Last week at Executive Board, UFT leadership told us that the APPR system was the best thing since sliced bread and that everyone loved it. The proof, they said, was that there were so few ineffective ratings this year.

This is kind of like the argument that the Open Market system is better than the UFT Transfer system, the one that got me out of John Adams before all the Adams teachers had to reapply for their jobs. (If I recall correctly, most didn't bother.) Because more people transfer, it's better. Too bad you're an ATR with no chance of ever getting a job again, but those are the breaks.

At my school, when we opened, a few teachers were a little upset. They each taught one class and then accompanied their students to various worksites. For the last few years they'd been rated via S and U, but this year they were told they were under Advance, Danielson, and all the wonderful baggage that accompanies it. Despite what leadership told us, they did not get up and do the happy dance.

In fact, they asked me if I could get them back on the old system. Now why would anyone do such a thing if the new one is so cool and fantastic? But they did. Last I heard, their request was sitting on a Very Important Desk at 52 Broadway, and they haven't gotten an answer back. So I don't know. Maybe they're right.

There have also been several people with .6 comp-time jobs asking me about this. My understanding is if 40% of your teaching day is spent, you know, teaching, that you fall under Advance. So if you teach 2 or more periods, there you are. This is what people at UFT tell me too. Of course, I can't blame people for trying.

There are some things that District Reps and UFT employees don't get. The first thing they don't get is that leadership can be wrong. There's a famous quote from Upton Sinclair:

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!

That applies here. The best way to get ahead in the UFT, as far as I can see, is to sign a loyalty oath and swear utter fealty to leadership. Various UFT employees have explained to me that the loyalty oath is not a loyalty oath, but if it barks like a loyalty oath, and quacks like a loyalty oath, it's a loyalty oath. Every time I go to the Executive Board or the DA and watch them vote as a bloc I'm reminded. They all love the observation system, each and every one of them, even if they hate it.

They do hate it, of course, if they actually teach. All teachers hate it. The administrators, unless they are frothing at the mouth vindictive psychopaths who get off on making teachers' lives miserable, all hate it too. It's pretty well worth hating. Imagine you have 40 teachers in your department and you have to observe each one 4 times. Then you have to write them all up and hold meetings for each one. I can't figure out how you do anything else.

We hate it because it's hanging over our heads each and every moment. When are they coming in? Will it be on a day when I'm actually talking with the students instead of doing some rubric heavy piece of incomprehensible degrees of knowledge stuff? Will the kid who never pays attention not pay attention? Will I look bad because it's 95 degrees outside and 105 degrees inside? 

Those questions sound ridiculous, but teachers know they're not. The problem is that people in leadership are not really teachers anymore. Some of them teach one class, but they aren't rated as we are. They're rated by--get this--S and U, the thing they say is so awful that no one could tolerate it. No one in leadership has ever been rated by Advance. None of them understand the stress that causes people to go to great lengths to get out of it. In fact, a member once told me that his supervisor threatened him--if he didn't get a .8 position instead of his .6 position, he was going to rate him ineffective. That member died weeks after having told me that. 

I think of him every time someone comes to me with one of these questions. Leadership doesn't. It's funny that, on a state level, they supported the end of APPR but won't do so for us. They say it doesn't work for the rest of the state. Here's a news flash--it doesn't work here either. Having a demoralized and terrorized teaching staff helps neither us nor our students. 

And doing nothing about it won't help UFT a whole hell of a lot come Janus either.

Every week or so I get an email from a UFT rep whose job is organizing. I guess that's why his newsletter is called The Organizer. I'm urged to share it with my staff, but I prefer to write my own. It has a lot of recurring features, so it tends to be repetitive. I usually don't find anything worth sharing.

This week, though, it had something that opened my eyes just a little. That was a fairly impressive feat since I opened my laptop at around six AM. I expected to just scroll down and close the thing. But there it was, and it had me up and blogging almost involuntarily.

I was pretty surprised to see this piece from a NYSUT email included in The Organizer:

It goes on, but you get the gist. Of course I don't disagree about APPR. I signed the linked petition and I recommend you do too. I'm just surprised at the UFT's willingness to take absolutely any position at any time, with no regard whatsoever for past positions. Am I the only one who remembers what a proud deed it was when we got our first junk science system, and how Mulgrew himself had helped write the law? Am I the only one who remembers hearing how smart it was to get the whole thing enshrined in law?

Of course, that argument was no longer so popular when Andrew Cuomo and the Heavy Hearted Assembly redid the whole thing a year later. Cuomo said his own brainchild was "baloney" because not enough teachers got bad ratings. We needed to rate more teachers badly. That was Cuomo's rationale for pushing the new system.

So they changed it. The UFT argument then became the matrix. The matrix is gonna make everything better because it's gonna make it tough to get an ineffective rating, unless of course you do get an ineffective rating. Then we'll all try to look the other way and pretend it didn't happen, I suppose.

In any case, I've opposed APPR since its inception. I'm in good company, including Diane Ravitch, Leonie Haimson, and the American Statistical Association, just to mention a few. Yet when I objected to it at chapter leader meetings, I was criticized and ridiculed. I was overreacting. I was Chicken Little. I'm trying to recall how many times I've heard about how few people got bad ratings, and how the system was therefore an improvement. I've heard it from UFT leadership and school leadership.

Of course, very shortly thereafter I'd get to hear face to face from the people who got bad ratings. You won't be surprised to hear that they failed to see the wonder and beauty of this system. Now there is a new wrinkle that I've heard Mulgrew speak of. It's not value-added, but rather showing student progress. We'll work out ways to do this, via portfolios or something.

It won't surprise you to hear that I've asked people who study these things, and they've told me there is no research whatsoever to support these ideas for rating teachers. In fact, I know of no studies whatsoever saying anything about it at all. Yet I'm regularly told at the DA and elsewhere that it's a big improvement. I've also heard, from Mulgrew on down, that anyone who opposes APPR supports total control for the principal.

That's what you call a black and white fallacy--it suggests there is only one alternative to this proposal. Beyond that, it fails to acknowledge the pernicious nature of this system, to wit, allowing the burden of proof to be on the teacher at the 3020a hearing. That's one more feature of the system UFT leadership has been pushing as the best thing since sliced bread--not the feature, of course. They generally fail to acknowledge it, although one UFT Unity member on Twitter insisted that gave members more control. This is the same guy who got up and insisted he spoke to two random ATRs  in one day who loved the new incentive.

There has been a little space between NYSUT and UFT on this issue. For example, when the Mulgrew-endorsed toppling of Richard Iannuzzi as NYSUT President happened, Andrew Pallotta's Revive NYSUT claimed to oppose APPR. They blamed Iannuzzi for it. Though he did it together with Mulgrew, they never, ever criticized Mulgrew, nor did they vocally oppose it at inception. The hypocrisy was palpable.

Now I'm curious about this thing we're gonna do next year, if there is ever an agreement. Will there be portfolios and who knows what else in the future of NYC schools? To me, it seems like a whole lot of extra paperwork for already overburdened teachers. This would not be my preferred course of action with Janus hanging over our heads.

The APPR system has left teacher morale lower than its been at any point since I began over thirty years ago. Thus far, every so-called improvement has failed to improve anything. I'm not sure that the NYSUT position precisely mirrors that of UFT leadership.

Nonetheless, it takes a whole lot of chutzpah to simply take something you've consistently supported and rationalized, then call it useless. It's particularly egregious when you offer absolutely no explanation as to why you've changed your mind.

How are you supposed to trust people who do things like that?

I've had great respect for Neil deGrasse Tyson ever since the first time I saw him on Bill Maher's show. I mean, here's a guy, smarter than me, smarter than you, an astrophysicist, an acknowledged expert in his field, speaking the unvarnished truth. Climate change is science, and science is real. Disagreeing with it is like disagreeing with gravity. Then one day, he posts this:

The rise of flat-Earthers in society provides some of the best evidence for the failure of our educational system.

— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) July 19, 2017

Now there are certainly better interpretations of this statement. After all, there's no context here whatsoever. Is he targeting teachers? Is he targeting the system? Is he questioning Common Core, which claims to create critical thinkers but actually gets kids so accustomed to tedium they might spend several decades working at Walmart without killing themselves?

Frankly, those aren't the first thoughts that came into my mind.

The rise of non-education experts pontificating on education pretty closely parallels the rise of flat-earthers. https://t.co/VUESgglvnB

— Arthur Goldstein (@TeacherArthurG) July 23, 2017

How long have we been reading nonsense from Bill Gates? Does it precede the nonsense from Donald Trump? It's hard to say, but for me it's like stereo. Gates nonsense in the right ear and Trump in the left. A frustrating cacophony of garbage, spread through the entire United States. And not by teachers, but rather by a strangely incurious press. In a country where Fox passes as news and millions view it voluntarily, we have issues. But were they taught that in schools? Aren't teachers regularly vilified for being too "liberal?"

Massive unaddressed poverty cannot be addressed by the educational system, despite the best efforts of flat-earthers like @FakeBetsyDeVos. https://t.co/VUESgglvnB

— Arthur Goldstein (@TeacherArthurG) July 23, 2017

Teachers in the United States are expected to singlehandedly overcome impossible home issues. Gates pretty much gave up on poverty, saying he couldn't fix that, but rather he could fix education. Of course he couldn't do that either. And what he's left us with is a junk science system under which we are judged by standardized test scores, a system deemed invalid by Tyson-level experts like Diane Ravitch and the American Statistical Association. Of course, Tyson himself doesn't seem to know that.

Flat-earthers ignore science just as educational reformies ignore research. But fine, blame the schools. Just like Trump and Trump Jr. https://t.co/VUESgglvnB

— Arthur Goldstein (@TeacherArthurG) July 23, 2017

Hey, everyone else does. Go ahead. Put out that statement, offer no context, and let everyone see it. You're an expert so you must be right. Never mind that it's well out of your field of expertise. Who could possibly take it the wrong way?

Glad to have you on board! Do you need a job? https://t.co/Rrj8FLPUi9

— Fake Betsy DeVos (@FakeBetsyDeVos) July 23, 2017

Really, Dr. Tyson, when you write things like that, you may as well be part of Team Trump. They're going to bend or break union so that working people can't organize. Do you seriously expect quelling teacher voice to ultimately benfit education? And just in case it's escaped your attention, teachers are pretty much the last bastion of vibrant unionism in these United States.

I can't read your mind, but a whole lot of people read your tweets. If you don't provide context, people will fill it in for themselves. In fact, poverty accounts for a whole lot of America's educational standing. Despite the nonsense propagated by Gates, and blindly promoted by Obama in the form of Race to the Top, education alone will not solve the issue.

And with all due respect, Dr. Tyson, if you aren't part of the solution, you're part of the problem.

Last night I went to a chapter leader training about the new evaluation system. I heard a few things. One is that the new portfolio and student achievement stuff doesn't actually exist yet. I'm not sure how I missed that. So not only does that stuff sound odd and potentially time-consuming, but no one actually knows what it is yet. Will it help teachers or students? It's hard to say, but I doubt it. When you make up a program out of whole cloth, when you haven't got any studies or research to support it, when you then enact it and hope for the best, it's hard to vouch for its validity.

Another is that MOTP reform is supposedly coming later. So maybe we won't have to worry quite as much about random drive-bys. I saw no indication that this was a UFT goal, but teachers would like to see fewer, and so would administrators. There are a whole lot of them who are overwhelmed by the demands of these observations. A single department in my school has 54 members. Can you imagine doing 200 observations and writing up reports? I guess you could do it, and I guess you could meet 200 times with teachers. I guess you could also do the rest of your job too. How well? Who knows?

If UFT leadership wants to improve this system (and who knows what they want, what with a President who doesn't answer email or attend his own meetings), they will meet the law's requirement of 2 observations per year. They will arrange for additional observations on an as-needed basis. A principal, not mine, told me that she could observe someone once a year, and if there were no issue, she could leave it at that. If they needed additional help, she could do more observations and work with the teacher in question. This was someone I respect, and I always remembered that.

Thought the MOTP reforms are supposed to come later, at least one of them is already here. Though presented as some kind of improvement, the four informals option now included two visits from colleagues. I'm not bothered by that. But I'm one person, and I'm not as sensitive as some of my colleagues. Teachers are beaten down and demoralized and terrified. This has been happening over time, and the new evaluation system hasn't helped. UFT reps can stand and talk about what an improvement this new system is, but that shows how out of touch they are. I don't know a single teacher who likes it better. I hate getting a checklist, and if it says I'm effective I don't much care what else it says.

This is not the only reason that UFT leadership is out of touch with how working teachers feel about this. You can't overstate the fact that no one in leadership has actually been subject to this system. No one. No one knows how it feels. And all their feedback comes from those in the Unity echo chamber. Since they've all signed loyalty oaths, their judgment is suspect. How can you trust someone to represent you if that person has signed an oath to support Michael Mulgrew in all things? How can you trust people who've agreed to speak one way even if it negates your personal experience? How can you trust people who've taken patronage jobs that depend on loyalty to leadership? Shouldn't someone who represents members be loyal to them first?

The first time we got an evaluation system we went to 52 Broadway to vote on it. That was kind of a pro forma exercise, as UFT DA is dominated by loyalty oath signers, and it was very clear how they were supposed to vote. When that didn't work out, Michael Mulgrew left it in the hands of Reformy John King. Evidently Mulgrew thought the reformiest man in New York was a fair arbiter. Chalkbeat reported that neither UFT nor DOE wanted so many observations, but John King knew better.

The system was revised two more times. UFT sent their band of negotiators, none of whom had lived under this system, because they know best what's good for us. Always. They didn't bother putting it up for a vote, because why bother? Democracy is for losers, and America should know that, having cast 2.9 million more votes for Hillary Clinton than President-elect Donald Trump.

My mind keeps running to Friedrichs two, and what will happen when dues are optional. If leadership wishes to help itself, it's gonna have to be responsive to us, to say the least. I'm not sure a dynasty can change its spots. But I'm always hopeful.

We now have another evaluation system, the third or fourth in as many years. Who can even keep track? There's a handy-dandy UFT explanation, with which lowly teachers like me are supposed to discern what the hell is actually going on. In many ways, it raises more questions than it answers, but you have to expect as much from a system that's been essentially made up of whole cloth, that's never been researched or tested anywhere.

The Good--Test scores reflect little more than zip code and percentage of special needs. Therefore, when we forcefully inject test scores into teacher evaluation, we condemn those with large numbers of ELLs, IEPs, and various issues to bad ratings. The option of portfolios, or project-based learning or whatever, while it has its flaws, may prove beneficial.  This may work better for teachers I know who got acceptable ratings by supervisors but were dragged down via test scores. Mulgrew can stand on his pedestal and preach of how rarely this happens, but if you're the one to whom it happens, that's cold comfort indeed. As someone who represents them, I can tell you that statistics mean little or nothing to people whose careers are under attack for no good reason. The fewer people caught in this miserable trap, the better.

The Bad--Again, this system has never been tested anywhere. There is no research whatsoever, anywhere, to suggest there is any validity to it. We have no idea what will happen to teachers like those I mentioned above (or whether it will adversely effect those who previously did well). I  certainly hope fewer of them are caught in the junk science web. But even if that happens, it doesn't argue to the validity of this system. It only means it sucks a little less than the other one.

UFT failed utterly to address a major issue with teachers I speak to on a regular basis, to wit, the number of observations.  Even in my school, one in which most administrators are not insane, teachers live in dread of the random drive-by. For those with administrators who are out of their frigging minds, it's a nightmare. Who knows what they see, since objective reality plays no part in it? When 12 hands go up, why do they see only two? Will they now act because you objected to the counseling memo placed in your file for no good reason? Who knows? It's the same crapshoot it was under the old S/ U system, Danielson means nothing, and even if you have incontrovertible video evidence you can't effectively object to the fictional aspect until and unless you're up for 3020a.

