Data Addiction: Why Commissioners Need a 12-Step Program to Cure Data Compulsion and Save Hundreds of Millions, and, Perhaps, Return Sanity to Classrooms.

When the number of initiatives increases, while time, energy and emotional energy are constant, then each new imitative … will receive fewer minutes, dollars and ounces of emotional energy than its predecessors.
Doug Reeves

Some years ago The Department of Education, with fanfare, and an 80+ million dollar price tag, announced the creation of the Achievement Reporting and Innovation System (ARIS)”… a single place where educators can find important information to use to accelerate student learning.”

“ARIS,” the Department gloated, “… provides New York City educators with a secure online platform for:

• Exploring data they can use to improve student outcomes
• Sharing what they have learned by publishing documents and taking part in discussions and blogs
• Finding other educators facing similar challenges
• Creating collaborative communities to solve problems together
• ARIS Parent Link

I sat at an ARIS training session a few weeks before the rollout run by a training company – we got to play around with a beta version of the final product – it was cool! The “one-stop” stopping was useful – the collection of a number of systems on one site, the promise of a platform on which teachers can post and discuss and blog.

The promise was not the reality, the Department realized that “discussions” and “bulletin boards” and “blogs” on a Department site had to be curated and the Department did not have the will or the capacity to curate a site with tens of thousands of users.

Today ARIS “clicks per school” by teachers are meager, the goal of a “data central” that would drive instructional practice and invigorating conversation has morphed to a convenient site to access student bio-data.

The answer to a key questions is embarrassing: do “high-click” schools show higher student growth? How do end users utilize the ARIS data?

The answer, I am told, there is no correlation between the use of ARIS and pupil achievement growth, and, the use of ARIS is overwhelmingly not for instructional purposes. (Commonly checking attendance and bio-data)

Sadly, over 400 schools in New York City purchase a proprietary product, DataCation, which principals find far more useful. You will note I write “principals,” not teachers.

The State Education Department is in the midst of creating its own version of ARIS, called an Education Data Portal (EDP), a tool that was in the Race to the Top application is under construction, at a cost well north of 50 million plus.

“The EDP,” says the state, “will help educators, students, and their families improve student outcomes by:

• Providing tools to accurately monitor academic progress and other indicators, such as attendance.
• Providing access to curriculum and instructional resources aligned with standards, including curriculum modules and teacher practice videos.
• Bringing all of these resources together on one site that can be enriched with additional local school and district data and curriculum resources to support data driven improvement to practice.

Sounds just like the ARIS campaign.

The State Ed dataphiles have joined a Shared Learning Collaborative (SLC), run by InBloom, a not-for-profit funded primarily by Gates-Murdoch dollars.

Shared Learning Collaborative (SLC) – a not-for-profit, state-led effort created to help states, districts, schools and teachers more easily and effectively personalize education for students through open and non-proprietary standards and services.

SLC work will allow SED, school districts and schools to build or buy technologies that work on open, non-proprietary standards and services so that fiscal resources can be used to provide the most educational value and choice at the lowest cost for teachers, students, and their families.

A State Ed generated power point attempts to answer the many, many criticisms of this data-sharing collaborative.

While InBloom is a not-for-profit the data they collect and the tools they create will be for sale around the nation. Why doesn’t New York State share in whatever dollars are generated by the tools?

When the dust settles, a year or two down the road school districts will have a vast array of tools, if they wish to expend local dollars; however, will the tools make John Doe and Linda Smith better teachers?

The answer is no. The tools will enable superintendents to produce glossy power points, not help the folks in classrooms.

Currently principals can use state testing results without these new tools – download and disaggregate the scores by question – create an error matrix and ask teachers to address deficits in lessons.

The most common use of technology by teachers is Dropbox and Google.Docs, free available apps that allow teachers within or among schools to collaborate.

The feds, state departments of education and school districts use data – simple uses like creating report cards or student scheduling or tracking lunch forms – all necessary – the tools are not driven by the needs of the end users – the classroom teachers, in fact, the endless data entry and report creation adds needless complexity to the lives of teachers.

“Data-envy” is an infatuation, a compulsion, we lust after each new tool, perhaps we need a “twelve-step program” to cure this compulsion which is wasting hundreds of millions of dollars, endless energy and alienating end users.

