A young teacher I mentored for a short while landed in another school. She's kind of important to me, as I first found her utterly unable to control her classes, gave her some very specific advice, and watched her follow it precisely and instantly. It's not often I get to give someone a concept, watch it put into action quickly and decisively, and see it work well immediately. In fact, this young teacher got so good at it, she got nicknames like "The Nazi." Not ideal, I'll grant you, but she did get her classes under control.

However, the whole nazi thing did not particularly suit her. Actually, I think she may have overdone some of my advice. That particular image does not much appeal to me either.

In her new school, she's been successful with an approach I would never consider. She uses terms of endearment. "Sweetheart, please take your hat off." "Honey, I'd really appreciate it if you'd stop throwing cheeseburgers at people." And so on. Kids tell her, "No one's ever called me honey before." That's kind of sad. But true, apparently.

I've seen other women do this. I'm fairly certain if I were to do it I'd end up in whatever they use for a rubber room these days. One day, a girl who reminded me an awful lot of my teenage daughter asked me a question, and I replied, "No, sweetie, it isn't," or something to that effect, exactly what I'd have said to my daughter. And as the words exited my mouth I was thinking, "That's it. I'm going to the rubber room or something."

Fortunately for me, the girl took it exactly as I meant it, and we had no problem whatsoever. But men just can't talk like that. Not to girls, not to boys, not to anyone in the school building. Particularly egregious would be addressing administrators like that, I suppose, but on the other hand I can't recall a time I've been tempted to do so.

Yet I have seen this work for other women, including one of my very favorite colleagues. Sexist is what it is, perhaps. Or maybe men can't achieve the right tone. Or maybe we're too backward and primitive to carry off any real feeling. Then again, we could always blame Mayor Bloomberg and be done with it.

As you may remember, back in my middle-school-teaching days, I had a Teacher Data Report. I blogged about it, shrugged it off, and didn't give it much more thought.

AFT and NYSUT Presidents are on Twitter declaring that evaluation data from upcoming NY state and city evaluations is not subject to FOIL. In one respect, they are correct, and that's why your S or U ratings have not made it to the pages of fine publications like our highly respected NY Post, not to mention the Times--with "all the news that's fit to print" displaying data that its own pages state are highly flawed. Diane Ravitch tweets:

NY Times on teacher ratings: "Margin of error" is "35 percentiles in math and 53 in English, the city said." Garbage in, garbage out.

And Yoav Gonen from the Post suggests it's even worse:

Maximum margin of error for a teacher's percentile ranking on #TDRs is 75 in math and 87 in ELA

In either case, as Ravitch pointed out, your odds are worse than a coin toss. That is some pretty alarming data about the VAM junk science that has landed teachers on pages with labels like "City's Worst Teachers." A problem with VAM is not only that it is junk science, but that no form of it has ever been established not to be. Arguments that a new system will contain less junk than this one are impossible to verify, and preposterous in any case since there is no planned pilot period. Even more ridiculous, as revealed by Leo Casey on Edwize, they anticipate system will improve, though they have no basis whatsoever for that assumption, and wish to raise 20 percentage points of junk to 25. (This assumes locally negotiated 20, or consequent 15% will not consist of more junk, an assumption I'm not yet willing to make.)

Casey claims only extremely low scores will jeopardize teacher jobs, but Michael Winerip shows it's entirely possible for good teachers to get very low scores:

According to the formula, Ms. Isaacson ranks in the 7th percentile among her teaching peers — meaning 93 per cent are better...What you would think this means is that Ms. Isaacson’s students averaged 3.57 on the test the year before; they were predicted to average 3.69 this year; they actually averaged 3.63, giving her a value added of 0.06 below zero. 

 A new system may indeed be better. Or it may be worse. Or it may be better sometimes and worse other times. These are the drawbacks of using junk rather than science to make conclusions, and the fact is, under the proposed system, teacher jobs can and will depend on that.