Fewer observations would not only relieve some of the terror of UFT members, but would also give administrators some incentive not to be assholes. If you observed two classes and found them to be OK, you'd be finished. If you wanted to be an asshole and ruin someone's life for no reason, a better system would require you to do more observations and more work. It would require you to do more writing. In my experience, supervisors who are incompetent at writing often need to assert themselves via bad observations. A system that required more work to screw people might dissuade that.

The Ugly--I call it the "UFT Leadership's" system because working teachers had no say in it. That's a disgrace. It behooves a union, particularly one whose dues will soon be optional, to consider member voices.

I have no idea who conceived of this system. I don't believe it was Michael Mulgrew because he cannot even sit through an Executive Board meeting, let alone hear new ideas or freely discuss them with elected high school Executive Board members. What I do know is that neither the Executive Board nor the Delegate Assembly, let alone rank and file, got to vote on these matters. I also know that no one who hasn't signed a loyalty oath had any part in crafting this plan. We can therefore never know whether anything but self-interest had any part in the decision to accept it.

We also now know the utterly predictable reaction to evaluation systems from our enemies. They wasted no time in getting their message out. From the Daily News:

"This is a scheme to rate every teacher effective, cooked up by Mayor de Blasio's biggest donors and it's a major setback for students," said StudentsFirstNY Executive Director Jenny Sedlis.

Of course, like everything that comes out of her well-compensated mouth, this is utter nonsense. But it's important because when StudentsFirstNY, and DFER, and Moskowitz agent Families for Excellent Schools, and all the other crabgrass orgs move suitcases full of cash into the campaign coffers of tinhorn politicians like Governor Andrew Cuomo, they move him to once again pretend he cares about public education. This, in fact, is why he called the first evaluation system "baloney" and pushed a new one down the throats of our spineless Heavy Hearted Assembly. The only reason we may get away without the idiotic "outside observers" is because of the determination and persistence of the opt-out movement (which earns no respect at all from UFT leadership).

So the risk, if this helps teachers at all, is that yet another system comes down the pike to rate teachers poorly. This appears to have played no part whatsoever in UFT Unity's game, which never considers the long-term.

I guess they're happy high up on the 14th floor of 52 Broadway, doing whatever it is they do up there. But I have no idea how they're planning to pay the rent if they don't start considering those of us who do the actual work day after day.

 Mulgrew says that we'll hear about the new evaluation system any moment now. I'm going off that topic for a few paragraphs, but I promise I'll come back to it.

Our school sent 21 probationary teachers to a tenure workshop last week. They all went and listened to our superintendent, our third superintendent in three years, tell them exactly what she wanted to see in their tenure folder, or whatever it is they are supposed to do before they get it. I myself am not acutely aware because it's been a while since I got tenure. Nonetheless, I'm sure I'll be dispensing a lot of apologies if next year we get a fourth superintendent with a fourth and distinct list of demands.

In fact, it took me a lot longer to get tenure than it took my colleagues. That's because I started out as an English teacher, but spent very little time actually teaching English. My first semester I taught four preps of English, but my supervisor shortly gave me one ESL class, so that I had five preps the very first semester I ever taught. That was a pretty tough gig. I distinctly remember being asked if I'd like to teach ESL, asking, "What's ESL?" and being told, "Give it a try."

Of course I had no idea about anything regarding the UFT Contract, and my first contact with union was with the chapter leader, who approached me in the men's room, handed me a postcard and said, "Psst, wanna join the union?" At the time the principal of Lehman High School was Robert Leder, and teachers were leaving in droves. I wasn't a drove, but I left too, and in retrospect, I'm really glad I did.

Anyway, new teachers sometimes complain to me about putting together portfolios and of the extra work it entails. I tell them that I'm sorry, but they really have to do it. I know they have enough to do, and I know well how much harder it is to do the day by day of teaching when you have little to no experience. I remember spending hours after school writing lesson plans, and I also remember back then that we were required to write weekly capsule plans. I had to churn out 25 of those a week, and it was no fun at all. And then when I rejected my first English appointment and decided that I wanted to be an ESL teacher, I lost a few years toward tenure. I think I lost another waiting for the city to give a test, which was a thing back then.

Personally, I'm grateful I don't have to put together some tenure portfolio. I've paid my dues and I lived through the craziness of my first few years. I'd rather no one had to go through such nonsense, but I'm glad mine is over.

Or is it?

If we're gonna be rated by portfolios and/ or projects, we'd better polish up both of them. It's funny, right after Michael Mulgrew tells teachers he's had it with excessive paperwork, that we're gonna have to come up with portfolios, something we've never had to do. This, of course, is between meetings and PD and teacher teams and hoping not to get a drive-by observation from some Boy Wonder supervisor, we have nothing to do but collect lesson plans and put them in some folder. Thanks for filling all that free time I didn't know what to do with! What's better than more paperwork?

Who on earth knows what will be judged or by whom? Are we looking for pictures? Original ideas? Grammar? Who knows? You can't use the same old tests, because Mulgrew is against them this year. And to be clear, I'm not against tests. I'm against standardized tests, particularly those that don't measure anything resembling what I actually teach (like the one on which I was last rated).

Mulgrew speaks of "authentic" learning measures. He speaks of a great new evaluation system that, alas, none of us have ever seen. What will it be like? Of course the specifics have been top-secret so far, so I'm not privy to them. Do they consult with real working teachers who haven't signed loyalty oaths to support whatever Mulgrew tells them to? Who knows? Given my experience with UFT leadership, I suspect not.

But what if we now have to put together portfolios every year? I suppose, to someone like Mulgrew who doesn't teach and hasn't in years, that doesn't seem like much of an imposition. After all, he won't have to do it.  Nor will any of the UFT officers making the decisions. Nor will your district reps. They teach, at most, one class, and as such are exempt from the evaluation system. They get rated S or U, and have no personal stake in how it affects you or me.

And if it's not portfolios, maybe it's projects. And if you aren't rating them, someone else is. Who will that be? Only Mulgrew knows, and so far he hasn't shared it with us lowly footsoldiers.

Now I want you to imagine your 170 students, 200 if you have a sixth class, or up to 500 if you're a PE teacher on an alternate day schedule. There you are with your 170-500 portfolios, or maybe one big old portfolio containing continually updated records of your 170-500 students, and you now have to not only find a place to physically keep them, but you also have to monitor them and check that whatever the hell it is you are supposed to produce is in there. Sounds like fun, doesn't it? And if you're a probationer, you also have whatever they want from you for tenure to handle. Of course they could be digital, which means you'd store them on DOE computers, and as someone who uses them regularly, even with a Mac genius tech guy in my building, I say good luck with that.

Mulgrew also talks about teacher-created tests being used, but discusses how teachers grading their own tests is ridiculed. I have no idea what on earth he envisions, or what the geniuses sitting around 52 envisioned for him, but here's what I know for sure--it's not based on science, research, or practice. UFT leadership has a decades-long history of bad decisions and worsening working conditions for teachers. Every time I think morale has bottomed out, some new and baseless directive comes down the pike to make it seep even lower.

By the end of the week, or maybe even today, we will know what monstrosity Mulgrew has in mind. Again, he won't be rated by it and neither will any UFT officers, district reps, or special reps. If they teach at all, they're still rated on the old S and U system, you know, the one that didn't cause teachers to have nervous breakdowns and heart attacks. Though they claim to hate that system, they in fact negotiated so that they themselves would be rated by it anyway, because leadership.

And also because in today's UFT, some animals are still more equal than others.

I was at a chapter leader meeting last week where I got the impression that there would be no agreement on a new evaluation system for next year. Of course that could change, but it's hard for me to imagine how it could change for the better.