Mike Schmoker in Focus makes a simple proposal:

There will be no more initiatives – at least for a time. Instead we will focus only on what will have an immediate and dramatic impact on learning in your classrooms: ensuring implementation of a common, content-rich curriculum; good lessons; and plenty of meaningful literacy activities (such as close reading, writing and discussion) across the curriculum. What is essential? Three simple things: reasonable coherent curriculum (what we teach), sound lessons (how we teach) and far more purposeful reading and writing in every discipline (authentic literacy).

Simplicity always trumps complexity.

UPDATE: See just released reserch paper “If You Build it Will They Come? Teachers’ Online Use of Student Performance Data,”

NYU Panel (Part 2): Where are the Policymakers? (Certainly Not Currently Listening to Families and Teachers and Principals and Scholars)

A really effective moderator can turn bland speeches into scintillating dialogue. At the NYU Steinhardt breakfast the moderator, Joseph McDonald was superb. He pointedly keep the panelists on task, chided the audience members who stepped to the microphone, “No speeches, ask questions.”

Pedro Noguera, Peter L. Agnew Professor of Education at NYU asked a simple question,

“Where are the policymakers?”

The core decisions driving education policy are made by Bill Gates and Eli Broad, the playbook, developed in April, 2009, “Smart Options: Investing the Recovery Funds for Student Success,” lays out the policies that drive education policy from Washington to the mean streets of the South Bronx.

Take a look at the Report: http://www.broadeducation.org/asset/429-arrasmartoptions.pdf, especially the list of the report writers. No teacher union reps, no principals, no teachers, no academics, the “Klein Crowd,” Michelle Rhee and a long list of the think tankers from the right: the market-driven approach to schooling.

While the Report supports, “Create fairer, more accurate and more useful teacher evaluation systems, developed with teachers and their unions,” and “Train teachers, unions and school leaders in the new systems” it excludes the very same people from the table.

The “Broad/Gates” playbook is not based on peer-reviewed evidence, not based on the experience of classroom teachers or principals or deep thinkers in the universities, it ignores the representatives of communities of color, it represents a 21st century “noblesse oblige,” perhaps harsh, it reeks of rich and powerful white guys deciding what is best for the poor, powerless communities of color.

Back to the panelists:

Professor Okhee Lee, an expert on English Language Learners, an English Language Learner herself, a member of the just released Next Generation Science Standards(NGSS) team strongly advocated,

“…having students develop models, construct explanations, and argue from evidence enables these diverse learners to understand core ideas within science while acquiring technical aspects of language like vocabulary or sentence structure … this is extremely important since the Common Core State Standards are moving more heavily towards building content standards across academic disciplines for all students.”

The policymakers in Albany, the State Education Department have been fumbling with Part 154, the regulations governing instruction for English Language Learners in NYS, regulations that are basically unchanged for thirty years, regulations that may protect jobs but certainly do not drive instructional practices that are both effective and evidence-based. While English Language Learners are stumbling across the state there are exceptions – a handful of schools are in agreement with Professor Lee, and the results are impressive, yet the policymakers diddle, again, politics trumps what has been developed at schools by teachers and principals.

Randi Weingarten, President of the AFT chided the Obama administration, 350 million to develop tests and zero dollars to develop curriculum, as well as Kentucky and New York State for “pushing off the diving board” approach to the Common Core, creating both high stakes evaluation of ill-prepared students and hostile and suspicious principals and teachers, is fool hearty.

The April 2009 Gates/Broad Report, four years down the road has been disastrous. The Broader, Bolder Coalition’s in-depth analysis exposes deeply flawed policies,

Top-down pressure from federal education policies such as Race to the Top and No Child Left Behind, bolstered by organized advocacy efforts, is making a popular set of market-oriented education “reforms” look more like the new status quo than real reform. Reformers assert that test-based teacher evaluation, increased access to charter schools, and the closure of “failing” and under-enrolled schools will boost at-risk students’ achievement and narrow longstanding race- and income-based achievement gaps. This new report from the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education examines these assertions by comparing the impacts of these reforms in three large urban school districts – Washington, D.C., New York City, and Chicago – with student and school outcomes over the same period in other large, high-poverty urban districts. The report finds that the reforms deliver few benefits, often harm the students they purport to help, and divert attention from a set of other, less visible policies with more promise to weaken the link between poverty and low educational attainment.

