I Wish The Criminals At The NY Post Were Right About This

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The same editors who decided to run a photo of a man about to be killed by a subway train are wringing their hands over the new teacher evaluation system fight between the Mayor of Money and the United Federation of Teachers.

They say that no matter what agreement the two parties come to, the evaluation system will be meaningless because the union will never agree to anything that "has teeth" and is "meaningful".

What the criminals at the NY Post fail to say is that the new evaluation system will be made up of the following components:

Tests in every subject in every grade, both city and state, simply to grade teachers.

A value-added measurement using those scores that is error-riddled and unstable, just like the one the city used for the infamous Teacher Data Reports.

A classroom observation rubric with a checklist the size of War and Peace that will be impossible to score well on.

An evaluation system that puts the test makers and data crunchers first, the children last.

Money and resources stripped from the classroom and given over to testing.

A Student Learning Objective process so convoluted that it will mean nothing when the city analyzes the data and decides which teachers have "added value" to their students' learning.

What the criminals at the NY Post fail to tell their readers is that this system is rigged against teachers, that teachers can come up "effective" on all three components of the system - the state test part, the local "assessment" part and the subjective part - and still be declared "ineffective."

The criminals at the NY Post are right about one thing, though: this system will not improve education for students.

But not because it is without teeth, as they say in their editorial.

Rather because it is half-baked and unpiloted, uses unproven or disproven evaluation methods and puts teachers in competition with each other on the GREAT APPR BELL CURVE so that it now becomes increasingly difficult to help colleagues and students of colleagues when that help will be held against you come evaluation time.

Just see how well this same evaluation system - Rank and Yank - worked at Microsoft.

That's what we have coming to schools all over the state in the form of APPR.

So the criminals at the NY Post are wrong about the union agreeing to a "toothless" evaluation system.

Quite simply by agreeing to the system they did, first during the initial Race to the Top legislation process, then by dropping the lawsuit they won against the Regents and the NYSED over making 40% of a teacher's evaluation tied to tests, they have allowed a system that is unjust, unfair, and harmful for both students AND teachers to be put into place.