So it's day six of NYSESLAT testing, supposedly to measure the English level of my students.  Once again there's no class for us. We just sit for yet another day and do the test. I'm stationed outside, perhaps to ensure no one escapes.

For the last decade, I've taught mostly beginners. A lot of my colleagues prefer teaching higher levels. I ask for lower ones and I generally get what I ask for. It's a win-win, in that I get what I want and my colleagues get what they want. At least it used to be.

As chapter leader of a large school, I teach four rather than five classes. For years I'd get two double-period classes of beginners. Last year, while I had one full section, my second section had only eight students. This year, I had only one section and taught an advanced class. This has proven educational, if nothing else.

Where had all my students gone? I found out this year. It turns out that most of the students in my advanced class don't belong there at all. I started the class out by giving them a novel called The Number One Ladies Detective Agency. It's a lovely book, utilizing simple language to express complex ideas and emotions. The last time I taught it, students loved it. This time it went over like a lead balloon.

I didn't really understand why at first. It was only when I started to focus more on their writing that I saw what was going on. Many of these students were unfamiliar with fundamental English conventions. There was no subject-verb agreement. There was no past tense. I understand a lot of people don't specifically teach these things, and that the idea is to teach it in context. I can deal with that, and I can do it. These kids had not done that, let alone much reading or writing.

If you look at the English Regents exam, there's a rubric. Using the conventions of standard English is right at the bottom of it, if I recall correctly. The important thing is the so-called close reading. That means, basically, you extract crap from one piece of writing and place it in your own words. On the bright side, you're supposed to explain what it means. However, changing the words of a sentence or two, to me at least, does not necessarily represent comprehension.

The NYSESLAT is like the little brother of the English Regents exam, and it seems to determine how Common Corey our students are. It most certainly does not determine how much English they know. Otherwise, my advanced class could've handled the novel, as my advanced classes in the past have. I would not have felt that more than half of my class was in dire need of taking my beginner's class. I do know that if these kids go to CUNY, they will get tested in English. They will fail and end up in remedial courses in community colleges. They will pay for the classes but receive no credit.

Why is this happening? The only conclusion I can come to is that NYSED wants to rid itself of the need for ESL teachers. After all, there''s been a shortage forever. By initiating Part 154, they've cut the need for us. All you need is a subject teacher with the magical 12  credits, and voila! We've met the requirements. And who cares what they actually know? I've seen students who write most awfully if at all, and they've gotten 80 or above on the English Regents exam. They're college and career ready, according to the rubric. Who cares if they're actually nothing of the sort?

There's a speaking test in which most speaking is done by the teacher. The students mostly read the text. If they can manage to change a word or two and reproduce the message, that's good enough for NY State to determine they can understand and produce verbal English. Whether or not they actually can is of no consequence whatsoever. 

The geniuses in Albany have rigged the game so as to make it convenient for themselves. I have seen no evidence that they give a golly gosh darn about my students, and forget about me and my colleagues. They are disgraceful, totally indifferent to the students I try to help. Now they wish to blame teachers for their outrageous misdeeds, and want us to take a few courses to make up for this. Evidently, because they know nothing about language acquisition, they've determined we must not either.

I can't believe these people are allowed to sit around cushy offices, make terrible baseless decisions, go to gala luncheons, and get away with this outrageous incompetence. Of course I'm just a lowly teacher sitting around administering tests. It's not my job to question them.

Too bad for them that I wasn't trained Common Core style. Too bad for them that I question what I see, as opposed to the paragraphs and lines to which their test may direct me. Too bad for them I see how utterly ineffective their methodology is. If they'd only take these shackles from my feet, I'd have a lot more time to show and encourage students how to do the same. That's not to mention I could easily teach them how to really write, and fundamental English skills, about which NY state couldn't care less.

 (That's pronounced NIGH--suh--slat.)

I'm sitting outside the school auditorium. Things are pretty slow right now. Inside the auditorium a bazillion kids, many of them my students, are taking a test. I can hear a voice booming loudly talking about something or other. I'm trying to tune out because I have a blog to write.

This is the fifth day of classes I'm missing. You see, the geniuses in Albany don't just give any test. It's an extravaganza. I mean, there's the speaking test. Now that only takes twenty minutes, but each of us has to test maybe a million students. So it takes a long time. And it's pretty goshdarn tedious too, reading the same thing one million times.

Of course the students read it along with you. That's one reason why it's such a terrible test. Theoretically, you're testing their listening and speaking abilities. Actually, though, you need not listen at all. The entire script the teacher is reading is right there in front of you. And you know what? If you don't understand the question, all you need to do is read the script, change a word here and there, and then you've pretty much done it all.

And if that's not cool enough, there's often a second question that's almost identical to the first question. You can pretty much say the same thing and get the same result. Why? Well, it's hard to say what the geniuses in Albany were thinking when they decided to do that. Actually, they likely didn't make that decision at all. They just paid a bazillion dollars to some testing company to write this thing.

One of the really cool things about this test is, since the company got paid a mere bazillion dollars, they recycle half the test from year to year. So if you learned about Hammurabi's Code last year, you just have to talk about it again this year. Maybe you were really interested, so you checked it out on Wikepedia or something. More likely you weren't so you didn't. Nonetheless, I can only suppose NY State would've had to pay two bazillion dollars for an entirely new test, so therefore it's saving money.