Let me return to  FOIL. This is the ability of people or entities to request information, just as the papers did so they could release the crap data reports that have humiliated so many working teachers for no good reason. While your S or U could not be FOILed, numerical data can. VAM formulas and proposed 1-100 grades assigned to teachers are numerical data, and as such, subject to FOIL. This clearly suggests the public shaming of teachers based on junk science will be an annual event.

When you are told it will not be, remember we were also told the grades that were released would not be. While I don't think the agreement was ever a good idea, I'm not faulting UFT leadership for the release of grades. There was, in fact, an explicit agreement they would not be. But Michael Bloomberg's morally bankrupt Department of Education recognizes no rules, and after having worked to break the agreement, simply lied about it.

Here's what our unions cannot promise--that the DOE will keep its promises, even written ones. This is particularly true because the DOE cannot make promises on behalf of the Daily News, the NY Post, or even the faux liberal New York Times. In fact the DOE can ask these papers to FOIL info help them out of inconvenient promises, as we've seen this week. If these and other media outlets see fit to FOIL numerical teacher data, as included in new reports, there will be nothing we can do about it. And our First Annual Shaming is a precedent, highly likely to be repeated.

It's time to back the New York Principals and stop this in the legislature. It's time to stop appeasing anti-teacher zealots. It's time to look this thing right in the face and see it for what it is--a disaster waiting to happen.

Update: In Rupert Murdoch's rag, the witch hunts have begun.

"Bullets are only one small part of the gun," says Mike Klonsky, on whether VAM, or value-added, should be part of any evaluation system. This notwithstanding, there are various ways of looking at New York's new evaluation system, and UFT High School VP Leo Casey may not see eye to eye with Klonsky.

I'd like nothing more than to agree with Casey. This would mean that all my colleagues and I were not in danger of arbitrary and capricious dismissal based on the junk science that is VAM. In fact, I very much admired Casey's recent piece, In Bad Faith, which nailed the DOE on its abject hypocrisy in the negotiation process.

However, I tend to agree with Diane Ravitch and Principal Carol Burris that the new system is an unworkable mess. First, we're talking about VAM, which is unmitigated nonsense. Whether that constitutes 20% or 40% of teacher rating, it's still another Bill Gates-inspired voyage into the wild blue yonder that's subject to wild margins of error. Today, though the UFT assured us it would not happen, teachers all over the city will have their names and highly dubious scores published in local newspapers. This is what comes of trusting Michael Bloomberg's morally bankrupt Department of Education--and don't be surprised if it happens to every working teacher under this new scenario. In fact, there's now a precedent for it.

Furthermore, the second so-called objective measure of 20%, the part that will be negotiated locally, needs to be approved by three-year teacher and charter founder John King, who's shown no evidence he supports or understands anything other than what Gates and his corporate cronies support or understand.

An important point here is the line in the state agreement, explicitly stating, "Teachers rated ineffective on student performance based on objective assessments must be rated ineffective overall." Diane Ravitch writes:

Unless I can't read plain English, this says that the 40 percent devoted to test scores overrides the other 60 percent. In other words, 40 percent is equal to 100 percent. 

I'm as impressed by plain English as Ravitch is, and that's clear to me. Casey explicitly addresses it in the comments:

...if a teacher scores very low on both the state measure of learning and the local measure of learning — 0, 1 or 2 out of a possible 20 in both components — they will not be able to make the cut score out of the ineffective rating, no matter their score on the measures of teacher performance. Given that there are two different measures, and at least one of them can be an authentic assessment of learning rather than a standardized exam, it is hard to make a convincing argument that a teacher who scores so poorly on both measures is effective in the classroom...

Given that VAM is total crap, and we have no idea whatsoever what the remaining 20% will actually consist of, I'd argue that it's impossible to make a convincing argument a teachers scoring poorly on both measures is not effective in the classroom. In fact, we've agreed to this wacky escapade without any successful pilot program, without any idea what the tests will be, without any idea what the VAM formula will be, without any idea what the remaining 20% will be, and largely without the remotest notion of what we're getting ourselves into. We do know, however, that good teachers can get bad ratings under systems that actually exist, and that teachers were fired in DC's VAM experiment under questionable circumstances.

