On Cuomo’s Testing Regime
Diane Ravitch’s piece is so essential I’m reluctant to excerpt from it at all. But these key points stand out to me:
The new evaluation system pretends to be balanced, but it is not. Teachers will be ranked on a scale of 1-100. Teachers will be rated as “ineffective, developing, effective, or highly effective.” Forty percent of their grade will be based on the rise or fall of student test scores; the other sixty percent will be based on other measures, such as classroom observations by principals, independent evaluators, and peers, plus feedback from students and parents.
But one sentence in the agreement shows what matters most: “Teachers rated ineffective on student performance based on objective assessments must be rated ineffective overall.” What this means is that a teacher who does not raise test scores will be found ineffective overall, no matter how well he or she does with the remaining sixty percent. In other words, the 40 percent allocated to student performance actually counts for 100 percent. Two years of ineffective ratings and the teacher is fired.
[...]
No high-performing nation in the world evaluates teachers by the test scores of their students; and no state or district in this nation has a successful program of this kind. The State of Tennessee and the city of Dallas have been using some type of test-score based teacher evaluation for twenty years but are not known as educational models. Across the nation, in response to the prompting of Race to the Top, states are struggling to evaluate their teachers by student test scores, but none has figured it out.
All such schemes rely on standardized tests as the ultimate measure of education. This is madness. The tests have some value in measuring basic skills and rote learning, but their overuse distorts education. No standardized test can accurately measure the quality of education. Students can be coached to guess the right answer, but learning this skill does not equate to acquiring facility in complex reasoning and analysis. It is possible to have higher test scores and worse education. The scores tell us nothing about how well students can think, how deeply they understand history or science or literature or philosophy, or how much they love to paint or dance or sing, or how well prepared they are to cast their votes carefully or to be wise jurors.
Of course, teachers should be evaluated. They should be evaluated by experienced principals and peers. No incompetent teacher should be allowed to remain in the classroom. Those who can’t teach and can’t improve should be fired. But the current frenzy of blaming teachers for low scores smacks of a witch-hunt, the search for a scapegoat, someone to blame for a faltering economy, for the growing levels of poverty, for widening income inequality.
I don’t have any objection to the use of standardized tests per se, either in general or as one criteria for measuring teachers. But to use them as the only significant criterion in evaluating teachers is nuts. It won’t be remotely reliable and invites all kinds of cheating.
Much as it makes me want to stab my eyeballs out reading him, bob somerby has some good stuff on this issue.
If you can find it between all those low mordant chuckles.
Missed the point. This is about selling test aids and busting unions through declaring schools failures, and doing all kinds of free-marketing things to those schools, which wounds up making certain people lots of money.
my thoughts exactly
We don’t have to choose — “why are people doing these bad things” is a story, “these things are bad” is another. Both should be told (though I’d stress the latter).
As someone who is pretty close to this, its this a thousand times over.
States have been using the nationwide teacher smackdown to break the unions and steal their pensions. A major part of this is ending tenure and getting rid of costlier older teachers for cheap, younger teachers. A trillion dollar money grab for Wall Street.
This is about selling test aids and busting unions through declaring schools failures
It’s a good job that there isn’t a major US newspaper owned by a company which has a strong financial interest in the overuse of standardised tests because it makes a very large amount of money from selling test aids. That would lead to rather a conflict of interest in the way this issue’s reported.
Oh, wait. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaplan,_Inc.
Right, it’s about busting unions and making money through the privatized education industry (including tests, test prep, etc), but in the longer term it’s also about cheapening and dumbing down education. Plenty of the rich & powerful backers of education ‘reform’ are perfectly well aware that making everything about the standardized test incentivizes a shallow, narrow education where what kids really learn is how to learn & follow arbitrary rules, not how to think. How could they not be at this point? That’s a feature, though, not a bug, if what you’re interested in for the vast majority of Americans is a cheap, compliant, ‘competitive’ workforce.
That’s not what the ruling class wants for its kids, though. Obama’s children go to Sidwell Friends, where “The faculty works to instill a feeling of self-worth and self-confidence in each child… The atmosphere is relaxed and informal… All classes, with the exception of one third grade and one fourth grade, have team teachers. Individual class sizes range from one teacher for every ten students in the lower grades to one teacher for every 16 students in some fourth grade classes.”