I can't comment too much on what's going on right now because I lucked out. I'm sitting outside while several of my colleagues are in there listening to some tape or other. I have to tell students that the auditorium is closed. I have to tell colleagues no, I can't let you take your student out even if you have a Regents exam coming up. Would you let me pull the student from your Regents? No? Then I can't let you pull the student from the NYSESLAT either. It might be stupid, it might be poorly written, it might not determine anything of valdity, but it's required.

The kids not only have to listen to it, but they have to pay attention as well, Judging from what I'm hearing, it must be difficult. I'm sitting with a colleague and watching her eat corn. This, evidently, is a better use of my time than, you know, teaching. The truth is my dog could do a better job watching my colleague eat corn, and I'm pretty sure he'd take a keener interest.

Anyway, I have two more days of sitting out here, or in there, and doing something, or nothing, or whatever. Truth be told, I'd rather be teaching. 

There are so many things wrong with this metric that I don't know where to begin. The logical spot, as far as I'm concerned, is these kids don't speak English. I'm not sure exactly how many people consider that before coming to conclusions, but you don't just wave a frigging magic wand and render people fluent in a new language.

I mean, could you go to China, with no knowledge whatsoever of the culture or language, pass all the tests, and graduate high school in four years? Could you do it in six? If you couldn't, would it conclusively establish your teachers suck? Would it establish that you suck?

What does it really mean? I'd argue it means a whole lot less than what people say or think it does. Even if it's a valid metric, which I'm not assuming, it's a misleading one. Here's why--if we take the number of ELLs who've failed to graduate over four years, and make them a percentage of our overall student body, it doesn't include the ELLs who've tested out and are no longer ELLs.

Let's say, for example, we have 100 9th graders who entered high school as ELLs. Let's say 50 of them test out before graduation. We then have a pool of only half of what we began with. So if only 20 of the 50 graduate on time, or in six years, or whenever, it looks like we've failed 60% of our ELLs. If we take this metric as valid, which again, I do not, that percentage is inflated twofold. It's therefore misleading and invalid, even by the ridiculous standard set forth by the city and state.

Of course any standard fails to account for the backgrounds of our students. I get students who halted formal education at grade four. They walk into high school with severely limited skills in their first languages, and I am expected to magically teach them how to pass the NY State English Regents Examination. Never mind that they are unable to write clearly in their first languages. They may represent ten percent of the students I serve, and not all are identified as such by DOE.

Then there are the students who don't want to be here, which I'd also roughly estimate to be around ten percent of the students I serve. It doesn't matter how good their native language abilities are. If you have been dragged here against your will by your parents, if everything and almost everyone you love is across an ocean somewhere, it can be really hard to assimilate or acclimate yourself to American culture.

Sometimes students find a comfort zone. They make friends with only students who speak their first language. They speak only their first language at home, and engage on laptops and cell phones in only that language. They find as many classes as they can that utilize as little English as possible. Then they meet me, some idiot who insists they communicate in English. What's up with this guy? Doesn't he know I'm turning around and going back to wherever at the very first opportunity? Doesn't he know English is a waste of time, that I hate it, I hate the food, I hate the music, and I hate him too?

And then the state looks at me and says look, only this many kids passed the Regents exam, and only this many kids did well on the NYSESLAT, so you suck. By that standard, I may suck indeed. Now I will prepare my students for the English Regents exam as best I can, because if they don't pass it they won't graduate. As someone who supports them and wants them to move ahead, I will do that.

It's not really what I want to do, though. I don't really sit up at night and worry that they don't know literary terms I'll never come across in the New York Times Book Review. I don't have existential angst because they can't write a canned essay formula in order to answer a question they may or may not see again in ther lives.

I really worry because they have needs that are quite distinct than those set forth as vital by the geniuses in Albany, who are so smart they need to know nothing whatsoever about language acquisition. I will try to serve my students despite the standards, not because of them. I know only too well that those who graduate, those who pass the test, may or may not be competent enough to handle English at a college level. Unlike NY State, I know there is no substitute for time. Unlike NY State, I know that academic English is a portion of our lives, not the central reason for all existence.

And unlike those who criticize the ELL graduation rate, I know it's a meaningless metric, tossed about simply to determine exactly who sucks. While it's me who supposedly sucks as much as anyone, I'm 100% certain I know what ELLs need better than any overpaid Albany functionary. And I will keep fighting to get them what they really need, with little support and against tremendous odds. If the critics wish to join me, they are more than welcome.

Yesterday I taught an advanced ESL class for the first time in a few years. Because words liked "advanced" are too easily understood, the outstanding thinkers in Albany now call them "transitioning." Naturally, I'm quite impressed. I had the students write a diagnostic essay. These are students who, according to the geniuses in Albany, ought to be performing around the same level as native English speakers.

I read all of the essays. Two of them were only two sentences, basically explaining to me that they either couldn't or didn't write. Fully half of them did not use past tense at all, and definitely should have. A few of them were pretty good. None were near native and all need remediation to get there.

In our school, we pair ESL with English. I'm certified in both, so I don't need a co-teacher. My inclination for these kids before I met them was to cover a few novels. However, having read their work, I'm thinking more about short stories and intermediate ESL instruction. That is, except for those who couldn't produce more than two sentences. They are beginners, despite what the very expensive corporate-produced NYSESLAT exam says.