We also know that there is some history here--if the tabloids approve of anything we do, it's a bad deal. The last time the tabloids admired us, for a solid 5 minutes, was in 2005. We approved a contract that precluded grievance of letters in file, killed seniority transfers, and created a seemingly permanent underclass of teachers known as the Absent Teacher Reserve, or ATR. To my recollection, neither Casey nor any UFT official anticipated that Joel Klein would hire new teachers even as current ATRs lingered in limbo.

And last year, there was an agreement to preclude layoffs that entailed sending ATR teachers from school to school, week to week. At that time, multiple UFT contacts assured me there was no way the DOE had the wherewithal to actually schedule such rotations. The DOE is inept, they said, they could never do it. We now know the UFT was wrong then.

Casey is correct that there is much to be negotiated. He's right that no agreement is perfect, that there are gray areas and many things yet to be determined. It's admirable that he's out there on Edwize personally answering every single comment, few if any of which have been remotely favorable.

But I must tell you, as it's abundantly evident to me--the UFT is wrong now too. In a particularly humiliating turn of events, the New York Principals have shown themselves to be much smarter than we are. They oppose this measure, and you should too. If you do, take a moment to sign their petition.

Can we ever live down having principals analyze this thing better than we did? One thing I know for sure--it would be a lot easier without this preposterous system hanging over our heads--like the Sword of Damocles.

Sometimes it's easy to forget that we live in, or near, one of the truly great and amazing world cities. Recesses are, for me, a time to get out and explore some of the awesomeness that New York City has to offer. The downside, however, is that this often means standing in very long lines.

AFT President Randi Weingarten has an interesting article up at the AFT website. Ms. Weingarten suggests we drop our "fixation" on testing. She points out that this is not what students need, and that there are other forms of learning that will better benefit them. She even cites the President, who used his "bully pulpit" to say much the same thing at the SOTU speech.

I couldn't agree more, actually. Learning is more about doing than testing, and no one remembers, "Oh, that Miss Wormwood. Boy, could she give a multiple choice test. I lived to blacken those circles..."

Yet Barack Obama has enabled a sea of testing, first by appointing basketball expert Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education, and next by allowing his baseless programs like Race to the Top to promote testing even more. In fact he boasted about how, with a relatively small amount of federal money, he got cash-starved states to jump up and down and show just how "reformy" they really were.

And Ms. Weingarten, despite her principled opposition, supports the reelection of this President, just as she supported mayoral control and its renewal, despite its clear inability to help New York's teachers or students.

So it's hard, for me, to understand how Obama and Weingarten are opposing such programs by supporting them. It's positively Orwellian. I'd love to get behind both of them and help them achieve their professed goal of halting our testing obsession. But as long as they keep giving lip service to good ideas while energetically promoting bad ones, that's going to be very tough indeed.

Hello all! If you're a New York City teacher, you're on vacation this week as a result of that strange creature known as "midwinter recess." Hope you are enjoying your break so far. As you can see by the timestamp on this post, I am enjoying mine!

Stuyvesant teacher and blogger Gary Rubinstein had a great op-ed yesterday in the Daily News. He says that any teacher who does not receive a favorable score on "objective measures," or VAM tests must be rated ineffective in NY state. Therefore, though VAM is stated to be 40% of evaluation, it actually counts for 100, unlike any other state that's jumped on the baseless BS bandwagon.

He also says, like Michael Winerip did in more detail, that a good teacher could easily receive a bad rating. I'm now getting email from people who seem to assume I personally wrote and negotiated this law, which is pretty odd. I've explicitly opposed it for years. I can only fault the emails from the union for failing to point out that I did not. I will say, though, that the UFT's Q and A did not manage to A any of my Qs.  Rubenstein and Winerip have thus far done a much better job.

I don't think there's much credence in calling yourself a good teacher, as you're likely the least credible and most prejudiced source in the world. I will say, though, that no one has called me a bad teacher in a long time. Of course that could change if my students, none of whom are fluent in English, perform poorly on tests that have not yet been designed. However, if history is any judge, I expect they'll be designed for native speakers. Who knows what the great and powerful Regents will pay test companies to design for my colleagues who teach special education?