I got up and said that evaluating teachers via test scores was junk science, and that the American Statistical Association said that teachers influenced test scores by a factor of 1 to 14%. One UFT  person said she was sure that her teaching influenced the kids. I didn't dispute that, actually. I'm sure it does, and I'm sure mine does too. I'm just not sure it influences their standardized test scores. In fact, the standardized test my kids take, the NYSESLAT, has little or nothing to do with English acquisition, which I encourage and foster. My kids did well on it last year, but I'm inclined to think it has more to do with the fundamental lack of validity of the test than anything I may have done.

Another UFT person challenged me to come up with an ideal rating system on the spot. I thought that was a pretty silly response. It reminded me of climate change deniers. Well, you come up with a better way to improve the environment than rampantly polluting the air and water and hoping for the best.

The real challenge is to come up with a worse way to rate teachers, and that, in fact, was precisely what Governor Andrew Cuomo set out to do. The system we work under, in case it's escaped your attention, was designed to more easily fire teachers. When it failed to do that, Cuomo famously labeled his own system "baloney" and set out on a path to send as many of us as possible toward destitution and ruin. That's his vision of advocacy for children. And the Democrats in the Assembly voted with "heavy hearts" to support it. UFT President Michael Mulgrew, for reasons that elude me utterly, thanked them for this.

There are other flaws in this system. One is the number of required observations. It's simply not necessary to observe every single teacher in the building that many times. We were lucky in that the principals' union advocated for four rather than six. But that's still too much. My principal says he gets a very good idea of what's going on in classrooms by observing from the hall and I believe him. In the year I spent doing hallroom patrol I got a very strong impression where things were going right and wrong, and I'm not trained to observe classes at all.

I think a principal or AP could observe teachers once a year, and if there were no problems otherwise recorded that would be enough. If, in fact, the observation did not go well, that would be an indication that the supervisor ought to support the teacher in question with further visits and advice. In fact, teachers in need of help get less of it because supervisors, in my building at least, are swamped visiting thirty or forty teachers four times a year. My friend James Eterno, however, informs me that the state law sets two observations as a minimum, so that's the best we can do. And if it is, I have no idea why we'd go for more. It's a waste of time and effort, and it demoralizes teachers to no end.

Of course I'm not Reformy John King, who Michael Mulgrew trusted to have the final word on our system. Though it's been refined somewhat, it's still his baby. I believe Geoff Decker wrote in Chalkbeat that neither the DOE nor the UFT wanted this much observation. If UFT is negotiating anything, I hope they're working toward reducing this number. It's a great time to give teachers something to be grateful for, what with Donald Trump and his Billionaire Swamp threatening to envelop us and all working Americans in toxic sludge.

Of course I'm not privy to the inside workings of UFT. I'm on the Executive Board, but those of us not on the dais are just the outside looking in. Ideally we should just sit there and question nothing, but they're now faced with the inconvenience of high school teachers having elected seven people who haven't signed loyalty oaths.

I think it's healthy for the union to have us there, and it amazes me to sit there while people roll their eyes and curse us out for having the temerity to ask questions. We are teachers, and it behooves us to ask questions and set an example. But up is down and right is left in America today, and sadly leadership make no exception for the United Federation of Teachers.

There is no question whatsoever, despite frequent assertions otherwise from leadership, that the evaluation system is the most demoralizing thing that's come down the pike in decades. In fact, it's specifically intended to be that way. I heard directly from a UFT Unity member that the "norming" exercises this year were directly meant to have supervisors give lower ratings. So don't believe all that crap about how a rubric makes everything equal or fair.

If UFT wants to do something to help and support those of us on the ground who actually do the work, it will push relentlessly for fewer observations. It will give those of us who teach some little thing for which to show gratitude when Donald Trump and his band of corporate goons make this country "right to work" until we rightly take it back.

Over at Ednotes Online, a bold Unity Caucus member is making anonymous comments to the effect that CTU has been assimilated and resistance is futile. CTU voted as a bloc, and therefore, with no evidence whatsoever, this commenter declares that we are stranded, alone, and that things are hopeless. That's a wholly ironic vision because a whole lot of teachers in NYC feel the same way.

They feel this way because they're caught in a vindictive and unreasonable system. UFT Unity would like you to forget that the new rating system was ushered in by a law their leader, Michael Mulgrew, proclaimed he had a hand in writing. This law made junk science 40% of teacher ratings. Andrew Cuomo loved this, until not enough teachers got fired. He then pushed another law that made junk science 50% of teacher rating. Mulgrew likes this because, he says, this gives less power to administrators.

When we in MORE openly oppose junk science, Mulgrew's people make up nonsense, saying that we want principals to have 100% discretion over evaluations. That's what's called a strawman fallacy. When you can't address your opponent's argument, you just change it, and try to make your opponent address the argument you just invented. It's ridiculous. What we say is that teachers ought not to be evaluated by invalid criteria. In fact, a vindictive administrator could make stuff up and sink a teacher based on observation alone. I have seen video evidence of administrators simply fabricating what happened in classrooms.

Mulgrew argues that more teachers have their ratings brought up by test scores than brought down. That's fine if you fall into that category. But I personally know someone whose rating was brought down to ineffective via test scores alone. If I know one person, there are plenty more. There's an old tenet of English law called Blackstone's Formulation, that says:

It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.

In American parlance, that means you are innocent until proven guilty, and that is the bedrock of American justice.  Another portion of the Mulgrew-endorsed agreement is that teachers, twice judged ineffective and confirmed so by the UFT Rat Squad, are guilty until proven innocent. I have actually seen UFT Unity people defend this, saying teachers should own the process. What this tells me is that those people will say any damn thing to defend their actions, whether or not said actions are beneficial to UFT members. When your core value is justifying what your caucus has done rather than representing members to the best of your ability, there's something very very wrong.

UFT Unity has no problem smearing opt-out based on outright lies to justify their position. They'd
would like to portray us as a bunch of lunatics who run around screaming for no reason. Now anyone who knows me, including my students, will tell you that I don't do that. I scream for effect, to grab or focus attention. My tendency when angry in the classroom is to be very quiet and think about how to fix things. I let the children scream while I figure out the best way of dealing with it. My default is certainly not screaming mode. 

I was elected by the high school teachers of NYC to represent them, and that I will do. What I see is a lot of uncertainly and misery, and that is fostered by ridiculous policies that benefit no one but reformies who hate union and wish to see it eradicated. What I see is a leadership that supports mayoral control, charter schools, colocation, and an erosion of seniority benefits. I see a leadership content to offer 20,000 high school teachers no representation whatsoever in NYSUT, NEA or AFT. I see a leadership that offers ATRs no representation anywhere at all.

I see a leadership that lives in a virtual fishbowl, communication only with people who've signed oaths to support them. I see a leadership that fails to engage rank and file. I see a President who shuns social media but musters the audacity to urge the rest of us to use it as he instructs us. I see a top-down model that criticizes top-down models and perceives no irony whatsoever in doing so.

And now I see seven voices on an Executive Board of 102 who will speak truth to bureaucracy, to reforminess. I'm proud to be part of this long overdue breath of fresh air in Dracula's castle over at 52 Broadway. They can continue to raise petty objections and indulge in juvenile nonsense behind our backs, but they will find the truth in their faces at the Executive Board and elsewhere.

To maintain that we do this simply to be contrary is another strawman. It would be so much easier to simply join Unity, go on free trips, and get some cool union gig in some office somewhere. But someone has to represent the people in the trenches, the people subject to the APPR endorsed by Michael Mulgrew. If he says this is the best of all possible worlds, every single one of his loyalty oath signers is bound to say, "Yes Mike that's absolutely correct.

In fact it's absolutely wrong, and the misery of people doing the work is palpable. Someone needs to be the voice of these people. Right now we are that voice. I'm very proud to represent my long-neglected brothers and sisters, and I will try to work with UFT Unity to do that. If they wish to move forward rather than indulge in petty nonsensical squabbles, I'm happy to do that too.

Time will tell whether or not they are up to the task.