And by the way, the NYSESLAT test is not only total crap; it's also the test by which ESL teachers are rated. To my way of thinking, it's a crap shoot. While it's true that near-beginners are testing advanced this year, it doesn't mean that will happen next year. So even though a few of my beginners from last year ended up in this class, I'm not patting myself on the back just yet.

Here's another interesting thing about my two advanced classes--because of Part 154, the students cannot be more than one grade apart. Therefore my period one class has three students, and my period two class has 34. I wasn't aware of that at first, and I was going to ask that some of the period 2 kids be moved to period one. That way I could have two reasonably sized classes and give decent attention to all students.

There's another factor here. Any English teacher could take the twelve magical ESL credits and teach this class, the same as me. I am not persuaded that these English teachers would see what I do. I am not persuaded they will have the resources I do. They most certainly won't have the experience I do. Most of them have never taught ESL. Sadly, direct instruction in ESL is precisely what these students need.

We've heard plenty about differentiating education. Some crazy supervisors have even requested multiple lesson plans within the same class. But the big move in Part 154 is away from differentiation where it is most needed. The idea is, let's forget, to the largest extent possible, that newcomers have different language needs than native speakers. Let's just give them the same stuff we give to the American kids and hope for the best.

Make no mistake, this is moving backwards. It's close to the same level of ignorance we showed when we gave IQ tests in English to newcomers and labeled them stupid, or worse. The newcomers weren't stupid, and they aren't stupid now. The only stupid around here is coming from Albany, and also us if we believe in their policies.

It's time to take a giant step away from the overpriced nonsense that passes for testing in NY State. And it's time to rewrite, reform, and remake Part 154 from the ground up.

Rubrics are perfect, or so you'd think if you heard the nonsense I do at meetings. And teachers have now lost quite a bit of discretion over how students are graded in city schools. There was a memo that went out from the chancellor, there was a meeting of the principals, and evidently this memo is tantamount to the Ten Commandments. Thou Shalt Tell Students Exactly What Basis Marking Has. Thou Shalt Not Have More than 49% in Subjective Measures.

I've always taken a holistic view of grading. Even as we entered an electronic age of grading, I was able to adjust percentages by counting some things more than others. For example, I am not unaware there is a whole lot of copying of homework. By assigning short answer homework a weight of 1, and written homework a weight of 2 or 3, I've been able to compensate a little for that. I also didn't think it was that bad that kids could earn high grades for simple completion. After all, if they failed tests and failed to participate, they simply didn't pass the class anyway.

My layout for grades has been 50% tests and quizzes, 25% participation, and 25% homework. I gave participation grades each semester. This has now been expressly prohibited by the geniuses at Tweed, who of course know better than those of us who fritter away our time actually teaching New York City's 1.1 million schoolchildren. So I will now have to give these grades more frequently and maybe write a rubric expressly explaining what it is for. This will result in more work for me and exactly the same grades. And frankly, short of posting Bill Gates-style perpetual video surveillance in the classroom, there will be no way to ascertain whether or not I am just making stuff up. (You know, like there's no way to determine whether or not supervisors make stuff up about the Danielson rubric.)

Our new department policy, if I recall correctly, is 50% tests, 10% quizzes, 20% participation and classwork, 15% graded homework, and 5% non-graded homework. This will help me not at all. This will help my students not at all. However, it will put uppity teachers like me in our place. How dare we presume to assess our students ourselves? Discretion is for professionals like Carmen Fariña, who made a brilliant success our of her school by hand picking all the students in a process nearly selective as that of Harvard. Me, I teach whoever they put in front of me. I try to do the best I can by them, my system worked fine, and now it's complicated for no good reason.

Why can't I make tests and quizzes one category and simply give tests more weight than quizzes? What if I think frequent quizzes are more important than tests and give me a better picture of where my kids are at any given point? Do I now need to test more frequently? And how can I do that when the school now says I can only test on certain days every week? And since supervisors are always quacking about formative assessment, why do tests now need to count for 60%? Isn't language, which I teach, largely about oral communication? Aren't there abundant tests in my students' home countries, don't they pass them and yet arrive here with little or no ability to communicate in English? Doesn't that argue that a test-based standard is not optimal? Do you judge the English ability of people you meet by how well they score on tests?

And let's go a little further into the woods now--do you think that I teach the same as everyone else? Do you want me to? If so, why not just stick a computer in front of the class? If not, why on earth would you think that assessing students subject to my voice is exactly the same as assessing students subject to another? Is it possible that I might, perish forbid, take the tack that actual day to day communication and survival are more important than how you do on the preposterous NYSESLAT exam about Hammurabi's Code? And if I actually do go the Hammurabi's Code route, how can you make sure the tests, quizzes, and whatever I give will make my students really know Hammurabi's Code?

Another argument I've heard is that teachers keep poor records and therefore need a tight rein so as to correct that. Let me tell you something--people who keep poor records do not need a more complicated and/ or convoluted grading system. If people keep poor records, under this system their records will get even worse. My nature is a little sloppy, but I've had college professors who sat on tests for 6-8 weeks, and then tested us on things without letting us know whether we understood the basis for them. I hated those teachers. For that reason, and also to cover my proverbial keester, I overcompensate. If I give a test, it's like a hot potato. I have to get it graded immediately, no matter what, and I almost always get it back to students the next day. I know if I don't do that they'll probably never be returned at all.