The last audience member standing at a floor microphone was David Steiner, the former Commissioner of Education, current Dean of the School of Education at Hunter College and leader of the new Education Policy Institute at the Roosevelt House.

Steiner was an unusual choice for State Commissioner; after all he hadn’t been a superintendent who worked his way up through the ranks. Each May the UFT convenes its Spring Conference – a couple of thousand teachers pack the Hilton to attend a number of timely panels, listen to a policy address by the union president, give an award to a public figure, and, for me the best part, have the opportunity to meet and engage with someone in the limelight at Operation Soapbox at the breakfast session.

In his first year as commissioner David Steiner connected with the audience – he may have a bit of an upper class British accent, I think he favors the philharmonic over a Jets game – he understands teachers. Many Operation Soapbox participants defend and deflect, David Steiner listened and engaged; it was clear that the Commissioner and Union President Mulgrew actually liked and understood each other. I had the feeling he could be the guy teaching down the hallway. (“Dave, have any ideas on an Aristotle lesson?”)

When Steiner suddenly departed two years ago I was saddened and not too surprised. Commissioners are battered by the winds of politics: a governor running for president, a mayor desperately seeking a “legacy,” superintendents wanting policies to increase graduation rates and decrease costs, agendas that may have nothing to do with the lives of kids and their families.

Steiner began by explaining that he does not comment on his successor, and told us that his successor was deeply committed to supporting the neediest children, sort of “damning with faint praise.”

Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer,
And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer;
Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike,
Just hint a fault, and hesitate dislike.
– “Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot” by Alexander Pope (1688–1744)

Agreeing with Weingarten (and Sol Stern and others) how can we rush forward without a curriculum, without agreed upon “domains of knowledge”? Late in the process the state has purchased and placed online a number of curricula, has begun to train district teams, Steiner reminded us that “retooling” is enormously expensive, the efforts; however, are faltering at best and fail to assuage deep suspicion on the part of teachers and principals.

The Commissioner emeritus ended his remarks by referring to Cuban/Tyack in “Tinkering Toward Utopia,” who reviewed a hundred years of school reform efforts and concluded that unless teachers and parents are on board the reform efforts are doomed.

Didn’t George Santayana remind us,

Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.

To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood.

NYU Panel (Part 1): Can We Graduate Teachers Adequate to Teach the Common Core?

For the past fourteen years the Steinhardt School of Education at NYU has been sponsoring themed panels of educators/practitioners on a wide range of topics.

The topic d’annee: The Common Core.

The first two panels: King/Suransky and a “national perspective” were, let us say, desultory.

The panel this morning looked disconnected, the leader of a new organization to drive reform/restructure college teacher prep programs (James Cibulka – NCATE), the primary writer of the brand new Common Core Science Standards for English Language Learners (Okhee Lee) and a middle principal in the South Bronx (Ramon Gonzalez). A week ago AFT President Randi Weingarten was added to the panel.

The panel, surprisingly, was excellent.

Principal Gonzalez painted a picture that is commonplace in the South Bronx and other high poverty neighborhoods – 50% of teachers are alternatively certified, (TFA and Teaching Fellows) and 40% of principals have three years or less of experience. Gonzalez is enthusiastic about the Common Core – with caveats: too many dense standards, difficulty of embedding a common language and common assessments, need to recruit teachers with content knowledge and increasing common planning time for teachers. Gonzalez admitted the kids were not adequately prepared for the rigor of the tests, and lacked the required endurance.

The subtext of the principal’s comments: we may not be preparing teachers adequately for the complexities of teaching the Common Core standards within a rigorous curriculum.

James Cibulka, the president of National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) rolled out a new organization, Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP), that will be “accrediting” the 900 teacher education college programs across the nation. Cibulka referenced the 1910 Flexner Report,

Flexner made the following recommendations:
1. Reduce the number of medical schools (from 155 to 31) and poorly trained physicians;
2. Increase the prerequisites to enter medical training;
3. Train physicians to practice in a scientific manner and engage medical faculty in research;
4. Give medical schools control of clinical instruction in hospitals
5. Strengthen state regulation of medical licensure

Teacher education programs are currently traditional classroom-based courses with a lightly supervised student teaching experience and low admission standards.