I cannot think of any other institution so worried about the quality of their workers that they go to such lengths to fire anyone under average. As though the USA at the current level of pay and training could have a Mr. Chips in every classroom.
By giving up the fight on poverty there will be simply no effective big solution in education. But try to tell that to hedge fund managers.
It’s fake worry built on the ‘punch a public worker’ equation the Republicans have developed. Now that the plutocrats have destroyed the private sector and replaced it with a bunch of McJobs, they are using that insecurity and hatred to turn the McJobbers against public workers.
Intel (in the past, at any rate) would regularly can the bottom-performing 10% of their workforce in chip fabs. Like every quarter. I don’t know if that’s still their policy but it’s hard to imagine them finding an incentive to change.
Diane Ravitch will spend the rest of her life trying to wash off the blood off her hands. Does she understand why the people who make education policy no longer care what she has to say?
Elected officials get campaign donations and favorable media treatment when they vocally support the corporate forces in education. They get nothing when they oppose them. The general public no longer cares about how other peoples’ children are educated. They just don’t want their taxes raised.
The teachers’ unions are all that stand in the way of a complete privatization of public education. That is why they are under state-by-state attacks.
I’ve taught high school English in the most challenging schools in Los Angeles for the past seven years. All we have ever talked about is raising test scores. Arguments against using test scores to evaluate teachers are immediately dismissed as attempts to protect lazy, incompetent teachers.
No amount of Op-Ed writing or public appearances, no book or exhaustive study, nothing, is going to stop the corporate forces from getting their hands on the $600 billion annual education spending.
“Blood on her hands” seems a bit much about being wrong in a policy debate but changing your mind when actual data starts to come in.
I suspect that Ravitch was always just window-dressing for the privateers. If she feels any guilt, it’s the flip side of a conceit that she mattered to them. I hate saying that she was just a chump because that’s an insult and as much as you can know a writer, I like her.
But everything else James Powell says, times a thousand. My kid is in 8th grade and I consider it a race, will he finish and get out before things really finish falling apart? Because things really feel they are accelerating, especially here in Ohio under Kasich.
On another note, the one aspect of the attack on public schools I never see addressed is the impact on the middle-class. As much as we all deplore it, middle-class people tend to segregate themselves into “good” school districts.
My family certainly falls into this category, though I often plead special circumstances — our kid has a disability and we needed a district with deep pockets so he’d be sure to get whatever he needed. I don’t like living in the suburbs, but here we are.
Anyway, this ricky-ticky piece of crap of a house isn’t worth what we paid for it, EXCEPT that it is in the district it is.
When our district’s schools aren’t “good” anymore, there goes our property values. I don’t mean to sound like I am complaining, I am using my family as an example. Because this will be true of everyone else in my school district, and in all the other “good” suburban districts.
As a result, the middle-class takes a big hit to its wealth. But that’s the evil genius of all of neo-liberalism: all the ways its policies are implemented nver seem to have any unintended side-effects that work against its larger goals.
I wonder if it’s time to start thinking up legal strategies that would prohibit public schools from being sold off, as the economic and political incentives for doing so are becoming too great to resist.
I have no idea what that would look like, though. Some kind of claim about the equal protection clause? That seems like a long shot, but I can’t think of anything else.
We just need to make sure that the major party that’s opposed to educational “reform” always defeats the major party that favors it!
Oh, wait…
This is, indeed, an issue where there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the parties. If anything, Obama’s been even worse than Bush.
And, of course, Ted Kennedy co-sponsored NCLB. Not sure which of the Democratic legislators that remain strongly endorse this type of thing.
Completely agree.
Key line: Across the nation, in response to the prompting of Race to the Top, states are struggling to evaluate their teachers by student test scores, but none has figured it out.
Public schools are a failure. Unions protect incompetent teachers. Teach to the test. Undervalue critical thinking. Wish that the Dems were supporting some sort of educational reform that distinguished itself from the Right’s corporatist agenda.
I’ve heard more than few teachers (and parents who actually pay attention to such things) say that RTTP is even worse than NCLB.
Wrong threat. The plan isn’t to sell them off, it’s to let charter schools proliferate until they squeeze public schools out of existence.