It's too bad that teacher discretion is given such short shrift. I very much believe teacher voice is a thing like writer voice, and that it varies teacher to teacher. Do some teachers work better for some kids than others? Yes, of course. But doesn't it benefit kids to learn how to deal with a variety of influences, even some they don't necessarily like?

Why does everything and everyone have to be exactly the same? How on earth does that help anyone, particularly in these times of "alternative truth?"

Last Saturday I spoke with Regents Commissioner Betty Rosa, who told me that the new revision of Part 154, which makes draconian cuts to English instruction for ELLs, was working very well in Buffalo. I've reached out to teachers I know in Buffalo, and they have not yet heard about what a success it is.

They tell me stories of teachers pushing into classes instead of teaching. They tell me that no one is happy, not the students or the teachers. In fact, they tell me that Betty Rosa visited one school and that a bunch of troublesome kids were shuttled all over the building to be kept away from the VIPs. Of course, Betty Rosa may have visited other schools. And Part 154 may indeed be working somewhere or other. But what I see is absolutely no evidence.

Dr. Rosa also told me that research supports this move, but failed to cite any. I've read a lot of research by Dr. Stephan Krashen, and it suggests to me something I've suspected and lived most of my life--that teaching kids to love language is what makes them successful. Dragging them to a new country and making them immediately do the same work as those who've lived here all their lives is counter-intuitive and counterproductive. It's like taking your baby, who hasn't yet learned to walk, to tango lessons.

Things like these might make someone feel good, or proud, or accomplished, but they cause a lot of needless suffering. In fact Dr. Rosa publicly and accurately criticizes other state officials for doing similar things. I saw her speak at George Washington Campus and she spoke of how those who wish to test newcomers ought to go to foreign countries and take tests in foreign languages. I've been saying that for decades and I couldn't agree more.

I have no idea why the chancellor or anyone would wish to hang on to a program that has no basis in logic, research, or practice. Nor have I got the remotest idea why it was instituted it in the first place. If anyone wishes to ignore the fact that these ideas have no basis in anything I've ever heard of, you can simply look at the other regulation--that ELLs cannot be in the same class with anyone more than one contiguous grade from them. For high schools, at least, that's a ridiculous and impossible mandate.

If my very large school, with 500 ELLs (10% of the entire Buffalo population), if we were to do that I'd have opened the school year with one class of 40 and one of 6. It's ridiculous. For small schools, it's absolutely impossible. That's probably a large reason they've done away with stand-alone English instruction as much as they possibly could. In Betty Rosa's new and improved vision, high school English instruction need only be given one period a day for one year. That's it.

The following year, based on the results of the NYSESLAT, a test originally designed to test language acquisition that no longer tests language acquisition (no, really), the kid could be in an English class reading Macbeth. And that's OK according to Part 154, because there will be an ESL teacher in the room with the English teacher explaining the vocabulary to the ESL students.

That makes sense, doesn't it? Well, not to me, and not to you.

But the geniuses in Albany have deemed it OK, and that's all that matters. It kind of makes me nostalgic for Merryl Tisch. I mean sure, she was a fanatical ideologue who didn't know jack squat about education. But she also never messed with ESL, because she didn't give a fiddler's fart about it.

Ironically, newcomers stood a much better chance of learning English under that regime. 

The beginning of school is pretty exciting, but it’s also pretty frustrating. In my school, for example, there are over 200 oversized classes. I know because I teach four of them. These will mostly be worked out over the next week or so, so that’s not a disaster.

What really frustrates me are the constant changes that we experience. For example, there are 43 students in my afternoon class. A big issue is the fact that at least 15 of them passed that class, with me in fact, last year. To me, that’s an emergency. However, to the 30 other teachers in my department, their classes are the emergency. My problem doesn’t worry them at all.

So really, the only thing to do is wait and hope. You wait, and you hope that your class will come first, or soon, or optimally now. I mean, I’m ready. The issue is that I’m teaching a whole bunch of kids things they don’t need to know, and then when the kids who maybe need to know those things show up, well, I don't think I'm gonna go back to square one and start from "hello."

There's also the issue of the NYSESLAT test, the one that rates and places my kids. I've given and read the test for two years, and as far as I can tell, it has little or nothing to do with whether they know the language or not. So a whole lot of my students tested commanding, or some such thing, which means they are no longer entitled to ESL services. This is unfortunate, because some of them have never passed a single one of my modest teacher-designed tests.

Why might that be important? Well, there's a whole lot of talk about students being "college ready." Now, what that means to New York State is that the students got this grade on some Regents exam, and that grade on some other Regents exam. In fact it's wholly arbitrary and has no bearing whatsoever on whether or not they are ready for college. You know, just like answering questions that involve repeating what a teacher said, like in the NYSESLAT, does not necessarily make you fluent in English.

I taught English in colleges for twenty years, and I have a pretty good idea what they want students to be able to do in English 101. Basically, they'd like to see people write coherently. I personally favor coherent writing. In fact, when I teach grammar and sentence structure, things my kids don't know in English, it certainly helps them. Of course I'm not supposed to teach that. I'm supposed to hand them some book about Hammurabi's Code, or The History of Cement, and have them close-read and answer tedious questions.