While I still love my job and look forward to going in every day, I've got almost 27 years in. So probably I cannot be dumped for no reason until I hit 30, and I'm grateful for that. Nonetheless, the spectre of the sword of Damocles hanging over my head, and that of every working teacher is particularly unsettling. It will not help any of us perform better, and it will not help any student learn better. There will be incredible pressure to do well on these stupid tests, and it's incredible that the President of the United States, who inspired and enabled this nonsense through Race to the Top, would have the audacity to say we need to stop teaching to the test.

Actually, NY teachers had better start teaching to the test if they wish to keep their jobs. And while I don't want to retire, that's the sort of thing that might make me do it anyway. And while I have sent my kid to public school, were she entering school this year I'd think carefully about that as well.

I don't want my kid subject to test prep 24/7. And neither does Obama, Bloomberg, or Klein. That's why they send their kids to private schools, where they avoid all the nonsense they support for other people's kids.

I'd like to see Bill Gates drink a glass of water while Arne Duncan is speaking.

From what I read, the state agreement is pretty much what was negotiated in 2010--20% state tests, 20% local or other tests, and 60% other evaluation. This will surely be a bonanza for testing companies ready to design whatever the hell it takes to extract more money from districts. And that, my friends, is business sticking its craw into education--Rupert Murdoch's wet dream. Though he'll surely want others, and with faux-Democrats like Andrew Cuomo and Barack Obama eager to please, this is not the end.

So, 20% crap, or 40% crap (and a cursory reading of Cuomo's press release has me leaning toward 40), it's all crap. And we're running headlong into a system for which tests do not exist, a formula for value-added has not been developed, and whatever it may be it will surely not work anyway, all because Bill Gates says it's a good idea. I see it all now--"watch it, you son of a bitch, don't ask me to tutor your damn kids. You could take points away from me. And don't try dumping that troubled kid in my class anymore. I have troubles of my own. If only I could persuade those losers to drop out."

And the UFT, the UFT has finally negotiated a system that utilizes an independent arbitrator. After all, it's absolutely unacceptable for the chancellor to decide, what with his having rejected 99.6% of appeals. And this is someone's job on the line. So what do we have? An agreement that 13% of appeals will be heard by an independent arbitrator. If you're not part of the 13%, you must rely on the tender mercies of whatever Bloomberg puppet happens to be chancellor. How do you make it to the lucky 13? Who decides? What sort of response does UFT expect to get from the 87% who are surely screwed?

I'm very glad I don't have to pick and choose. In my view, anyone facing loss of position ought to have due process, a fair hearing, and an unbiased arbitrator to decide. Under this agreement, 13% get it, while 87% are SOL. This does not appear to be a huge victory, particularly when you consider 20% VAM is 100% crap. Extrapolating, I can only determine that 40% VAM is 200% crap.

This morning, on my way to work, I passed a school that has been slated for...well, clearly it's been slated for something. Not closure, I don't think. Maybe turnaround. Anyway, a lot of people are unhappy about it, as you can imagine. They had a pretty sizable demonstration going on the busy street alongside the school.

All week last week we kept hearing about spirit week. There was a Harry Potter Day, some other stuff, and a Bad Teacher Day. They announced them every day. I wondered what the hell Bad Teacher Day was, but I don't wear costumes to work, so I ignored it. Then some of my colleagues started asking me about it.

"What the hell is Bad Teacher Day? Isn't that a terrible idea?"

It occurred to me that it was indeed a bad idea, so we started asking various administrators, who were as mystified as we were. Finally we decided to go right to the top, almost, and asked the APO. She looked at us as though we were nuts, and said, "It's not Bad Teacher Day. It's Banned T-Shirt Day."

So we were relieved, somewhat. We told some of the administrators, and then they started getting upset. "Why are we encouraging banned t-shirts? Who knows what sort of things kids will be wearing?"

They were pretty agitated, and we spoke to the to the APO again.

