW that the meeting pulled in a double-full house of community people, and that's a double-full house of people who were vocally in favor of standing up to Governor Cuomo. One parent in the newscast compares the action to taking a stand for civil rights.

Ken-Ton is one of the districts in NY that took a financial hit under the Gap Elimination Adjustment, which has oddly enough created budget gaps in many districts-- in Ken-Ton the cost has been about $40 million.

Mirand has only been in place since May of 2014. While she is clearly not one of those heroic warrior superintendents standing up to reformy nonsense, she is an actual educator, who started out as a teacher and has worked her way up in the region. Bob Dana was president when the board hired her, and he expressed enthusiasm for her at the time. She's having one fun first year.

Other board members range from firmly in Dana's corner to slightly apprehensive, and since the resolutions have only been out there for a few days, several would like a chance to finish thinking things through. The board has also invoked that old stand-by of nervous politicians everywhere-- the waiting period to get a more community input.

The resolutions are tabled until the April meeting of the board. In the meantime, you can bet that there will be some spirited conversing in the Ken-Ton school district.

Throwdown in Upstate NY*

It appears that some board members of the Kennmore-Town of Tonawanda Union Free School District (generally known as the Ken-Ton district) have had enough.

The district is located north-ish of Buffalo, NY, and serves roughly 75,000 residents. And tomorrow night, board president Bob Dana wants to fire a shot across the state capital's bow.

The story has just been picked up by the Buffalo press in the last hour. In that piece, Dana is plenty clear:

“Enough is enough. He’s slowly bleeding us away,” Dana said of Cuomo on Monday. “I have never been a conspiracy theorist. But every time I look at the things that are getting proposed and where they’re coming from, they’re not fair, they’re not legal, they’re not right.”

He has two resolutions drafted and ready to go.

First, a resolution that protests both the current 20% system and the proposed 50% for counting standardized test results in teacher evaluations, and demands that both be abandoned. The resolution calls for a representative council drawing from many of the states educational professional groups to develop a fair and equitable teacher evaluation system. If those demands aren't met,

The Board of Education of the Kenmore-Town of Tonawanda UFSD will, upon the approval and acceptance of the KTA & KAA, seriously consider eliminating using student test data as part of our teachers and administrators evaluations. Furthermore, it would be expected that the KTA & KAA would be receptive to recalculating the remaining portion of their evaluations to a total 100%.

Second, a resolution that the governor stop holding school funds hostage and comply with the court-ordered return to districts of the money owed them by the state of New York. If the state won't do so, the district will

seriously consider not administering standardized testing in grades 3-8.

In other words, Dana would like to tell Andrew Cuomo to "go get stuffed." I'm paraphrasing.

While some district folks are calling on parents to support the board by submitting opt-out letters, not everybody is feeling feisty. The district's superintendent Dawn Mirand has sent out a statement that basically says, "I feel your pain. Everybody is frustrated and school boards want to watch out for their children and districts, but it would really be better if we didn't go do something crazy that would earn us a serious spanking by the state. I will keep working within the law to do something about the state's mess of dumb regulations, but in the meantime, the law is the law and let's not volunteer to be made an example of. Vote no on this thing." I'm paraphrasing.

The meeting of the five member board is tomorrow (March 10). It looks like it could be quite the adventure. Granted, a resolution to seriously consider possibly doing stuff leaves the board a lot of wiggle room, but if nothing else, it marks the frustration level in the outskirts of Cuomo's domain. Stay tuned. [Update: The account of how this meeting turned out can be found here.]

*All right. I spent five minutes debating the intricacies of New York geographical subdivisions. I had this argument forty years ago in college with residents of what may be either "Western NY, " "Upstate NY," "Buffalo-area-the-rest-of-the-state-is-really-East-of-Us NY" and other variations I have since forgotten. I mean no malice toward anyone who does not care for my geographical designation. I had to locate it somewhere.

Cuomo to Teachers: Get the Hell Out

I'll give Andrew Cuomo this-- when he makes threats to come after someone, they aren't just empty political promises. He said he would try to break the public schools, and he appears to be determined to make it happen.

Cuomo's assault has started with a lesson in how data can serve as a mirror to reflect the biases of whoever is gazing into it.

Mangling data

Cuomo's talking points and reformy agenda have started with a simple set of data. The proficiency rate for 3rd-8th graders is 35.8% for math and 31.4% for reading. Over 90% of New York teachers received effective ratings. There are three possible explanations for why these numbers don't fit together.