CAEP is calling for sweeping changes, upgrading admission standards, “clinically-rich” programs, meaning the classroom experiences closely tied to classroom instruction, and transparently tracking the effective of graduates in school settings.

New York State is responding by requiring sweeping changes in both teacher prep and school building leader programs.

One of the major differences in the high achieving education nations and the USA is the quality of new teachers. In Finland only one in ten applicants are accepted for teacher preparation programs – in our nation – almost all applicants are accepted. Colleges face a challenge: teacher education programs are highly profitable for colleges, regardless of the number of anticipated vacancies in schools. Teacher education and school building leader programs are churning out candidates in an era in which jobs are shrinking.

CAEP does not have the authority to terminate programs – that power is held by states; however, poor assessments of state-approved programs will certainly be embarrassing to states and colleges.

The Flexner Report changed medical education dramatically and created the finest medical education program in the world.

If we want to change the quality of teachers we must both recruit abler candidates and retain teachers, the Research Alliance for NYC Schools finds,

Among middle school teachers who entered their school during the last decade, more than half left that school within three years…

The Common Core may or may not be a “sticky idea,” it may change instruction and raise the bar for students, it may create waves of better prepared ”college and career ready” students. It will not happen if we do not upgrade the quality of teachers entering the profession and provide supports to retain teachers.

Building Trust or Building Antagonism: Will Teachers and Parents Accept or Reject the Common Core?

Over the next two weeks kids in grades 3-8 are will be spending a couple of hours a day bubbling in answer sheets, writing essays and coping with multiple-step math problems. The tests reflect the new Common Core, and Walcott/Suransky and Tisch/King tell us,

The old tests…. tested only basic skills, and “were stifling learning and frustrating … children’s creativity.” By contrast, the new assessments, designed to assess whether students are on track for college and careers, are oriented toward critical thinking, solving real-world problems, and closer reading and analysis of texts. The new tests are “a completely different baseline,” the policymakers wrote, and the percentage of students identified as proficient is likely to plummet compared to previous years.

Old tests were “stifling learning and frustrating,” sounds more like a description of the new tests.

We know there is no curriculum, New York State has posted reams of material on their EngageNY.org website, the state recommends/suggests to schools districts across the state, however decisions are local. In New York City schools belong to networks, groups of schools with differing philosophical approaches – some enamored of Lucie Calkins strategies and others who abhor her views. The City-Wide Instructional Expectations 2012-13 and Instructional Shifts documents present an overview of department goals. As Sol Stern has written in the City Journal the department is misguided, either through ignorance or design. At the school level too many schools mechanically require frequent interim assessments and lesson plans targeting “deficiencies” identified in the assessments. A huge paperwork burden that results in what is essentially constant test prep – constant remediation to improve the data on interim assessments, and, perhaps, on the standardized tests.

The department lauds principals that require each and every lesson plan and lesson reflect instruction that targets “deficiencies” in Acuity, or whatever interim assessment the school uses.

Acuity is a Common Core K–12 comprehensive assessment solution that supports district and school instructional improvement goals, while enabling teachers to use valid and reliable assessment data to inform their instruction and intervention plans (from Acuity website)

Teachers feel overwhelmed, threatened and question whether this relentless imposition of essentially a 24/7 test prep philosophy will actually create “college and career ready” students.

Ironically at the same time the Common Core is being driven into classrooms across the city the department is about to adopt an instructional assessment model – the Charlotte Danielson Frameworks.

In addition to her Frameworks book – the new “bible,” Danielson has written a thin volume, “Talk About Teaching! Leading Professional Conversations (2009).”

Danielson begins the book with a sentence with which I hope we would all agree,

Leadership in schools implies instructional leadership. All educators who exercise either formal or informal leadership have the responsibility to use their influence and positional authority to insure high levels of pupil learning.

She believes that at the core of any conversation is building trust,

Arguably, the most important condition for professional conversations is the existence of trust between teachers and administrators, without trust, teachers are always on their guard in the presence of the principal, and they tense up whenever an administrator enters their classroom. Discussions during faculty meetings cannot be an honest reflection of professional views if teachers fear retribution or loss of standing if they express a view divergent from the official position.

The doyen of instruction practice warns us that building trust is at the core of using her frameworks to build competency at the same time that the department is hammering teachers with an inflexible heavily regimented approach to teaching.