It looks like Governor Cuomo's plan of painting targets on the backs of all teachers has not worked out as well as planned in NY State. Evidently there is a shortage, and to ease it, the geniuses in Albany are relaxing standards. Their thinking, evidently, is people from other states will be anxious for the chance to judged by Governor Cuomo's matrix, and potentially be guilty until proven innocent. After all, there aren't many opportunities like that in the United States.

Another point of view, of course, is that Governor Cuomo is bought and paid for by Eva Moskowitz's BFFs at Families for Excellent Schools, and that he pretty much jumps at their beck and call. Maybe that's why he was so happy to appear at Ms. Moskowitz's field trip, you know, the one where she boarded all her students on buses and dragged them to Albany to lobby for her own political cause. If you or I did that, we'd be fired. But of course we didn't, so that's not why there's a teacher shortage.

There's a teacher shortage because we're tired of being used as punching bags. We're tired of being vilified in the press, and by every tinhorn politician that takes suitcases of cash from DFER and FES. We're tired of hearing people like Cuomo enact rating plans to fire teachers, call them "baloney" when they fail to fire enough teachers, and revise them for the express purpose of firing more. We're tired of being judged by test scores which the American Statistical Association correctly asserts have little or no validity.

We're tired of being told the only way to teach is like this, like that, or like whatever Bill Gates wakes up and decides children other than his own must be taught. We're tired of endless testing and being forced to teach nonsense that does not help our children. We're tired of underlying assumptions by people with no credentials or credibility that the children we serve lack "grit" and must be treated with "rigor."

I'm particularly tired of so-called leaders who create problems and then try to solve them in ways that don't address the problems at all. When I started teaching, pay was particularly low. The city didn't bother addressing the huge disparity in pay between the city and surrounding suburbs. Instead, there were ads in the subways and on buses to try to attract teachers. There were intergalactic recruiting campaigns. It turned out, though, that people from other countries and universes just couldn't afford to live in NYC.

And then, of course, there is the issue of quality. I was one of the people who saw a subway ad and took a teaching gig. I had no idea what I was doing. On my ninth day of teaching, my supervisor wrote me up and said I had no idea what I was doing. But I had told her I had no idea what I was doing when she hired me. To this day I wonder why she expected more. She wrote that I should try to be more "heuristic" when I taught. Naturally that cleared up everything for me. Doubtless with excellent advice like that every teacher will become instantly excellent, no matter how much they raise or lower the standards.

Cuomo is an empty suit, with loyalty to no one but Cuomo. He just said he won't support his party in its effort to retake the State Senate. This is they guy Hillary's people have representing the DNC for New York. He has no moral center whatsoever, does whatever the people who pay him say, and happily supports whatever the privatizers tell him to. And, oh, if the people rise up and say screw your ridiculous tests, he can always make some empty gesture, like a partial moratorium, and say, "See? I care what you think, sort of."

This is step one in addressing a teacher shortage created by Albany. There will be more. But until they start listening to teachers and learning why people no longer pursue this job, they will be empty gesture after empty gesture, likely helping no one but those who see education as an opportunity for profit.

It's kind of amazing that Shari Lederman won her case challenging her junk science rating. I mean, junk science is the thing that Bill Gates staked his reputation as a self-appointed expert on. Not only that, but President Barack Obama and his Education Stooge Arne Duncan tied junk science rating to Race to the Top, and forced it down the throats of cash-starved states.

I mean, sure, the American Statistical Association says teachers are responsible for 1-14% of student test scores, and sure, we do more than show kids how to pass tests, but when DFER gives all that money to a candidate, they expect results. And they certainly got them, along with Common Core and charter schools and all that other great stuff.

The question, really, is why Shari Lederman had to do this on her own dime. I mean, why didn't NYSUT stake her? Why did her husband have to do the whole case pro bono? What about all the other teachers rated by this nonsense who suffered for no reason? I know a teacher who was rated ineffective only because of test scores, but she hasn't got a lawyer for a husband. Is NYSUT or UFT going to jump to her aid?

Well, not hardly. Michael Mulgrew boasted of having helped write the law that enabled this junk science. Did he really do it? Who knows? And what difference does it really make? He was proud of it. And he still boasts about the 700 teachers who got ineffective ratings last year. I can tell you for a fact that not one of them shares his joy, and that the consequences of this rating are far more severe than that of the unsatisfactory rating. After all, in 70% of the cases, the state no longer has to prove these teachers are incompetent. These teachers have to prove they are not incompetent, and how the hell they do that I have no idea.

And even as Mulgrew boasts of how few teachers are being rated ineffective, he thanked Cuomo's Heavy Hearted Assembly for passing a new APPR designed to rate even more teachers ineffective. And what has NYSUT and UFT done to help teachers like Shari Lederman?

Nada. Zip. Diddly squat. Why the hell aren't our leaders footing the bills of teachers wishing to challenge these ratings?

Well, they have other priorities. The UFT has to pay millions to transfer 800 living rubber stamps to conventions several times a year. I think they're going to Minneapolis this year. I don't suppose they'll have Bill Gates as keynote again, as he lives pretty far away and probably doesn't want to strain himself.

But honestly, why shouldn't UFT get in the business of helping poorly rated teachers lawyer up? I mean, sure they supported junk science, and it was a great victory, but why not oppose junk science and make that a great victory too? I remember well when that mean old Michael Bloomberg wanted to judge us by only 7 components of Danielson but we held out for all 22. I remember the subsequent great victory when we got it reduced to 8. There was the great victory when UFT demanded artifacts, and another when we didn't have them anymore.

Then there was the great victory of the UFT transfer plan, and the subsequent great victory when excessed UFT members became ATRs. There was the great victory when we won Common Core, and the great victory when we were suddenly against it and no longer threatening to beat the crap out of those who opposed it.

So let's get with the program and get on the right side of things. Most teachers can't afford the prolonged and costly lawsuits it will take to bring sanity to New York State law. Randi Weingarten is praising the Lederman decision. She's the big cheese, right? So let's put our money where her mouth is and back up working teachers.

Problem is, at every DA I go to, Mulgrew defends junk science, saying it subtracts from the judgment of principals. But if the judgment of principals is so bad that a crap shoot improves it, the problem is the principals. Let's stop pussyfooting around, lobby for principals who are not insane, and get off the junk science train once and for all.

I've read and heard a lot from Michael Mulgrew and his Unity Caucus about how fabulous the new teacher evaluation system is. Obviously Mulgrew cannot be bothered lowering himself to mix with rank and file teachers who haven't signed his caucus loyalty oath or he'd be hearing a different song altogether. But they have their talking point set, and they're sticking with it.

This is the talking point--if you oppose the junk science/ Danielson system, you therefore want to place 100% of the rating power in the hands of principals. The junk science somehow mitigates the principal evaluation even though it's largely a crap shoot. So, therefore, ipso facto, shut up and stop complaining. That shut up and stop complaining theme is very popular among Unity folk. It's pretty much their greatest hit, and I've personally been hearing them sing it since 2005.

But then along comes Michael Mulgrew's BFF, Carmen Fariña, and she's singing another song altogether. In fact, she's talking about "purging bad teachers," counseling them out or firing them, whatever it takes. Now this runs counter to the Mulgrew talking point. Mulgrew says only 700 teachers were rated ineffective this year, as opposed to 2,000 unsatisfactories under the previous system. We are, therefore, supposed to spring up on our hind legs and applaud wildly.

The problem is, though, that teachers don't much feel like applauding. Teachers feel the Sword of Damocles over our heads. We feel tremendous pressure to do all sorts of things that may or may not benefit our students. We worry that we will be fired for no reason. While Mulgrew can boast about the wonders of junk science and how it mitigates the judgment of those awful principals, I personally know a great, smart young teacher who was rated ineffective last year solely on the basis of test scores. Had this teacher not moved schools last year, another such rating could've led to a dismissal hearing.

On one issue, I think Mulgrew is right. A lot of supervisors are incompetent. I know plenty of people working for various Boy Wonders, and their lives are a misery. I mean, if you're a vindictive, small-minded, self-serving narcissist, it's unlikely you'll inspire great work, let alone enable or encourage it. And the fact is teachers with figurative guns to their heads are not likely to be of the very best service to children we serve.

