New York principals told evaluation is none of their business... While teachers wear 'scarlet letter' of 'value-added' to protest grotesque VAM systems outside Rupert Murdoch's New York headquarters
Anyone who thinks that Chicago is the only place where the arrogance of mayoral control has gone out of control should see what has been happening in New York lately. New York City parents and teachers welcomed Carol Burris on the evening of April 17 at the Murry Bergtraum High School auditorium in Manhattan. Dr. Burris is the principal who together with a Long Island colleague, Sean Feeney, launched a New York State principals' revolt against the state's plan for a new performance review system for teachers and principals. She spoke as part of a panel sponsored by the Grassroots Education Movement (NYC), Parents Across America, Class Size Matters and GEM's Change the Stakes campaign.
New York City teachers protested "value added" outside the headquarters of NewsCorp (owned by Rupert Murdoch) on March 22, 2012. Some of the teachers in the protest wore the "Scarlet Letter" with their VAM scores. After serving as Chancellor of New York's public schools, former Clinton White House official Joel Klein went to work for Murdoch and has been traveling the country with Michelle Rhee and Arne Duncan continuing the teacher bashing he perfected under New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Substance photo by John Lawhead.Dr. Burris told a receptive audience, which included some state test-boycotting parents, that her career as a troublemaker began just over a year ago, a bit before the ruckus she started over the new evaluations for teachers and principals. She had been asked by her principals' union to participate on a team that would be setting the cut score on a new English Regents exams and agreed. Up in Albany she found her way to a “large room with an awful lot of people from Pearson” and discovered the purpose of the meeting was to determine a college and career readiness score for the exam that would “prove” which students could be labeled as such. “I was really horrified,” she said. On one level she was reacting to such a gross misuse of the metrics. “The other thing” she continued, “was that I understood the kind of effect it would have on my school.
“I knew the kids who would pass the English Regents but would fall into that gap between the 65 and the 74” or whatever it was going to be. They were going to be African American and Latino students, the ones receiving free and reduced-payment lunch services. “They were good kids and great students. I was horrified that anyone from SED or anywhere else, based on one score and one test would say to a kid, or to a parent, 'you're not college material.'” She express her displeasure at the proposal. The know-it-alls in suits were displeased with her displeasure. Assistant State Commissioner David Abrams (who had not yet been pushed out) “was pretty much telling me to sit down and shut up.”
She related how she went home and started paying more attention to how test scores were being used. Such skeptical contemplation is leading many an educator into wayward steps these days. The April 17 event was unapologetically, and some might plead alarmingly, titled, “Teacher Evaluation Nightmare!” It was convened to address the state's new evaluation plan, called the Annual Professional Performance Review but it also encompassed a range of related issues. Other suspects on the panel included parent and public-schools advocate Leonie Haimson, teacher-blogger Gary Rubinstein and alternative high school teacher Khalilah Bran. Julie Cavanagh, another outspoken teacher who served as moderator, read a statement from teacher and internet commentator Arthur Goldstein.
Dr. Burris said that other principals shared her sense that Albany was setting new policies and did not want meaningful input from people in the schools. The principals who participated in the committees were just there to be “a rubber stamp.” A few months later she and Dr. Fenney drafted a protest letter against the APPR which the state legislature had approved as a requirement for the state to receive the Obama's administration's Race to the Top funds. The letter was later expanded into a position paper and circulated.
Her main objection to the new evaluations was the use of students' test scores to evaluate teachers. Dr. Burris saw this as putting an onerous and destructive strain on relationships in the classroom. She also believed that reducing a teacher's annual performance to a single number was unprofessional and degrading. “It was cruel,” she said.
Another concern was that such an approach would threaten the spirit of collaboration that her school enjoyed. She explained that after years of experience a principal learns that a school is a system that can be dramatically affected by simple changes. Her fellow principals had no trouble seeing a lot of negative consequences coming.
Together with these school-based issues some policy concerns were added to the statement. There will be a terrific waste of money going to test publishers who would be producing the new tests demanded for every grade and subject and other vendors who have to analyze the data each year. Another concern is the lack of evidence that the statistical methods can work. The letter campaign would eventually gather over 1,400 signatures or more than 31 percent of the principals across the state.
Winning people over to open resistance has been easier in the suburbs than the cities. Principals in New York City were less eager to sign on than administrators in other places (less than 17% here versus about 40 percent elsewhere joined the groundswell). Dr. Burris observed that in places like Bloombergville it's more likely that a principal's superiors could give him or her a “really, really hard time” for doing so. She mentioned that she was attacked by the teacher's union for her role in the revolt. This came a few days before the New York State legislature was to put the agreements made by the unions and state education department into law in the by way of a budget amendment.
In an Edwize blog post by Leo Casey, the UFT's Vice President for Academic High Schools, entitled “Teacher Evaluation: Principals, Principles and Power,” Carol Burris and another critic of the APPR, Philip Weinberg, were accused of using the controversy to push a hidden agenda for “absolute power” over evaluations. V.P. Casey had nothing to say about the specific objections stated in the principals' position paper. He referred to it all as “sentiments” and suggested that teachers would be in a better position with APPR since they will have data from multiple student assessments in their evaluation to counter their principals' opinions about them.
The Obama Administration's Race to the Top competition contained requirements that grant applications guarantee unions a role to play role in negotiating the implementation of some of the policies prescribed, including teacher evaluations based on students' test scores. Keeping a seat at the table in this process has been a major objective for NYSUT, the AFT's state affiliate, as well as the UFT . On a number occasions state and federal officials have called the teacher unions' participation indispensable.