1) The teacher effectiveness ratings are wrong.
2) The student proficiency numbers are wrong.
3) There is no connection between student test results and teacher effectiveness.

#3 is by far the most likely. At the very least, there isn't a shred of documentation, study or much of anything else to support the notion that test results have anything to do with teacher effectiveness. Let's also remember that we're talking about math and reading scores for 3rd through 8th graders-- exactly what should tell us about, say, 11th grade history teachers?

#3 is also affected by #2-- if the student scores don't actually mean anything, they can hardly be connected to teacher scores. And since student cut scores weren't set by any particular supportable academic standard, it's highly unlikely that they are really telling us anything about how many students are "proficient" (a term that doesn't have any actual meaning in this context).

Cuomo has, like a student who fails to check all options on a standardized multiple-choice test, simply stopped at answer #1 because that's the one he likes. He has not even pretended to consider the other two options. It would certainly appear that he is less interested in figuring out what's actually going on and more interested in using test results to draw a target on New York's teachers.

And what a target. 

Cuomo proposes that fifty percent of a teacher's evaluations be based on test scores. (This fun starts on page 229 of his Opportunity Agenda Book.) In the case of non-tested subjects or grades, "a student growth measure that measures one year of academic growth." Whatever that is supposed to mean and wherever those are supposed to come from (since the stated goal here is clear-- "We will eliminate the local measure."

Thirty-five percent of the teacher's evaluation must come from an "independent observer" who can be either 1) a principal from within or without the district, 2) an observer from the state-approved list of "entities" that can do that sort of thing or 3) a faculty member from an education program at a state university of New York (and I am imagining college ed professors across the state slapping their heads and saying, "Why, yes, thanks, that's exactly what I want to spend half my year doing!")

The remaining fifteen percent can come from a local administrator.

And that's it. Screw the whole "multiple measures" idea, and nerts to evaluations by people who know the territory, the teacher, the students, the local lay of the land.

But wait. There's more. Cuomo proposes that all cut-off scores be set at the state level. And if the teacher fails either portion of the evaluation, she fails the whole thing. In other words, if the live human says, "I watched her work and she is a great teacher" and the test scores come in low, the live human observer is over-ruled.

Can we make a teaching career less viable?

Tenure? Screw that, too. It was for 19th century college profs so they could resist political pressure, and of course there are no politics associated with teaching in New York public schools. I wonder how long it took the governor's typist to stop giggling before he could finish this part.

Now tenure requires five straight years of effective ratings. Until you hit those five straight years, you are probationary, and as long as you're probationary, you can be fired at any time for any reason.

Cuomo could not be more clear if he required every college education department to put a giant banner over its doors saying, in huge bold letters, "Get the hell out of New York."

What sane person would try to start a teaching career under these conditions. You must have five straight years of good test scores, which means that taking a job in a high-poverty school would simply be the kiss of death. In fact, if the cut scores are going to be kept the same so that almost seventy percent of New York students are failing The Big Test-- well, that means that most of the classrooms in New York will be the kiss of death to a teaching career. You would be better off betting the state of New York that you can roll snake eyes five times in a row.

Best and brightest

And yet Cuomo's plan blithers on, as if it's not obvious that he's telling future teachers to Get the Hell Out! The teacher beatdown section of the Opportunity Agenda starts with some noise about setting up a doctor-style interning program for training teachers, and I actually support that, having come from a similar residency program myself-- except that, with the stakes of testing so incredibly high, who in their right mind would let a teacher trainee into their school? The residency idea is probably necessary, because under the new, highly punitive evaluation system, what teacher would agree to host a student teacher? The residency idea begs all sorts of questions (how will the state possibly have enough capacity to handle the number of teachers they need to train) but it doesn't really matter, because given the impossible hurdles placed in the path of becoming a tenured teacher with anything remotely resembling job security, who is going to want to invest the time and effort to start on a path that can at any time, through random factors outside of your control, be yanked out from under you?

But after five sections of flipping the middle finger to every future teacher in New York, the Agenda starts its next section with this sentence:

Once we can attract and recognize the best teachers, we need to keep them in our schools.

First of all, this new system defines "best teacher" as "teacher who has class of good standardized test takers." This idea fails twice-- once by basing teacher evaluations on the results of bad invalid tests and again by removing all other considerations of quality from teaching. Nothing matters in this system but test prep. Nothing.