"No," she said. "It isn't banned t-shirts, B-A-N-N-E-D. It's BAND t-shirts, B-A-N-D. You know, you could wear your Led Zeppelin t-shirt."

I don't have a Led Zeppelin t-shirt, so it did not fundamentally affect my life style. But it's amazing how poorly we managed to communicate. I mean, there we were, on verge of a revolution and stuff, and only because a bunch of kids wanted to wear Justin Bieber.

I'll bet wars have been started over less.

...for every time I had to tell a kid to take his/her (usually his) hood or hat off, I'd be retired already. I've already had to do it today, in fact.

When you decide to arbitrarily take control from educators, and re-assign it to self-professed experts, you run into problems. Take, for example, these shining stars in Philadelphia. They observed a classroom,  saw a reading corner, labeled it "clutter," and had it removed. Sure, that's blatant idiocy. Yet who's to say those who most influence faux-Democrat Barack Obama are not equally deluded?

Now that there's a mania for evaluation processes, no one bothers to look at what they imply. It appears many of them simply assign principals to perpetual observations.

...what amounts to 20 times the number of observations previously required for veteran teachers - including those she knows are excellent - sometimes to the detriment of her other duties. 

Doesn't sound like such a swell job to me. Wasting the time of principals is hardly going to make our schools improve. Worse, the actual systems are untested and unproven. While we know already that value-added has wild margins of error, and results in dismissals of those who might indeed be very good teachers, we have no idea how, if at all, these systems will benefit anyone other than the corporatists who want to fire teachers.

The article discusses a video:

"At the very end, it shows a little kid on this airplane looking out and smiling," he says.


"But this system has not been tested, has not been tried. I'm not willing to put my kid on board this plane." 

Yet corporatist pawn Arne Duncan has no issue whatsoever with it. He has no problem experimenting with your kids or mine. Barack Obama, enabler-in-chief, sends his kids to schools with small classes and few high-stakes tests. Apparently that's not suitable for us regular folk.

The people who control public education these days don't think it suits their own kids. If they cared so deeply about public education they'd put their money, their children, where their mouths were. It appears the only thing they care about is the support of their corporate overlords. That's a clear conflict of interest, a clear lack of integrity, and a clear danger to what remains of our fragile democracy.

Yesterday, a kid came in who didn't bother coming in Wednesday.

"What happened on Wednesday?" I asked.

"Forget Wednesday," he said.

"But you weren't here."

"FORGET WEDNESDAY!" he cried, with a big smile.

There seemed little choice. He's almost never absent, and it didn't look like I was going to get any further. I was actually pretty happy he was expressing himself so clearly. Not all my beginners can do that.

In any case, at that moment the Chinese teacher walked in. She looked worried.

"Who's in my fourth period class?" she asked, quite seriously, ruining any possibility of my discovering why my forgetting Wednesday was so important.

Two Spanish-speaking kids raised their hands. I gave them extra credit for their senses of humor.

The Chinese teacher recited some Very Important Instructions in Chinese, which neither I nor the kids who claimed to be in her class understood at all.

But the Chinese kids nodded their heads knowingly, happy that none of the rest of us had the remotest notion what was going on. That's poetic justice, in a way, because all too often they're the ones with no idea what's going on. It's tough being an ESL teacher, because one of the first survival techniques newcomers acquire is the one that entails smiling and looking like they understand things they do not understand at all.

That's why, while many tests are simply nuts, I'd never advocate doing away with them entirely. It makes sense for me to find out once and for all what kids know and do not know. It makes sense for me to do everything in my power to make sure they know as much as possible.

But honestly, it makes no sense at all to blame me for those kids who came to this country kicking and screaming when they abjectly refuse to learn English. I can try and make it fun, I can show them I love it, and I can place them in a non-threatening environment with kids who are good role models. But I can't simply open their throats, force-feed them English, and make sure it comes out when the VAM tests come.

Assuming otherwise is nothing short of insane.

Because if you ask the folks at Slate, you'd swear we public school teachers had a quota.