“Tinkering toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform“(David Tyack and Larry Cuban) reviews a century of school reform initiatives, almost all of which faded into the dustbins of school reform. Tyack and Cuban conclude that unless reforms are accepted by teachers and parents they fail.

Harold Howe, II, former US Commissioner of Education, in a review writes,

Isn’t the message these two professors from Stanford have brought us under the banner of Tinkering Toward Utopia very much the same message as that of Robert Browning, which is so often quoted: “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, Or what’s a heaven for?”

Who Should the UFT Endorse for Mayor?

There are seven candidates running or considering a run for the Mayor of New York City. In the week of the new Common Core state standardized tests let me pose a new state exam-type question:

(1) Write an evidence-based essay explaining the education policies of the candidates, and
(2) Write a persuasive essay supporting one of the candidates that includes specific information from candidate’s written or spoken positions.

You may not end up with a Level 4 score!!

The two Republican candidates, Lhota (“Lhota backs Merit Pay“) and Casamitides have mumbled a few words about supporting current policies and the four Democrats (Quinn, Thompson, Liu and De Blasio), and maybe five (Weiner) are pretty indistinguishable.

Quinn actually laid out her plans in a speech at the New School University (see speech here). Liu issued a Report on Digital Literacy and favors a screening panel to vet candidates for the PEP, the Panel for Education Policy. William Thompson, who served two terms as Comptroller and as President of the Board of Education in the 90s, issued a policy paper during his 2009 run. Bill De Blasio favors a millionaires tax to funds universal Pre-K and opposes co-locations.

I would posit that the Democratic candidates all support each other’s statements on education.

One wag commented that if you ask a Democratic candidate a specific education question their response would be: “What does Mulgrew think about it?”

The Republican candidate’s education policy is, “If it’s OK with Mike it’s OK with us,” and the four Democrats are stumbling to get the UFT endorsement.

At the April 17th Delegate Assembly meeting a block of time will be set apart for a “speak out,” an opportunity for delegates to vent, persuade, attack, advocate for whomever or whatever.

The UFT has a number of choices:

* Should the UFT endorse any candidate prior to the September 10th primary, and, if so, which candidate?
* Should the UFT wait until after September 10th and endorse in a runoff, if there is a runoff?
* Should the UFT wait until there is a Democratic candidate and then endorse?

If the 150,000 members of the UFT enthusiastically endorse and the union gets the troops into the streets they are a potent force, UFT members live in every borough and in every neighborhood, teachers and paraprofessionals and over 20,000 childcare workers.

UFTers manning phone banks, handing out flyers, knocking on doors, encouraging relatives and friends, clearly the candidates are wooing the most powerful force in the election.

The UFT faces a difficult conundrum: Can the union agree on a candidate and fight to elect their endorsee or, will members each go their own way and campaign for whomever regardless of the choice of their union?

In straw votes at union meetings most of the attendees don’t support any candidate – no one has emerged. At this point Chris Quinn is a heavy lift – many teachers hold her responsible for abrogating the two-term limit and allowing Bloomberg to serve a third term, on the other hand, she prevented 7,000 teacher layoffs in her role as leader of the City Council.

The September 10th primary is five months away with the general seven months away – an eternity in politics. Who knows the number of electeds who will be indicted in the meantime? What scandals will emerge? Will negative ads sink the frontrunners?

In the last few days Quinn has slipped in the polls,

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn’s poll numbers are down following a barrage of criticism in recent weeks — and coinciding with the apparent re-emergence of former mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner.

Quinn’s share of the Democratic vote now stands at 32 percent, according to the latest Quinnipiac poll — a five-month low and a significant dip from late February when 37 percent of voters polled said Quinn was their top pick.

Nonetheless, Quinn remains far ahead of her Democratic rivals, including Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, with 14 percent, Bill Thompson with 13 percent, and City Comptroller John Liu with 7 percent of the vote.

And, as the candidates wrestle for relevancy, try to present themselves to the voting public, carve out a space apart from their opponents, other candidates might jump in. The Democrats are jabbing at other each and every day with the distinct possibility that the final two will need a runoff a few weeks after the primary. An exhausted Democratic winner, hammered for months by his/her opponents, short on cash may face a yet to emerge Republican with deep pockets unscathed by months of attacks – remember 2001.