The Agenda goes on to say that we don't want to lose great teachers to other "more lucrative" professions. It does not say anything about losing future great teachers to other professions where they have greater work to do than spend all their days preparing children to take a pointless standardized tests. Or losing future great teachers to other professions where they are treated like professionals. Or losing future great teachers to other professions where job security is not based on a random roll of the dice.

Sigh. Cuomo proposes to set aside $2 million for incentive payments of up to $20K to encourage great teachers to stay in hard-to-staff schools. Do you know how many payments of $20K you can get out of $2 million? 100. What do you think, Andy? Will 100 teachers take care of all the hard-to-staff schools in New York?

I can answer that. No-- no they will not, because those hard to staff schools will become SUPER hard to staff once you implement a system under which teaching at high-poverty low-achievement schools is an excellent way to never get to start your teaching career.

But just in case, Cuomo also wants to streamline the firing process, and since all non-tenured teachers will be fireable at any time for any reason, I think he's got that covered. Also, no more trying to rehab incompetent teachers, because under this new system, New York will be up to their collective tuchus in eager new educators.

The kisses of death

What's next? Well, back in the first section, Cuomo allowed as how teacher traineess need less theory and more real-world classroom training and experience. However, in this next section, he wants to make sure the new teachers are Good Enough by giving them some standardized tests, which I was going to mock, but you know, since in Cuomo's New York a teacher's job is to prepare students to take a standardized test, it does make sense that taking a standardized test should be the basis of teacher training. So prospective teachers will have to pass some standardized tests, and if too many of them fail, their college program will be shut down. So congratulations, future New York teachers, and welcome to four college years of test prep. Wow. I bet that will attract even more of the best and the brightest to teaching.

I know this is running long, but I want you to get the full grandeur of Cuomo's public school-crushing plans.

We'll make it harder to get into grad school. We'll make your certificate dependent on getting continuing ed hours, but we'll put all of those programs under the direct control of the state education department.

This next one is genius. Cuomo wants to guarantee that not student will have an ineffective teacher two years in a row. Let's think this through. An ineffective teacher is one who is put in a room with the low-scoring students. Whatever teacher we send those students on to will likely also "become" ineffective. Some schools can look forward to small packs of teacher-crushing students, moving like kryptonite through the system. Depending on the VAM sauce that's being brewed, those packs could be composed of low-ability- high-poverty, or even highly gifted students. This schedule shuffling will also guarantee that teachers can't easily develop a specialty, and that administrators can't schedule based on what they know about teacher strengths and weaknesses. And those young teachers trying to get their five straight years of good test scores in? It just became even harder. What, I wonder, does Cuomo propose if a grade level or subject are in a school runs out of teachers who were rated effective this year?

Once again, the message is clear-- whatever you do, don't get a job in a high-poverty low-achievement school.

Finishing touches

Cuomo commits to the Bottom 5% model of school failure, guaranteeing that there are always failing schools. Lucky for them he has decided to scrap time-consuming turnaround plans and just implement receivership, a nifty technique for privatizing a school and handing it over to a specialist for carving up.

Carving up for whom? Well, the very next item is the abolition of caps on charter authorization, so that charters can bloom across the land like a thousand flowers. This comes attached to a meaningless provision that is hilariously called an "anti-creaming provision" because what fun are these long government documents if you can't slip some mildly obscene easter eggs in there? Cuomo also wants to establish educational tax credits, aka vouchers by another name.

Final touches? Let's expand the market for Pre-K providers by pumping more money into that, along with a rating system. The term "high-quality" let's you know that it's nothing but the best, spared no expense. It also lets you know that the state will require assessment so that presumably parents will know how well their four-year-olds are learning to take standardized tests. Oh, wait-- did I say four-year-olds? Let's up the ante and extend this to three-year-olds. Opening up new markets is always good for entrepreneurs, and those three year olds have all been slacking anyway.

So you see? When Andrew Cuomo says he wants to bust up the public ed monopoly, he's not just generating sound bites for the evening news-- he means it. The program is bold and audacious in the same way that pushing a carload of nuns and puppies into the East River is bold and audacious. In particular, it reduces teaching to a job that people would be less likely to want, and then makes it nearly impossible for them to hold onto it anyway. I try to stay away from reaching conclusions about character, but looking at this, I have to figure that Andrew Cuomo is an incredible dolt or a giant prick. I will leave it to my brothers and sister in New York to decide.