Now that would be a great idea if my goal were to make them hate me, hate my class, and hate English altogether. But as I'm not a great thinker like David Coleman, I actually want them to look forward to coming to my class. I want my class to be a safe place, a place they can count on for support, a place where absolutely no one will make fun of their English.

David Coleman's gonna have to place a gun to my head, literally, to make me teach his tedious tripe. I think my oversized classes will get fixed, and I think the kids who passed last year will move up. Some of them, sadly, will move up way too high and lose their chance to learn what they really need to know.

But hey, how would Questar, or whatever company that designs the crap tests that place them there, make money to send their reps to gala luncheons if we didn't have those tests? What's good for business is good for America, and it's unpatriotic to suggest otherwise.

Isn't it?

A few weeks ago our department ran NYSESLAT testing. I’ve written elsewhere my opinions about this test, its lack of validity, and its Common Coriness as opposed to measuring the language ability we're supposed to encourage and enable. Whatever my opinions of the test may be, we had to administer it.

In the past, we had a clear person in charge of this test. One year it was me, as LAB BESIS coordinator. I didn’t much love the job and opted to go back to the classroom after I did it for a year. So this isn’t meant as a knock on anyone who ran it in the past.

This year, we ran it more cooperatively. There wasn’t really any one person in charge. As things needed to be done, we got up and did them. Papers needed to be distributed. Phones needed to be collected. Someone had to run here or there to get this or that. Things happened, and we calmly dealt with them one at a time.

This is a model of what I almost never see. Working for the DOE, it’s usually some High and Exalted Supervisor telling everyone else, “I have decided all of YOU have to do this THING. THIS is how I want YOU to do this thing. If YOU don’t do this thing, YOU are in TROUBLE. And YOU better do this thing the way I say, or YOU will be in TROUBLE.

On the other hand, my colleagues and I looked at this task, thought about how best to do it, and simply did it. A great thing my AP did was decide NOT to do it in the trailers, as we’ve done in the past. This year, like every year we’ve ever done this, it rained. By bringing it indoors, neither we nor our students got wet.

So when a few colleagues of mine showed up on Monday, we figured out how to distribute wooden work boards in the auditorium. We needed something on wheels because they were kind of heavy. I found a rolling chair on the stage and a colleague and I wheeled it around, placing the boards where they needed to be placed. My colleague hates opening plastic packages, so I did it for her. We alternated making announcements until we found the person we decided had the best speaking voice.

Absolutely no one got angry at anyone.

This is what happens when you leave things in the hands of teachers and trust them to do the right thing. This is what happens when you don’t have top-down mandates from people who refuse to participate or assist with the actual work that needs to be done. This is what happens when no one stands over people making ever-shifting demands on the people who do things that are too lowly for that person to mess with.

I wonder why we can’t run our education system like this. I wonder why we can’t run our schools like this. In fact, I even wonder why we can’t run our union like this. The top-down model is rejected by the system that rates us, and fully expects us to enlist the cooperation and enthusiasm of our students. Yet principals do any damn thing they feel like, with no regard whatsoever for those of us who do the actual work. Even under alleged socialist hippie Bill de Blasio, they likely set themselves up for promotion by indulging in ineffectual top-down nonsense, thus making the system even worse.

How does demoralizing teachers systemwide help us to be role models? How does it help us to inspire children? How does it help children?


And how did we come to do things this way?

It must be great to put out a press release from so-called Families for Excellent Schools and talk about how poorly the public schools serve high-needs students. Those astroturfers just care so much. High needs kids are the ones I teach every day of my life, the ones who wouldn't get into a hedge fund backed charter school on a bet.

If you're a lucky astroturfer, some paper will put your press release out as news. That's pretty much what a Daily News article did yesterday. In fact, it did not present much of any other point of view (though mild protests from Carmen Fariña's office were later added). It appears Fariña's office has some sort of junk science VAM formula to show progress, or lack thereof, on the part of ELLs. It seems to entail the NYSESLAT exam and some other English exams, like the elementary school ELA or maybe the NY State Regents. Neither the ELA tests nor the English Regents are designed to measure language acquisition (and your humble correspondent feels it's absurd to have newcomers take these tests at all).

The fact is the new NYSESLAT test has been given precisely once. Any other test with which they compare it was substantially different, and if that's what Fariña's office is doing, well, it doesn't know what it's doing. I know this well because I administer the NYSESLAT each and every year. The new NYSESLAT, like the aforementioned exams, does not measure language acquisition.  It used to at least try, but now it's all Common Corey. For the edification of confused NYC DOE officials, as well as the CEO of so-called Families for Excellent Schools,  the purpose of ESL is to help newcomers acquire English. It is not, as some genius at DOE stated on a Powerpoint, to prepare them for core content courses (though it certainly helps).

Last year's NYSESLAT test was largely about doing close reading. This is not a language specific skill, and in fact any and all reading skills transfer with time, something so-called Families for Excellent Schools did not really account for. Nor, it appears, has the DOE. Of course, since absolutely no one mentioned in this article appears to have the remotest interest in language acquisition or what that entails, this is no surprise.