I was speaking with a Democratic strategist: “Getting in early allows you to set the policies of the winner, and risks picking a loser and alienating the eventual winner, on the other hand remaining on the sidelines is akin to ‘kissing your sister,’ satisfying no one.”

The UFT has a hard decision, and, there is nothing to be gained by rushing into the fray. More important is assuring that the membership is totally on board with the eventual decision.

Legislators and Teachers Are Sullied By A Few “Bad Apples,” The 99% Strive to Create a Better World.

Every few weeks the NY Post runs a “if it bleeds, it leads” article, a teacher who did something stupid, really stupid. Editorials and columnists gloat, call for the abrogation of due process, next step a pillory outside of Tweed.

I’m no longer angry at the Post, sleazy headlines sell papers, I’m mad at the teacher who sullies us all.

No matter what the teacher did, s/he is entitled to due process -Star Chamber proceedings disappeared in the 16th century – except in the world of Michael Bloomberg.

I was about to enter a room to defend a teacher when the superintendent asked me to step into the hall.

“How can you defend him?” asked the superintendent, agitated.

I hesitated, and responded, “John, you hired him, you gave him tenure and the union doesn’t choose its clients.”

The superintendent, reluctantly nodded.

In spite of how hard we work, how much we dedicate to the kids, a few bad apples make us all look like slackers. We defend them because every teacher, no matter the charge or behavior is entitled to due process, their “day in “court.”

Last week the US attorney (not the NYC cops or state cops) arrested a State Senator, a City Councilman, two Assembly members and some Republican pols for accepting bribes, the stories are so bizarre that the electeds should have been arrested for stupidity.

The Assembly, the Senate and the City Council – 264 electeds.

Unfortunately all the electeds are sullied. Once again, a few bad apples damage all of our parliamentary bodies.

Fred Dicker, a Cuomo mouthpiece at the NY Post posits that Cuomo is going to try and oust Shelly Silver from his leadership position in the Assembly,

ALBANY — Gov. Cuomo and his top aides are looking to use last week’s round of embarrassing scandals in Albany to oust Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver — and they’re already eyeing an upstate lawmaker to replace him, The Post has learned.
The governor and his team — stung hard by US Attorney Preet Bharara’s assertion that corruption is “rampant” and “pervasive” in the statehouse — are fed up with Silver, who they say has presided over two decades of dysfunction, sources said.

I’m always suspicious of any reporter who depends on anonymous “sources” for a crucial claim.

Over the two years of a legislative session about 11-12,000 bills are introduced – a couple of hundred become laws.

Assembly member Linda Rosenthal is interested in protecting tenants and animal rights:

A01585
Makes conforming technical changes to the New York City administrative code and the emergency tenant protection act relating to vacancy decontrol;
A01655
Relates to the care of animals by pet dealers

Assembly member Alan Maisel is interested in education and environmental issues:

A03805
Authorizes school districts to purchase manipulatives with money that has otherwise been set aside for the purchase of textbooks
A03806
Expands local jurisdiction over the extraction of natural gas and oil; limits state jurisdiction to matters directly related to on-site drilling;
A04029
Requires charter schools to enroll children with disabilities and English language learners in comparable numbers to those enrolled in public schools

Legislators work to convert ideas, concepts, into laws.

Introducing a bill is far, far from turning the bill into a law. Legislators seek as many co-sponsors as possible; submit the bill that is assigned to a committee(s). If the bill involves funding it may become part of the budget process. The committee staff will review the bill, ask for modifications, and send the bill along to the appropriate state agency for comments. The next step is the Speaker’s staff – which may send the bill back to the committee for more review – a tortuous path. If the bill passes one house a companion bill must follow a similar path in the other body.

If the bill passes both houses it is reviewed by the Governor – who may veto the bill and send it back to step one.

Ideas for bills may come from lobbyists, from advocacy organizations, from neighborhood activists or “citizen” activists.

Last year I spent six months working with a legislator to convert an idea into a bill – it was introduced – and never moved – I’m still trying to generate some interest.

Aside from life in Albany legislators maintain a neighborhood office to serve members of their community. Seniors with Social Security or Medicare/Medicaid problems, landlord problems, a cracked sidewalk, the myriad problems that a local elected may be able to resolve.