But here's a fun fact--Mulgrew and his Unity Caucus have done absolutely nothing to improve the quality of administrators. It doesn't seem all that well-known that it's the  job of administrators to help teachers improve. Adminstrators seem shocked when I bring that up at meetings. Rather than help those who need it, adminstrators walk around checking off boxes and consigning teachers to Danielson hell. I know supervisors I very much doubt could perform better than the teachers they relentlessly criticize. People driven by ambition rather than care for what they do are not necessarily "effective." Those who rose in the ranks to "escape the classroom" weren't good teachers, and can't be good leaders of teachers either.

I question whether Fariña, who is on a mission to fire rather than support teachers, is really contributing either. It's pretty well known that this was her MO when she was a principal, but the fact is she not only selected the teachers, but the kids as well, rejecting 6 of 7 applicants.  I am unimpressed with those who lead highly selective schools and then boast of their results. For those of us who teach in community schools and serve everyone, it's apples and oranges. If Fariña, or Moskowitz, or anyone reformy wishes to impress me, let them go to Detroit and work their magic on a crumbling school full of high-needs kids.

Until they do that, this whole blaming the teachers thing isn't going to make me jump up and down, let alone actually help children. And as long as Fariña is trying to fire her way to the top, Mulgrew's happy talk isn't going to resonate with those of us on the front lines. Maybe it's time for Mulgrew himself to be "counseled out," and turn over the reigns of our union to a working teacher.

If you're happy with how things have been going, you can vote for Michael Mulgrew and his gang of 800 loyalty oath signers. You can let them know you love being under a microscope. You can tell them you love being judged by a rubric, and it makes no difference to you whether or not supervisors even understand it. You can tell them it's swell that you can't address supervisory fabrication in observations until and unless you receive an ineffective rating.

You can tell them you're pleased they failed not once, but twice to oppose autocratic billionaire Michael Bloomberg as he bought Gracie mansion. You can pat them on the back for supporting his mayoral control not only at its inception, but also after it was proven to be an abject disaster. You can thank them for not only supporting charter schools, but also for creating and even co-locating them.

You can let UFT Unity and Michael Mulgrew know that you have no problem with their sitting on their hands as Joel Klein established a Leadership Academy and trained a small army of administrators to paint targets on the backs of working teachers. You can tell them you approve of being judged by test scores of students you may or may not even teach. You can let them know that you think it's a great idea to be judged on what Diane Ravitch and the American Statistical Assiciation regard as junk science.

You can pat UFT Unity on the back for having handed you a contract that ushered in second tier due process for ATR teachers, the most vulnerable among us. You can tell them you're pleased to wait until 2020 for the raise that NYPD, FDNY and most city workers got in 2009. You can say, "Thank you sir, may I have another?" as they make teachers on leave wait at least two years to get the small portion of retro pay we received a few months ago.

In fact, you can thank them for their failure to actively support or promote opt-out. You can listen to Mulgrew take credit for the cosmetic changes Cuomo proposed, the ones that were actually inspired by opt-out activists like those in this video, Jia Lee, Lauren Cohen, and Kristin Taylor. You can pretend that Cuomo is afraid of Mulgrew instead of the vibrant grassroots opt-out movement that has tabloids all over the state in a frenzy.

On the other hand, you may wish to support the future, and you may wish to repudiate the reforminess that has infected and degraded not only our profession, but also the education of our children. That's what I'm going to do, and I'm going to do so by voting for not only Jia Lee for UFT President, but also the entire coalition of MORE/ New Action. I'm tired of being told that black is white, that hot is cold, that day is night.

If you are too, you will join me in demanding fundamental change in our union. MORE/ New Action has a slate of hundreds of activists who will stand up for what we know to be right. That's why I'm proud to be running with them. Vote for them, vote for me, and vote for a long-needed new direction in our union, the United Federation of Teachers. 

Last weekend I went to a chapter leader training in Rye, NY. To the left you can see a view from my room. It was really very nice, and you can never know too much. It turns out I'd been through quite a bit of what was discussed, though I picked up a few things here and there.

At the plenary on Saturday morning, Michael Mulgrew got up and said that some people wanted to have principals have total control over teacher ratings. I was pretty surprised that he had given that no thought whatsoever, spouting out the same nonsense I’ve seen on Twitter. Once again he went to the numbers, that there were 2,000 poorly rated teachers then and are only 700 now.

Mulgrew clearly wasn’t concerned about burden of proof shifting from the DOE to teachers. Like everyone else I’ve seen spouting the Unity talking point, he didn’t even seem to recall that part. What’s the big deal about people being guilty until proven innocent? What’s the big deal if few 3020a hearings used to be resolved in favor of the city, and there’s a strong possibility that few future ones will be resolved in the favor of teachers.

Mulgrew did share some pearls of wisdom. “You can’t go on TV if your head is shining way too much.” That got a laugh from most of the crowd, but having heard him make a clear slander against people I work with and respect, I wasn’t laughing so quickly.

Mulgrew spoke of Karen Lewis, and of how, according to him she asked, “Mulgrew, can you imagine Rahm Emanuel being the good guy against the governor” He said it would be like us saying Bloomberg was a good guy.

I guess he forgot about Randi going to the baseball game with Bloomberg, or Klein hugging Randi (if it were me I’d have washed my whole body with Brillo pad) or that we approved Bloomberg's mayoral control not only at its inception, but also after it was pretty much well-established to have been an abject disaster. Maybe he forgot that we approved the ATR, or the raises that weren’t really raises because we worked more time to get more money. And let’s forget about the miserable deal he himself negotiated with a mayor we deemed to be friendly.

Then he spoke about the success of a school that had given up the “top-down craziness.” I, for one, am not a strong supporter of “top-down craziness,” and that’s precisely why I won’t be voting for Michael Mulgrew and his loyalty oath-signing band of 800. Mulgrew spoke about how so many principals made so many demands, and how people complied, but with no real passion. Of course he’s right.

But my passion comes from within. That’s why I can’t join Unity. Who the hell wants to be part of a group that’s as top-down as the principals Mulgrew criticizes? Well, 800 or more, evidently. Thanks, but I’ll take James Eterno. Thanks but I’ll take Jia Lee, and Lauren Cohen, and Mike Schirtzer, and Jonathan Halabi, and Kit Wainer.

Mulgrew asks what we can do for the chapter leader. For my money, he can liberate them. He can stop tying them to a failed philosophy and requiring them to support any damn thing he feels like. Now I didn’t get up and say that, and maybe that’s on me.

But even more telling, to me at least, was at one of the final sessions. I was sitting with a bunch of mostly Unity chapter leaders who were astounded that I had over thirty years and wasn't planning to retire. Several spoke of the 25/55 initiative of a few years back. One looked longingly back to it, wishing he had joined up. He said, "At the time, I had no idea this profession was going to s**t."

You know, if even the Unity chapter leaders know what we're feeling, it's almost inconceivable that folks like Mulgrew have managed to not to see it. I guess if you're a chapter leader, teaching every day and talking to working UFT members, you can't really avoid it. But it kind of makes you wonder how Mulgrew can thank the Heavy Hearts for making our system even worse.

How do you sign a loyalty oath to Unity and publicly espouse positions you know firsthand to be untrue?

I actually blogged something very close to this a few days ago, but after hearing Mulgrew harp on it at the DA, after hearing it was mentioned before I showed up at a CL meeting, and after seeing tweets like the one below, I'm gonna address it directly.

.@morecaucusNYC You want principals to have total control over eval? We disagree. ref="https://twitter.com/Unity_Today">@Unity_Today

— UFT Unity (@UFTUnity) March 24, 2016

First of all, this is a strawman, a logical fallacy. I have never, ever heard anyone from MORE say they want principals to have total control over evaluation. What MORE says is precisely what Diane Ravitch does, to wit, that teachers ought not to be rated by junk science. And that, frankly, is the only thing there is other than principal evaluations.