It's funny, because right now, while this article merits placement in the Daily News, ESL instruction has been cut to the bone in NY State. I happen to know the writer of this Daily News piece is aware of this, because I sent it to him personally. I'm going to send it to him again just to make sure. I'm a little curious how severe cuts in English instruction for newcomers do not merit mention, but a press release from a Moskowitz PR firm masquerading as grassroots is a big deal.

No one bothers to ask me what's going on with ELLs because I am not qualified. I only see them come into my classroom every day of my life. Yesterday I had a girl come into my classroom, speak Spanish to me and everyone in it, and act like everything was fine. My students were pretty surprised.

I took her outside and told her, in Spanish, she had to speak English in my classroom. I asked if she understood and she said she didn't. This was a first for me. I told her I would not speak Spanish with her in the classroom and that I would not answer questions addressed to me in Spanish. She found that unreasonable. I told her I couldn't speak Chinese or Korean for my other students, and that until I could translate for all, classroom business would take place in English. I offered to explain it to her mom by phone and have mom explain it to her, and she seemed to understand a little better. But just to make sure, I had a dean who speaks Spanish better than I do give her chapter and verse.

Now it's great that so-called Families for Excellent Schools are interested in ELLs. Even as I deplore their outlandish ignorance, I applaud them for their concern. Since they are such big proponents of the Got to Go List Moskowitz Academies, I'm sure they'll urge Eva to start taking in all beginner ESL students, including those SIFE students who don't know how to read and write in their first languages. Do you know how many of these kids are now in the much ballyhooed Moskowitz Academies? Exactly zero. (And it would probably be fewer if they could do anything about it.)

Personally, I'm not at all surprised that math scores are down for kids who don't speak English. I'm not at all surprised that schools with high percentages of non-English speakers have lower test scores. After all, they don't speak English. I regret that is evident to neither the DOE nor so-called Families for Excellent Schools.

I suggest Eva Moskowitz and her BFF, the CEO of so-called Families for Excellent Schools travel to China, take a bunch of tests in Chinese and share their results with us. After all, since they're so horrified by these test results I'm certain they'd do much better. And since the new plan in NY State entails teaching ESL via magic, rather than classroom time, and since this is noteworthy to neither Moskowitz  nor so-called Families for Excellent Schools, they should have no problem learning Chinese. Eva will work her magic and show her CEO pal how to be highly effective.

I don't know about you, but I'm gonna sit while I wait for that.

I've been going to the DA and taking notes the last few months. One theme I hear from UFT President Michael Mulgrew is that people like me are hysterical, that we don't understand what a great improvement this system is. You see, since a smaller percentage of people get negative ratings under this system, it's better. That's it. There is no nuance, no accounting for people's feelings, and no awareness whatsoever what working teachers go through.

After all, Mulgrew is not a teacher. I don't know how long he was in the classroom, but he certainly isn't there now. Some of the UFT officers and DRs teach one class, but single-class teachers aren't subject to the APPR system that Mulgrew helped negotiate. They still get rated S or U, and I haven't heard of anyone rated U for teaching one class. If I were a supervisor, with 5 million observations to do, I probably wouldn't even bother with those people.

I teach in a good school, and I don't have bad ratings. I will almost certainly be rated effective this year, though I won't know until September. I've been observed four times and, as far as I know, none of them went badly. So let's say things go as I expect. Let's say I don't get a negative rating, I don't have a Teacher Improvement Plan, I don't have to meet with my supervisor each week to discuss why I suck and how I can suck less. Let's say they don't send a UFT Dementor Teacher to determine whether or not the burden of proof is on me or the DOE when they try to fire me.

Here's what I feel. I feel it's another two years before they can bring me to 3020a and move for my dismissal. Let's say I don't go senile over the next few years and I continue to get decent ratings at my school. Am I at peace? No, I am not. Because I honestly don't trust the MOSL, the junk science that will determine the rest of my rating.

Right now it's not too bad. I'm on the committee at my school and we've decided, wherever possible, to use the broadest measures possible so no teacher is tied to the scores of his or her classes. This makes sense to me because actually, classes vary. Beyond that, a crazy supervisor could stick a teacher with a class that would do poorly. Or an honors class could fail to go from 98% to 99%. That class could sink to 97%, which would clearly indicate the failure of their teacher via junk science metrics. We don't want teachers to suffer for things like that. Also, we don't want teachers in competition. We don't want teachers to feel they'll be hurting themselves by, for example, tutoring students of a colleague.

I teach ESL and for the last few years have been teaching beginners. I love doing this, but not everyone does. And it strikes me as risky. This is because the new NYSESLAT test is all about Common Core and nothing about acquisition of English. Oddly, I still cling to the fiction that helping kids acquire English is my job. But everyone knows fiction plays just about no part whatsoever in Common Core. Few seem to know that acquisition of academic English does not happen instantaneously, and must be preceded by basic conversational English.

I now wonder whether I'm on a suicide mission. The state can attach my rating to the ridiculous and invalid NYSESLAT exam and say I suck and must therefore be fired. I'm not clear on how and when they will do that, but it seems inevitable. The new Cuomo/ Heavy Hearts plan will also bring in total strangers who know nothing about me or my kids to observe, and they are doing this specifically to create more negative ratings. It's not like this is a great secret. Cuomo openly complains we aren't firing enough teachers. I've got thirty years in and if they fire me my family and I won't be living on cat food. Better me than one of my younger colleagues.