The legislature is a fractious body – New York City, upstate cities, suburbs, the rural districts, Afro-American and Hispanics, Tea Party Republicans, all with differing interests. The role of the Speaker is to listen and to shepherd electeds with sharply different concerns and on the Senate side the dual leadership model: Republicans and the Independent Democratic Caucus.

Sadly, in the poorest districts with the lowest voter turn out greedy miscreants abuse their power and office. Teachers and legislators work hard, they care, and a few paint the many in a negatve light.

Politics is not for the meek and the Govenor may try and use the current scandal for advance his agenda.

If Fred Dicker is right, and Andrew Cuomo is trying to depose Sheldon Silver I’ll put my money on Silver.

The Luddites Are Right: Skilled Observers Trump Dense Algorithms – Improving the Art of Teaching Requires Mentoring by Respected Educators not Computer Printouts

At the top of the reform agenda, match teachers to pupil growth (VAM) and grade teachers accordingly: identify “good” teachers and “bad” teachers. Reward the “good” teachers and support, retrain and perhaps fire the ‘bad’ teachers.

Research appears to support the impact of “good teachers,”

In their analysis of these data, Rivkin, Hanushek, and Kain (2005) found that teacher quality differences explained the largest portion of the variation in reading and math achievement. As in the Tennessee findings, Jordan, Mendro, and Weerasinghe (1997) found that the difference between students who had three consecutive highly effective teachers (again defined as those whose students showed the most improvement) and those who had three consecutive low-effect teachers (those with the least improvement) in the Dallas schools was 34 percentile points in reading achievement and 49 percentile points in math.

If the goal is to fill classrooms with “good teachers” and rid classrooms of “bad teachers,” how are we doing in achieving that goal? The New Teacher Project report, “The Widget Effect” paints a grim picture, in the districts studied virtually every teacher receives a satisfactory rating and there is little help for new or struggling teachers.

All teachers are rated good or great.

Less than 1 percent of teachers receive unsatisfactory ratings, even in schools where students fail to meet basic academic standards, year after year.

Excellence goes unrecognized.

When excellent ratings are the norm, truly exceptional teachers cannot be formally identified. Nor can they be compensated, promoted or retained.

Professional development is inadequate.

Almost 3 in 4 teachers did not receive any specific feedback on improving their performance in their last evaluation.
Novice teachers are neglected. Low expectations for beginning teachers translate into benign neglect in the classroom and a toothless tenure process.

Poor performance goes unaddressed.

Half of the districts studied have not dismissed a single tenured teacher for poor performance in the past five years. None dismiss more than a few each year.

To address the disconnect, led by the US Department of Education, states began to design teacher assessment systems based on a combination of student growth scores (VAM) and principal lesson observations based on a widely accepted rubric. In the growth score category teachers are measured against each other and in the teacher lesson observation category against a standard, for example the Danielson or Kim Marshall frameworks.

In order to qualify for Race to the Top (RttT) and School Incentive Grant (SIG) dollars states have to implement a teacher assessment system, in New York State it is referred to by the acronym APPR. The feds and states have spent hundreds of millions of dollars, jobs for psychometricians, economists and other experts, using extremely dense mathematical calculations, formulae that are the subject of sharp differences in the academic community.

“If these teachers were measured in a different year, or a different model were used, the rankings might bounce around quite a bit,” said Edward Haertel, a Stanford professor…. “People are going to treat these scores as if they were reflections on the effectiveness of the teachers without any appreciation of how unstable they are.”

As scholars bicker the results from early adopters are surprising to the teacher scolds ,

In Florida, 97 percent of teachers were deemed effective or highly effective in the most recent evaluations. In Tennessee, 98 percent of teachers were judged to be “at expectations.”

In Michigan, 98 percent of teachers were rated effective or better.

Advocates of education reform concede that such rosy numbers, after many millions of dollars developing the new systems and thousands of hours of training, are worrisome.

“It is too soon to say that we’re where we started and it’s all been for nothing,” said Sandi Jacobs, vice president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, a research and policy organization. “But there are some alarm bells going off.”

New York State is entering both the first teacher of teacher evaluation and implementing the Common Core (CCSS) on the soon to be administered state tests. A state teacher union officer and the Chancellor of the Board of Regents have sharply differing opinions.