The other Unity talking point, one some Unity person threw at me on Twitter earlier today, is that there are only 700 double I rated teachers, down from 2,000 U rated teachers. I suppose that is from the last year they have records, but who really knows where they get that stuff from? Anyway, let's suppose they are correct. There is still a problem here.

Back in the bad old days when the principal had total control over evaluation, when that nasty principal sought to remove you via 3020a he had to prove you were incompetent. He had to make a case and demonstrate before an arbitrator that the stuff he wrote had validity. And that was a tough mountain to climb. That was why those mean old principals were so rarely successful.

Under the plan that Unity wants us to fall in love with, a double I-rated teacher has to prove he is not incompetent. That's a tough mountain to climb too, except it will be you climbing it instead of the principal. Now sure, there is the UFT Rat Squad, and if they say you're doing a swell job, the burden of proof will revert back to the principal. In fact, Unity will proudly declare they do just that 30% of the time. So what does that mean?

That means that 70% of the time, UFT teachers have the burden of proof on them. Compare that to the S-U system, when that happened precisely zero percent of the time.  And if that isn't enough, under the new Cuomo education law, the one the UFT declined to oppose, the one Mulgrew thanked the legislature for passing, we may not even get the dubious benefit of the UFT Rat Squad. Mulgrew says he's working on it, but as his caucus misrepresents MORE's position, it also condemns "small locals." That's code for Stronger Together, the new caucus in NYSUT that opposes the reformy nonsense Mulgrew and his BFFs have enabled for us.

And again, that non-principal evaluation stuff that Unity seems so proud of? It's VAM junk science. The American Statistical Association has determined that teachers move test scores by a factor of 1-14%. Yet in our evaluations, it counts 40%, and next year could count 50. And who knows? Maybe they help you out. In my high-performing school, I have seen members brought up from developing to effective, particularly the first year. It appears to me the supervisors wised up somewhat the second year, though, and started giving lower ratings to that lucky few. I could be wrong. But what difference does it make whether I am or not when our ratings are largely based on a crapshoot?

I know a person from another school who got an ineffective rating due solely to test scores. She was not precisely doing a jig over the new system. I'm sure she's not the only one. But if she is, she is one too many.

I am personally flabbergasted that this is the best talking point the highly compensated minds at Unity could muster. Back to the drawing board, fellas.

I just read a retweet from Randi Weingarten. It was some teacher in Texas (or somewhere) who voted for Hillary and wrote about how proud she was that her union had endorsed Hillary. Now that's fine. You can be proud of anything or anyone you want, and as long as you don't try to shove it down my throat I won't give you any grief about it.

Here's the thing, though. I represent the largest school in Queens, one of a handful of the largest schools in the largest district in the country. I was not asked who I wanted AFT to represent, and I don't know a single other person who was either. I'm told there was a scientific survey, but I'm not sure exactly what it means. For one thing, I haven't seen a single question on this survey, and for another I have no idea exactly what sort of science we're discussing here. Is it the same kind that rounds out my teacher rating?

And who exactly filled out this scientific survey? Again, not I or anyone I know. In fact, time after time I read survey reports saying teachers support Common Core, or Hillary, and I wonder why the surveys show that teachers support whatever leadership does. Personally, I can't think of a single working teacher who supports Common Core. I know some very smart teachers who've found ways to deal with it and ways to help their students do the same, but I haven't heard a word of enthusiasm about it even from them.

Months ago when AFT began its exhaustive search for whom to endorse, I was invited to be part of a conference call featuring Randi Weingarten. At this call, supposedly, we could push a button or something and get to speak our minds. I couldn't help but notice the first person who spoke was this NYS Unity guy who wrote a column about me. The guy called me a part time union leader and a part time teacher, and said I was obsessive over having lost the NYSUT race for EVP, all of which is ridiculous.

Randi, of course, posted a link to this blog (I won't), and kept it up, saying what I great blog it was. I was kind of surprised at how impressed she was by a combination ad hominem/ strawman personal attack. Nonetheless, when I pointed out to her that the characterization of me as a part time teacher/ part time unionist insulted not only me, but also every working chapter leader in the city she took it down.

Anyway, I decided whatever pearls of wisdom this NYS Unity employee had to offer were probably not worth my time, and turned it off. Of all the hundreds of people on this call, it was absolutely impossible that guy's call happened to be first by coincidence. So in Democracy, AFT style, you get in this long queue, and they call on whoever they're gonna call on.

And then there's the UFT winner-take-all system, which means anyone who disagrees with Punchy Mike Mulgrew gets no voice whatsoever in AFT or NYSUT. It was pretty obvious that AFT was gonna endorse Hillary, just as it was obvious that UFT was gonna endorse that mayoral candidate, what's his name, who told the Daily News the city just couldn't afford to give teachers the raise everyone else got.

We have a shot at changing that this May. It's usually in April, but in a typical quirk of UFT-style democracy, May happens to be when a 3.5% raise kicks in. So May it is. I'm sure that decision was made just as democratically as our decisions to endorse Hillary, to support Common Core, to support junk science ratings, to support mayoral control, and to allow Reformy John King the right to arbitrate our rating system. 

In a headline that appears to belong on The Onion, New York's own Reformy John King is "trying to repair the Obama administration's frayed relationship with teachers." This is kind of incredible. First of all, if President Obama wished to score points with teachers, he would not begin by appointing someone who appears to hate us and everything we stand for. And yes, that would be King.

In New York, King held hearings on Common Core. When he found himself criticized, the King called public school teachers and parents "special interests." He then canceled all subsequent hearings until an outraged public forced him to come out of his office and face the music. King passionately supported the miserable Common Core, and became indignant when New Yorkers asked why he placed his own children in schools that did not use it.

In one of his first major speeches as acting U.S. secretary of education, John King apologized to teachers for the role that the federal government has played in creating a climate in which teachers feel “attacked and unfairly blamed.”

It is borderline surreal to read these words. King himself championed the New York junk science rating system. It never bothered him that value-added teacher rating had no established validity. He totally ignored NY State principals who said that this was the wrong way to go. When the American Statistical Association declared that teachers affected student scores by a factor of 1-14%, King did not raise a whisper of acknowledgement.

Another disappointment is the reaction of NEA President Lily Eskelson Garcia:

“We definitely hear something new coming out of Dr. King,” she said, adding that while his words “mean a lot to us,” teachers are now interested in seeing how he backs up those words with actions.

The fact is she ought to know better. Candidate Barack Obama went to the NEA and promised to do things "with" teachers, not "to" us.  He followed that up by appointing Arne Duncan Secretary of Education, racing to the top, and imposing junk science ratings and Common Core on most of the country via a gun to its head. When Arne said Katrina was the best thing to happen to NOLA education, Obama didn't chastize him at all. When Arne made his idiotic remark about soccer moms' kids not being so smart, based on ridiculous Common Core tests, Obama said nothing.

Making John King Duncan's successor was a slap in the face to working teachers. It's very disappointing neither Eskelson Garcia nor Weingarten would come right out and say so. Of course, they're both busy campaigning for Hillary Clinton, who has promised to close any school that isn't "above average."

King would have us entirely forget his own tenure in New York and make believe we trust him. I certainly hope we aren't stupid enough to fall for that.

Lohud reports there are 13,000 fewer teachers in NY State than there were five years ago.  I know there are thousands fewer teachers in NYC alone, though I can't say offhand just how much of that figure it represents. We know that in NYC, Emperor Bloomberg had a habit of allowing teacher ranks to drop through attrition. Retiring? Fine. One more person I don't have to pay, figured Emperor Mike, and screw the inevitable larger class sizes they'd cause.