Mulgrew can ridicule me and all of us who oppose junk science. He can call us paranoid, cranks, whatever. But he has no idea what we, all of us, are going through.

Too bad because, given that, he cannot and does not represent us at all.

I recently got an email from Punchy Mike Mulgrew informing me that 12,000 members filled out their one-question poll and preferred Neverending Professional Development to 37.5 minute Small Group Tutoring. Apparently there was no choice C: None of the Above. Nor was there a spot to make suggestions. Therefore 3 out of 4 UFT members want to stay 80 minutes after school on Monday and 70 on Tuesday to accomplish Whatever Is Done on those days.

I guess it's good to put out polls like that. It makes it look like you care what people think. I just took a poll from NYSUT asking me about the NYSESLAT test, which I administered. It asked how I would like the test to be weighted. Should speaking, listening, reading or writing be weighted more or equally? I wrote equally, and NYSUT asked me why. I said because the test had no validity, it made no difference how the parts were weighted, and they left me no option to write any such thing.

I don't usually give A, B, C, D questions on tests I write. Maybe sometimes I'll put a few, but no more than 20%. I usually want to see what students can write themselves. I never, ever, do true and false. It's pretty ridiculous when you have a 50% chance of getting it right. When you get surveys with sorely limited choices, they're not really asking you what you think. They're giving you limited choices and suggesting one is acceptable. That's not necessarily the case.

In the case of the UFT poll, it's simply ridiculous. It's kind of like what I used to do to my daughter when she was very young and I wanted her to do something. Well, you can do this thing that I want you to do, or you can do this other awful thing that I just made up. By the time she was six, she was hip to this trick and using it against me.  But there's UFT leadership saying you can do this thing, or some other thing that you want to do even less. In argument, that's called a black or white fallacy. It's what Karen Magee used at the AFT convention when she suggested the alternative to Common Core was Complete Chaos.

I can't testify as to the 37.5 minute small group thing, as my school is multi-session, and we simply rolled the extra time into classes. As chapter leader, everyone tends to complain to me about everything, but no one ever complains about that. In six years, not one teacher has said to me, "You know, our classes are too long. Why don't we shorten them and go to meetings instead?" And plenty of teachers in my building are tutoring kids all the time, whether or not that's their C6.

As always, it's tough looking reforminess in its twisted little eye while wondering what union leadership is doing to fight it, if anything. Mayoral control is now under attack because de Blasio doesn't support charters sufficiently. They want to raise the cap or dump it. Dump it, I say. But UFT leadership supports it, along with charters, junk science, and testing.

Most teachers want real choices. Not many are getting them.

Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday I dispensed with all that "teaching" stuff and gave ELLs the NYSESLAT instead. It wasn't such a great test when it was one day, and kids would be routinely placed at incorrect levels, but now that it's three days instead it will be much better, depending upon what you mean by "better." In my school, it's actually seven lost days of instruction because of the extended time we need for the speaking test. But now that NY State has cut English language instruction in half, what's seven fewer days?

It's a well-known fact that more time learning is actually not useful unless you're using it to bash teacher unions for being recalcitrant, fighting all earnest efforts to achieve the goal of more work for less pay. If the lost time is devoted to standardized testing, well, then it's Mom, apple pie, and saluting the American flag.

And what a test it is, folks. Yesterday, a young man asked me why the essay specifically called for an introduction, body, and conclusion but only two paragraphs. This was the same young man who, the first day of the test, asked why the students had to stay until the bell rang if they had already finished their tests. Why do we have to sit here and do nothing? And why do they require a basic structure that demands three paragraphs and then ask for two?

I'm not at all sure that particular student is in need of Common Core. He's critical all by himself without it. Oddly, folks like Arne Duncan and John King get pretty churlish when people question the Core. They attack soccer moms and call teachers, parents and students "special interests." Those who spend billions imposing their will on our children, of course, are philanthropists, heroes to be lauded on test passages.

The second day, I stopped the CD because the listening activity was identical to that of the first day. It turned out that the geniuses at NYSED, or whoever they paid to design this thing, decided to repeat the same sample question three days in a row. I'm sure the students were as inspired as I was by that bold move, once I figured out it was not, in fact, yet another error.  On part one of this review, a commenter offered:

The Speaking Subtest was just the tip of the iceberg. This new CCLS-aligned NYSESLAT is the worst sort of rubbish: inappropriate, riddled with errors, and designed for failure. The CCLS cancer is spreading, my friends. Take heed.

Sounds ominous, but I'm not persuaded. I have no idea whatsoever what the NYSESLAT was designed for. Certainly it was an effective device in torturing beginning students. I watched a girl from El Salvador who's been here maybe six weeks suffer through it for no good reason. She's a rank beginner who will likely need to start from the beginning in September, and I don't need a three day test to tell me that.

But I have no idea what the test will say about her or anyone You see, after we grade the test at the school, we have to send it to Albany for the next part, The Rigging of the Scores. That's when Albany decides which percentage of kids should be at which level, and sets the cut scores so whatever they predict comes true. After all, how can you be all-knowing unless you force your predictions on the entire populous? There are reputations to protect, and now that you've cut English learning in half, there's gonna be a lot less of it anyway.

And that's just fine because once they rig the test scores they can get to the real work of firing all the teachers who've failed to make double the progress in half the time based on a test that doesn't even measure what these kids are supposed to be learning.