…how well students can think, how deeply they understand history or science or literature or philosophy, or how much they love to paint or dance or sing, or how well prepared they are to cast their votes carefully or to be wise jurors.
You’re making the assumption that the privatization-as-ideology crowd has any interest in molding citizens with any of these traits. Repukes want a stupid, easily-led population of propaganda consumers that will readily join their base.
The stupidity of ranking teachers based on the increase in their students scores just astonishes me. Can’t they see that this inevitably leads to every teacher failing, by their measure? Or do they think that test scores, like real estate prices, can go on increasing forever?
It’s a stupid idea but not for this reason. I don’t think it’s going to be done along the lines of “last year your 12th-grade students scored 55%; this year your 12th-grade students scored 57%; well done!” It’s presumably talking about measuring an improvement in the performance of the same students over the course of the year, not expecting that each cohort will do better than its predecessor.
Given that we really have not figured out exactly what it is that these tests actually measure (other than how well the students take that particular test), this is a pretty absurd metric for evaluating teachers.
“I don’t have any objection to the use of standardized tests per se”
“Teachers rated ineffective on student performance based on objective assessments must be rated ineffective overall.”
“But to use them as the only significant criterion in evaluating teachers is nuts.”
If I was a teacher, I would model my classes on Oprah.
“You get an ‘A!’
And you get an ‘A!!’
EVERYBODY GETS AN ‘A!!!’”
Do I get to keep my job?
Sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesh…
You’ve no idea how tempting this can be sometimes, especially when your students basically control whether or not you’ll get asked back to teach again next semester. (Being an adjunct professor in Florida is a nerve-wracking and probably life-shortening experience.)
Fortunately for my soul and sense of self-worth, I haven’t succumbed. Yet.
I was an adjunct at an Upstate NY college, so I understand how nerve-wracking and life-shortening it can be.
Thankfully, that wasn’t my main source of income. I was a bartender, and preferred my usual drunks to a lot of the students.
Yes. And the incentives/opportunities for fraud this system will create, from the level of the individual teacher on up through the testing companies and various corporate entities, will be staggering. And lucrative.
oops- sorry boldface.
As a New Yorker, and a proud liberal, I’d just like to say I will never vote for Cuomo for anything. ANYTHING. The man is a Republican on everything except for some social issues. I do not mean that as hyperbole, or in the sense that the general rightward drift of our politics means that a modern Democrat can be unfavorably compared to a Republican from the 70s or 80s. I mean that his positions are literally taken from contemporary Republican economic playbooks. He only looked good in 2010 because he was running against Carl Paladino.
When Cuomo runs for President in 2016, I will not vote for him in the primary and I will not vote for him in the general if he is the nominee. There are limits to how great a lesser evil can be before I’ll vote for it, and Cuomo crosses that line.
Yeah, if it were anyone but Paladino, I might have left that circle blank myself.
But, if it comes down to Cuomo or Christie in 2016, I’ll take a deep breath, hold my nose, and vote for Cuomo.
I wonder if Mike Wallace and Mario Cuomo ever talked to one another to try to figure out what went wrong?
Yeah, well, if he’s already the nominee, then Christie will have accomplished what he sought to accomplish by vetoing an equal rights bill in New Jersey. I doubt he’d care enough to champion antigay legislation as President, and he certainly wouldn’t be vetoing any same-sex marriage bills from Congress anytime soon. So with that issue out of the way, I see no reason for rewarding Cuomo for being a vicious anti-labor right-wing asshole. Give me a choice between a spoiled Republican asshole stomping his expensive shoes in the faces of the working class, and another spoiled Republican asshole stomping his expensive shoes in the faces of the working class, and I might as well go with Christie, because his foot may be a little softer and squishier.
This is a position that I disagree with, but do not think you are a moral monster or derelict in your responsibility as a citizen to take.
We all gotta decide where the line we aren’t willing to cross is.
Murc,
My line is that I will never again vote for anyone with and “R” next to their name.
Or at least not until that party regains some semblance of sanity – and I don’t see that happening anytime soon.
Hell, I’ll be 54 in 9 days, and I don’t expect any sanity returning in my lifetime. The “crazies” have taken over that train, and there’s no local stops for sanity. It’s an express train to Fascismville.