This has meant among other things that even in the wake of February fiasco when wildly random and inconsistent teacher scores from the Teacher Data Reports were put on display by half a dozen New York City news outlets, the union, while condemning their publication, expressed no misgivings about value-added statistics in the long run. In fact in October 2010 at time the newspapers were demanding release of the TDRs the union's New York Teacher newspaper told its readers that the “UFT had “assisted researchers to refine the value-added methodology in hopes that it could someday become a useful instructional tool.”
Another speaker on a the April 17 panel was Gary Rubinstein who also shared some interesting details about how he became a troublemaker. Mr. Rubinstein is a math teacher at Stuyvesant High School and he began his teaching career as a Teacher for America recruit, a member of the 1991 “corps.”
He had been critical of the organization, especially their approach to training teachers. In February 2011 he attended a convention to celebrate TFA's 20th anniversary. He told the meeting audience he did not realize until then how many alumni enjoyed a lot of influence and power and were basically “ruining things” for public education. The keynote speaker was Arne Duncan and he was taking about school reforms in Chicago. He was describing how replacing teachers in the schools had led to great results.
Mr. Rubinstein's own experience in the schools gave him doubts about the claims. He said, “it didn't sound right to me. There are some teachers who aren't so good but it's not that many that firing half the teachers or all the teachers would make this huge difference.” He went home and searched the internet for information about the school that Mr. Duncan had been touting as exemplary, Urban Prep. The claims were a sham. They had been touting an 100 percent graduation rate but they didn't mention the dropouts.
In the following months he continued to examine other claims by corporate-sponsored school reformers. After putting his two small children to bed, Gary used the late hours of the evening to analyze the New York City's school report cards which he showed as almost completely random and meaningless. From there he proceeded to analyze and write about the state tests for elementary grades which he found to be poorly constructed and unfair.
These studies served as prologue to what was perhaps the expose of how flawed the value-added method of the TDR reports were. He emphasized that simply saying there are large error-rates for the value-added scores doesn't do the results justice. Gary presented a serious of slides that showed the lack of correlation between scores for the same teachers. The results were dispersed all over the charts with no discernible tendency to assume the rightward ascendency band one looks for to show a correlation of the data.
One slide looked like blue algae on a laboratory slide moving in every direction. It represented value-added scores for the same teacher in the same subject with different grades.
The wildly random results were produced partly by a decision to rescale modest differences between teachers into an exaggerated range of 0 to 100. “What this means,” Gary explained, “is that since everyone's score is pretty close, if you go up a tiny bit it could affect your percentile rank a lot.”
Gary Rubinstein pointed out that given this evidence that the designers of the value-added formula had incorporated such a disfunctional mechanism as the 100-point re-scaling the decision by the teachers' union to agree to a cut-score for APPR without knowing more exactly how scores will be calculated is likely to be a disastrous one for teachers.
One plain fact about psychometrics is that any test can sort or rank people as efficiently as any other whether or not anything important or relevant is being measured. Leonie Haimson, another panelist, told about a recent incident that displayed a troubling disregard for test validity from the New York City DOE leadership.
She mentioned that recently, “over fifty percent of kids in white, middle class neighborhoods in District 3 and District 2 tested gifted. How is that possible? What is the meaning of “gifted”? A segment of ABC's Nightline recently showed several Manhattan families competing for places in gifted and talented programs for four-year olds. The commentator said research shows some 74 percent who tested gifted as four year olds were no longer testing as gifted in high school. In an interview with Chancellor Dennis Walcott the reporter asked him if he thought it was fair. His justification was that the tests were fine because the specialized programs the kids who passed the tests attended had such “great results.”
Leonie's remarks mainly concerned the growing phenomenom of using of education data in unconscionable ways. She noted that a plain fact of standardized testing was it that it ruthlessly sorts children according to socio-economic level. Instead of helping Black and Latino students in the city as was promised school reform agenda tends to “bulldoze every semblance of what we think is valuable in terms of the learning experience.”
Her points were vividly illustrated by Khalilah Bran who is a teacher at the Bushwick Community High School. Her school began some twenty years as an outreach center taking older students with few credits. It was threatened with closure ten years ago before the neighborhood groups rallied to its defense. It was remade into a school but has been living until threats ever since. This year it was put on the turnaround list requiring another campaign to preserve it.
Arthur Goldstein, an ESL teacher and UFT chapter leader in Queens, was only present at the event in spirit and prepared statement. He declared that “there is an epidemic of bad teachers in this country.” The mockery was appropriate and well received. Often the discussion of evaluating teachers fails to express the sheer absurdity of of the situation. Whatever the technical details these remote mechanisms for judging teacher are meant to institutionalize distrust of educators.
Some would say it's harder for teachers and principals to oppose the new evaluations with much credibilty now when it's they (in addition to the students) who are on the receiving end of the standardized measurements. A closer look at the issues suggests there actually may be a opening in all this for conscientious educators to make common cause with parents and students as both unionists and public servants.
The words of Principal Burris resonated with many on the night of April 17. “We fight on. They've made it clear they do not care what 1400 principals think. They've made that abundantly clear. However, I do believe that at least to some extent the governor and the Board of Regents care about what parents think. The lynch-pin in all of this, the rock on which all of this is built is test scores. So our efforts now have got to be to try to roll back a lot of the standardized testing especially in grades three to eight.”
John Lawhead's email is twoflightsup@hotmail.com.