I'm hearing that it's highly unlikely the Cuomo/ Heavy Hearts plan could be in effect 2015/ 2016, for a number of reasons. One is that the deadline for agreements, even without a delay, is late November. There will have to be systems in place before that, and they will likely be whatever districts have now. So prepare for another year of MOSL and MOTP.

If there are "hardship" delays, and both Tisch and Cuomo now appear on board, said delays could possibly put off this nonsense for yet another year. Of course all this is contingent upon whatever NYSED and the Regents do, but Carmen Fariña does not appear to be in favor of all this nonsense, and supports the delay. Will the state allow hardships all over? That's a more difficult question.

But a crap system will indeed be a hardship on any and all systems that enact it.

It appears likely that the new system in NYC, with its unfunded mandates,  would entail having supervisors wander the city observing teachers in other schools. They would be the outside observers, working under the assumption they would be objective and everyone else was crooked. Would outside supervisors contact the supervisors in the schools they were visiting? Would they be influenced by what said supervisors say?

Of course they wouldn't, because the new system assumes them to be corrupt only within their own schools. They would never call another school to hear that teacher A is wonderful and teacher B sucks, and they would never act on such info. After all, who wants to please people in other schools so those same people deliver desired results in their own schools? And how would supervisors ever conceive of such a thing?

My students and I have lost four days of instruction due to cumbersome and poorly written state tests, and next week we will lose three more. In our case these tests serve not only to decide how quickly your humble correspondent is fired, but also the levels at which students are placed next year. The fabulous system for doing that entails teachers in my school scoring the actual test, because of course we have nothing else to do. However, though the tests are scored, we cannot actually use them for placement, because then follows the rigging of the scores by NY State.

Although we have little time to grade, the geniuses in Albany will need months to actually get back to us on what the scores mean. Therefore, my school, like all the schools in NY, will program kids for next year and need to alter said programs based on whatever NYS tells us the scores mean.

We're lucky to have a visionary like Andrew Cuomo to let us know that however badly the system sucks now, he has a way to make it worse.

I spent last week giving oral exams to ESL students. Each year, our students have to take an exam called the NYSESLAT. This year, it's different from what it was in the past, and evidently aligned to the Common Core. The Common Core, you see, is akin to the Ten Commandments, is the best thing since sliced bread, and renders all that came before it obsolete. We have finally achieved perfection on earth, never to be improved upon until something replaces it, which could happen any moment, but will almost certainly happen next year (like every other).

The speaking test leans heavily on non-fiction, and doesn't delve into any of that touchy-feely personalization stuff. After all, David Coleman, largely regarded as the architect of Common Core, was famously quoted saying no one gives a crap how you feel. Ironically, I actually don't give a crap how David Coleman feels, so to an extent, he's correct. On the other hand, my students, who've been sitting one period waiting to take the test, and the next with a sub, are probably feeling less than inspired, and getting considerably less instruction as a result of this test.

There are some flaws with the oral part of the test. The largest flaw, in my opinion, is the patently idiotic decision to test Common Core rather than English. As I ask the questions for the two-hundredth time, I ask myself what would happen if I were to give this test, say, to ninth grade students who were born here. If this were a perfect English test, all the native speakers would establish themselves as such and receive a perfect score. I don't think that would happen.

Not everyone is logical, and not everyone is a good reader. These traits are important, but they're far from the first thing newcomers need to be taught. For one thing, if newcomers already carry these traits, they need not be taught them at all. For another, if they don't, they need to acquire basic conversation and usage before such things can even be considered.

Another issue is the rubric, in which differences between levels are vague, sketchy, and insufficiently differentiated. I'm not an expert, but I could do better than that.

Things I find fundamental, like native-level usage, are of little or no importance. It's like we're raising a generation of drones to answer tedious questions on topics people may or may not care about, and presenting the topics in such a way as to preclude any kind of inspiration. Though we demand detail and precision from kids, the test writers often provide us with neither. There is a passage that uses a fairly fundamental word incorrectly. We are told to reword questions in ways that fundamentally change their meaning, and judge the revised question by the same rubric.

I can't tell you what the tests are about, and I can't give you the precise language in question, as The Testing Company will probably have me fired and sued for a gazillion dollars, but I can tell you the things they test are not on my bedside reading list. This is what you call a "secure" test. I'm not allowed to reproduce or distribute it. Nonetheless, it takes days to administer.

Naturally, no kid remembers what is on the test, and no kid tells any other kid about it. Kids would never do that, because kids never try to do better on tests by any means necessary. Therefore no student comes into the test expecting to hear a certain question. No kid comes in prepared to discuss things they would otherwise be unprepared to discuss. I have never seen kid cheat on a placement test and end up in classes for which they are unprepared, and no kid would ever sit back a few days and wait to find out what's on a test before taking it.


And that's just a few of the reasons why I have absolute faith in companies that don't know me, don't know my school, don't know my kids,  and basically don't know anything to issue assessments. They aren't prejudiced in favor of the kids like I am. I want the kids to succeed, while they don't give a golly gosh darn. I want the kids in classes that help them learn English, while they want them grouped according to how Common Corey they are.

Thank goodness the geniuses at the NY State Board of Regents study Common Core instead of language acquisition. Where would we be if mere teachers assessed students instead of well-compensated strangers from Albany?