“We’re giving the test before teaching the curriculum. That’s not what you should do,” said Maria Neira, the vice president for research and educational services for New York State United Teachers. “We’re rushing to do it, instead of doing it right.”

Merryl H. Tisch, the chairwoman of the state board of regents, counters that the state’s timeline for common-core implementation has been clear for more than two years, and that schools and districts would have to have been “living under a rock” to be surprised now.

“There is an enormous pushback against us because we are rolling out the common-core assessment, and some think we should have waited a year,” she said. “But as youngsters graduate high school right now, they’ve already hit a wall. Their reality is right now. We feel this is such an urgent issue, we have to roll it out now.”

A principal, only half-jokingly, tells me that teachers in her school joke about undercutting other teachers to improve their “grade.” With the release of the first round of scores in August, 2012 principals were confused, in numerous instances the grades did not jibe with principal judgments. For probationary teachers the teacher grades determine tenure – few principals are willing to fight with superintendents for their teachers.

Around the country school districts are developing multiple measure systems combining the use of student test scores, usually a growth model, and supervisory lesson observations. We know the student test score data is “unstable,” aka wide year to year swings, and, up to now supervisors rate only a few percent of teachers as “ineffective.” The new multiple measures assessments, combining growth scores and lesson observations find few “ineffective” teachers. What if we train supervisors and lead teachers on the use of an agreed upon rubric and use supervisor/teachers teams to observe?

Well, guess what, the Chicago Consortium for School Research conducted a two-year research project,

“Rethinking Teacher Evaluation in Chicago: Lessons Learned from Classroom Observations, Principal-Teacher Conferences, and District Implementation” (Read here) from the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research focuses on Chicago, but the lessons learned have significant applicability to districts across the country. The report is one of the first to provide research-based evidence showing that new teacher observation tools, when accompanied by thoughtful evaluation systems and professional development, can effectively measure teacher effectiveness and provide teachers with feedback on the factors that matter for improving student learning. This is especially relevant for those districts that are implementing the Charlotte Danielson Frameworks.

If we spent our time and dollars training supervisors and teachers around an agreed upon rubric we could develop an assessment system that identifies both “highly effective” and “ineffective” teachers, that not only identifies but provides feedback to a teacher that hopefully leads to improved practice.

The annual New York City Department of Education Instructional Expectations document demands of principals “frequent brief lesson observations with meaningful feedback.”

If we know that lesson observations conducted by well-trained supervisors and teachers are effective why do we spend mega-dollars on constructing systems based on mathematical algorithms that only the few can understand?

Either, we don’t think we can train supervisors to observe lessons, or, we don’t trust them, or, we are besotted with the world of data, take your pick.

Read an excellent interview with Charlotte Danielson here: http://www.ed.gov/Teacher-Evaluation-Systems

Or, maybe we can try to emulate Finland,

Finland has developed a deeply thoughtful curriculum and then provided teachers ever more autonomy with respect to how they approach that curriculum; they have both a curriculum worth teaching to and the kind of autonomy in how they approach it that is characteristic only of the high status professions. Because Finland is at the frontiers of curriculum design to support creativity and innovation, teachers have a job that has many of the attractions of the professions that involve research, development and design. They are pushing their intellectual and creative boundaries. Because Finland is understandably satisfied with the job its teachers are doing, it is willing to trust them and their professional judgments to a degree that is rare among the nations of the world (a sign of which is the fact that there are no tests given to all Finnish students at any level of the system that would allow supervisors to make judgments about the comparative worth of individual teachers or school faculties.)

Teachers jump up and down with glee – why can’t we be like Finland?

I point out that if we were like Finland the vast majority of you wouldn’t be teachers,

Finnish teacher education programs are extremely selective, admitting only one out of every ten students who apply. The result is that Finland recruits from the top quartile of the cohort

In the good, old USA admission standards to get into college schools of education are low and virtually all prospective teachers graduate and receive certification.

These are complex issues: the one point that I’m sure of is the current teacher assessment system will neither attract and retain “good” teachers or rid the system of “bad” teachers – it will simply anger all teachers – pit principals against teachers and principals and teachers against superintendents and state education departments: a pitiable formula for failure.

The Luddites are right. People trump mindless machines (and dense algorithms).