Cuomo is mostly terrible, but on education he’s well within the mainstream of the party. Other than the teachers’ unions, there’s really no organized opposition to the “education reform” agenda.
I think talking about whom we’ll vote for is a problematic way of framing the debate. When Cuomo runs for the Democratic nomination in 2016, it’s not that I won’t vote for him – obviously I won’t – it’s that I will donate as much as I can afford, and I will give more volunteer time that I can afford to fight against his nomination.
The possible Cuomo nomination isn’t something that we can merely choose to vote for or against, and discuss the merits of on the internet. It’s a real event that we can resist with real action in the world. I’ll be doing that, and I’ll deal with the question of whom to vote for in the general afterward.
This is an excellent point that goes over the heads of a lot of people who are interested in politics (the readership of this site excluded, of course). By the time you’re voting, everything’s already been decided. It just hasn’t been announced yet.
This is yet another reminder of how not only will I not work for Cuomo when he runs in 16 and not only will I not give him money, I flat out will not vote for Cuomo, no matter the alternative. I will sit that election out.
Of course, I also don’t think Cuomo can win the Democratic base in the primary so I don’t think this scenario will play out.
Poser! I was refusing to vote for Cuomo an hour and a half ago, BEFORE it was cool.
But but but, Republicans are CRAZY! FIREBAGGER! FIREBAGGER!
“Of course, I also don’t think Cuomo can win the Democratic base in the primary so I don’t think this scenario will play out.”
So, Andrew Cuomo: worse legacy pick than Evan Bayh? I’m thinking that, even when ignoring that New York is more capable than Indiana of electing a decent liberal, Cuomo is worse.
Tough call. Evan Bayh was a Senator, which gave him far more power to fuck the country as a whole.
Cuomo is just a Governor. While he may very well be worse than Bayh, limiting him geographically contains the damage he can do.
In SPC, with normal data variation, you can expect to see “runs” of 4 or 5 data points quite frequently. You can expect 2 consecutive years of “lower” test scores about 50% of the time after the first year of lower test scores. Which means, it will behoove teachers to cheat once they have one strike against them.
Having 15-25 kids determine your fate year in and year out seems sort of silly…
Having been a teacher, and having a wife who’s a social worker in a program for kids with behavior problems, I can attest that not every student puts in his/her best effort. And yet testing regimes like this don’t seem to account for this fact. Granted, part of a teacher’s job is to motivate their kids, but to place a teacher’s livelihood in the hands of kids who may or may not respond to a teacher’s best efforts to get them try their best seems like a pretty big issue to me.
Oh, and 25-40 is a much better class-size range for your typical public-school teacher. Very, very few teachers get the benefit of teaching as few as 15 kids in one class.
I retired last year as a litigator in the New York City Law Department. One of the last cases I argued was the release to the public, by the City’s Department of Education in response to a Freedom of Information Law request, of teacher evaluations, including the names of individual teachers. Without divulging too much, I can say that nobody has ever been completely comfortable with any methodology of evaluating classroom teachers. There are those who want to do the best possible evaluations and those, almost all outside the DOE, who want to use the evaluations to bust the union.
You have to remember that the main reason Cuomo brokered the deal was to get the funds flowing again. No matter what your educational philosophy is, if you understand that evaluations are required to capture the education money, the best chance is to come up with a plan that is the most accurate and hope for the best. Evaluations that rely substantially on standardized test results aren’t going away anytime soon.
Evaluations that rely substantially on standardized test results aren’t going away anytime soon.
But they are truly terrible. Your solution, basically to hope for the best, is absolutely terrible. Wherever theses schemes are implemented, the education experience of students will suffer dramatically. The only reasonable response is to resist them as much as possible. Many people are simply unaware that these methods of evaluation are simply terrible at what they purportedly do. Not everyone pushing this realizes what is going on so I don’t think it is as inevitable as you claim.
As long as testing istiedto federal dollars it will remain.
Well, this *will* produce “higher” test scores – bad teachers will just cheat moar, and good teachers will be tempted to start. See also Michelle Rhee and the erasure scandals in several of her “miracle” districts.
[...] commenters, I had a schizophrenic reaction to Diane Ravitch’s essay on Arne Duncan. I’m inclined to think that her harsh critiques of the Obama administration’s education policies are right. What I [...]