For the rest of the state, there is the Gap Elimination Adjustment, which Cuomo now proposes to end, but which has still cut state aid for drastically for many districts since 2009. Couple that with the Cuomo's tax cap of 2% or the rate of inflation, whichever is lower (a measly .12% this year, if I recall correctly), and districts all over the state are strung out for cash. Cuomo, who fancies himself a "student lobbyist" has set it up so districts need a super-majority to aid their children. This, in fact, gives more power to those who'd deny students than those who'd support them, let alone "lobby" for them.

Cuomo gives lip service to moves he's made toward a less insane system, like his so-called moratorium on Common Core testing. This is much ballyhooed not only by Cuomo, but also by UFT leadership, which placed it on the cover of the most recent copy of NY Teacher. In fact, this affects only the scores on state ELA and math tests in grades 3-8, so for most of us, it's meaningless. In fact, it's not even clear whether these scores are entirely not going to be counted in future years.

With all teachers about to be rated 50% via test scores, an entirely invalid measure, it's getting harder to encourage newcomers to go for this job. We now know that we are to be observed by "independent" observers, since of course school supervisors may be prejudiced in favor of the people with whom they work. What an outrage. This follows, of course, the state's brilliant move not to allow teachers to grade their own students. After all, we're just a bunch of thieving, unscrupulous, self-serving bottom feeders who will do anything to look good. We'll never be paragons of integrity like Andrew Cuomo.

We're looking at an insane law, a law for which UFT President Michael Mulgrew thanked our Heavy Hearted Legislature, and a law which neither UFT nor NYSUT appears poised to reform. Mulgrew told us that he'd decided to focus on funding rather than reasonable evaluation. Doubtless, as he always says, he has very smart people with very smart reasons why we should not fight the increase in junk science evaluation for working teachers.

So while UFT declares victory on the cover of NY Teacher, we're looking at yet another evaluation system. This is becoming an annual event in NYC. Once you get a little bit used to the nonsense used to rate you, Cuomo decides not enough of us are being fired and makes up some new and more draconian BS for the teacher-hating charter school enthusiasts who give him so much money. To try and appease the opt-out people who frighten the crap out of him, he proposes a few changes, including the "moratorium" and nebulous promises to adjust Common Core.

UFT leadership declares victory, as it always does no matter what, and opt-out promises to keep up the fight. Again, we are on the wrong side doing the wrong thing, just as we were when Mulgrew promised to punch our faces out if we touched his precious Common Core. Of course, now it's a victory that Cuomo is doing just that, and he spend $1.4 million on a commercial telling NY State what a great guy we thing Cuomo is.

It's hard for me to believe these words as I write them, but that's pretty much the way it is. It's time for our union to get on the right side of history, whether Michael Mulgrew likes it or not. Fortunately, there are teacher groups who notice this and are urging leadership toward sanity.

It makes me kind of wish the UFT election were not rigged, so that it weren't dominated by retirees, so that high school teachers could select their own VP, and so that the winner take all system didn't mean absolutely every delegate to NYSUT and AFT were a loyalty oath signer bound do do Any Damn Thing Leroy Barr Says.

But I'm a dreamer. I'm a teacher and it's my job to see potential and act on it.

Rodney Dangerfield used to have a routine about heaviness. It followed him everywhere. He'd wake up in the morning and say, "Hello, heaviness." The heaviness would answer. It would say something like, "You're gonna be drinking early today." Dangerfield, of course, felt the heaviness because he didn't get no respect.

In case you hadn't noticed, teachers don't get no respect either. So we feel the heaviness too. Administrators don't understand it. They're too busy writing up observation reports about things that may or may not have happened. It really doesn't matter, as long as they get enough of them done in a timely fashion.

And you, all you have to do is grade stacks of papers, write IEPs, consult with your co-teacher, consult with your other co-teacher, go to your teacher team, go to PD, call the parents, patrol the hall, go to meetings, keep a record so you don't lose your license, go to another school to mark papers, proctor 500 exams, grade 200 more, reflect on all you've done, ask the kids to reflect on it too, write your class midterm, analyze your department midterm, and intervisit with your colleague to show school spirit. Oh, and you have to write lesson plans. And teach the classes. Did I forget that part? Well, you'd better not.

Anyway, the heaviness. It's the Danielson rubric, don't you know. Can your 30-year-old supervisor give the highly effective lesson he expects from you every time he darkens your doorstep? Who knows? It doesn't matter. He read in the book what it is, and goddam it you'd better deliver, or you're on a one-way trip to Palookaville. What's the matter, can't you deal with a few stinking observations?

Well, here's the thing. If you have a supervisor who isn't insane, it's likely you can. But how many of you can say that? And even if you can, this system was expressly designed to get rid of lowlife teachers like you and me. Cuomo said so when Bloomberg wanted to get rid of LIFO. This will thin the herd, he suggested. Then when it didn't, he called the system "baloney," and worked to make it even worse. 50% junk science, because the current system isn't crappy enough. Wear sunglasses and dress hip because your rating is going through a matrix.

Oh, and by the way, because not only do you suck, but your supervisor also sucks for not issuing enough negative ratings, we need outside observers. That's the only way we can make sure we fire enough of those stinking teachers. And make no mistake, that's what the current system was put in place to do. The only reason the system is changing is because it wasn't doing so efficiently enough.

Are we paranoid? Perhaps. But they are out to get us, they've said so quite openly, so maybe we're reacting entirely appropriately. Still, in any case, there's the heaviness. Every day before we go to work, we say, "Hello, heaviness."

Sadly, it's gonna take a lot of work before we can say goodbye.

Michael Mulgrew is President of the United Federation of Teachers so it's only fair to assume he speaks for leadership. Despite his constant talk of victory in Cuomo's agreement to hold off using Common Core results for teacher evaluation, teachers are still going to be judged by junk science. The only difference is which tests on which we base said junk science.

Informed people, like Diane Ravitch, reject junk science. The American Statistical Association found that teachers account for only 1-14% of student scores. I'd say those who choose to ignore that are akin to climate change deniers. Yet when UFT President Michael Mulgrew is faced with objections to the new 50% junk science system, he asks if teachers want to go back to principals making choices.  In fact, that's a black and white fallacy, assuming there is only one alternative to Cuomo's 50% plan, the one for which Mulgrew thanked the Heavy Hearts Assembly. Furthermore, it's an appeal to fear, another logical fallacy. It reminds me of nothing more than Orwell's Squealer asking the animals whether they wanted Jones to come back.

This was an effective argument at the Delegate Assembly, where the overwhelming majority had signed the loyalty oath, agreeing to follow the leader no matter what. But a thinking person has to reject the argument, and not simply because it's a logical fallacy. First of all, if you accept the ASA's findings (as opposed to Cuomo's), you have to concede that this leaves half your rating up to pure chance. While it's possible the junk science could bring your rating up, it's equally possible it could drag you down. And while Mulgrew can point to people who were saved by junk science, I know people who were sunk by it. In fact one such teacher, Shari Lederman,  has literally placed junk science on trial. A colleague of mine likens depending on junk science to suggesting you go ahead and take up smoking, because maybe you won't get cancer.

More importantly, Mulgrew neglects to consider or acknowledge the flip side of his APPR agreement--the DOE no longer needs to prove teacher incompetence in these cases. Under the current agreement, if the UFT rat squad says you suck, you have to prove you are NOT incompetent. That's a huge burden of proof, one teachers are unlikely to overcome. So while Mulgrew can argue there are fewer teachers with twin bad ratings, the consequences they now face are far more dire than before. That there are fewer facing double negative rating does not mean there will be fewer people facing 3020a, or fewer who actually lose their jobs.

Mulgrew can call those of us who oppose him Chicken Little. He can say we're hysterical and illogical. He can call us names. But I know people directly affected by the APPR law he boasted about negotiating. I know the 50% Heavy Hearts Law was designed specifically to fire more teachers, and I know the notion of Firing Our Way to the Top is essentially ludicrous. The best predictor of test scores are income and degree of special needs, and as long as the politicians blame schools and teachers for such things we are not going to fix the perceived problems with test scores.

It's a shame we haven't got a President who addresses this head on. Ours, in fact, seems to prefer his head in the sand.