Category: General

Another Heroic Superintendent

The heroic actions of our own Dr. Rella are well documented in our school community and a few weeks ago we told you of another heroic superintendent from Western New York, Dr. William Cala.  Now we can add Shoreham-Wading River’s Dr. Steven Cohen to the list.  Check out the letter below that was sent home to parents today…

State Testing

Governor Cuomo Wants to Fire You

Via Newsday…

ALBANY — Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo Sunday called for a state review of all Long Island school districts because many use a union-provided evaluation he said is skewed to favor teachers.

A Newsday analysis of teacher evaluation systems in Long Island public schools found that in many the portion that local districts control is weighted toward ensuring teachers score an overall “effective” rating.

Principals’ judgment of teacher performance in classroom observations and other subjective criteria accounted for 60 percent of a teacher’s overall 100-point evaluation, according to the Newsday analysis. The other 40 points are determined by student test performance.

“Recent news reports found that most Long Island school districts have used their local discretion in teacher evaluation systems to skew the overall scoring to ensure that their teachers are rated only ‘effective’ and ‘highly effective,’ ” said Jim Malatras, the state director of operations, in a statement on behalf of Cuomo. “Most districts adopted the scoring procedures specifically drafted by the teachers unions.”

Seventy of Long Island’s 124 school districts use scoring ranges promoted by New York State United Teachers, the state’s largest teachers union, for the classroom-observations component of job ratings, according to Newsday’s analysis.

State law says the state education commissioner must ensure the local evaluations are rigorous and accurate. Cuomo’s statement Sunday asked the acting commissioner if she found any concerns in reviewing the local evaluations and, if so, what action the state Education Department took.

The teachers union said the evaluations are accurate and Cuomo wants to give more weight to students’ grades, which they argue are statistically questionable in evaluating teachers. Spokesmen for the New York State United Teachers union and the state Education Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment Sunday.

In other words, Long Island districts are not firing enough teachers, so the state should strip local control of teacher evaluations from those districts and force Cuomo’s junk science evaluations onto those districts.  Cuomo’s war on teachers continues and today he has turned his focus specifically on Long Island’s teachers.  The time to fight back is upon us.

PJSTA’s McMullan’s Letter to Cuomo

So very proud of our own Melissa McMullan whose letter to Governor Cuomo was published on Diane Ravitch’s blog yesterday.

Via Ravitch…

Melissa McMullan, a teacher in Long Island, explains in this comment how deeply insulting Governor Cuomo’s plan for teacher evaluation is. Will he listen to reason? Will he insist on crushing the morale of every teacher in the state? Why?

McMullan writes:

“I have been a teacher for thirteen years. I graduated with highest honors from Rutgers University, earned my masters degree from Queens College, graduating with honors and begun work on my PhD to help me become a better teacher. The teacher I am today is not the teacher I was yesterday, nor is she the teacher I will be tomorrow. I learn every day from students, families, colleagues, professional development, research and my own mistakes. In thirteen years, former students of mine have become writers, teachers, philanthropists, doctors, nurses, mechanics, beauticians, small business owners, etc…

“My employment as their teacher has been carved from a relationship I have built with the district that employs me. The district I graciously serve. I am a public servant. I do not take this assignment lightly.

“Governor Cuomo is holding state aid to public schools hostage. His ransom? Using eleven hours of tests, that the state scores, and converts to teacher ratings, assigning a great many teachers, including myself, ineffective. One score. Six days of testing to remove a teacher who works 12 hours a day, gives her students her cell phone number so she can help them with homework at home and invites Spanish-speaking parents in to the classroom to explain, in Spanish, the value of reading and writing. A teacher who will stop at NOTHING to push her students forward. Passing rates on the state test vary year to year from 72% to 83 % depending upon how the state wants teachers to be perceived from year to year.

“Governor Cuomo and the New York State Board of Regents want to use test scores it assigns to my students, against me, their teacher. This is not the role of assessment. Assessment has a single purpose – to inform instruction. Its responsibility is to let students, teachers and families what students know, and what they do not know. Under the Governor’s proposed plan, these scores would warrant my removal from the classroom, violating the agreement that my school district and its community have established with me, by using children as its weapon of choice.

“We get no feedback from these scores. No view into what our students know or don’t know or what we as teachers have taught well nor what we have not. But it costs millions of dollars to implement each year.

“As a mother, I will not permit my own four children to be used as pawns against their teachers. The only way we can stop this abuse of power is to refuse to permit our children to be used as pawns.

“The cornerstone of public education in the United States is the local community school district. Allowing scores the state assigns our children after six days of testing to be used to remove teachers we have placed in their classroom is an unacceptable, egregious overstepping of power. We have power as parents to protect our children from harm, and we have an overwhelming responsibility to keep the over-reaching powers of the state from reaching into our children’s classrooms.”

Mobile Billboard Hit Long Island Streets!

Today NYSAPE’s mobile billboards encouraging parents to refuse the New York State tests hit the streets of Long Island!  Be sure to look for these billboards throughout your travels between now and the tests.  If you see one snap a picture and tweet it to us with the hashtag #LIRefuse or send it on to us and we will tweet it out!

Seen on Long Island streets today! Refuse the tests!
Seen on Long Island streets today! Refuse the tests!

NYSUT’s Favorite Local President

Earlier we covered the “secret meetings” between Karen Magee, Mike Mulgrew, and aides for Governor Cuomo.  I mentioned my belief that the NYSUT and UFT ads would not not be pulled from the air any time soon.  As I mentioned, it is important that they at least make it appear as though they are putting up a fight before ultimately capitulating to the governor and sticking us with a worse APPR scheme than we have now.

Still there is one thing that continues to stick in my craw about the entire situation.  It certainly doesn’t surprise me to see him involved, but the presence of Michael Mulgrew at these meetings can’t possibly make any teacher in the state comfortable.  Last spring, in the lead up to the NYSUT elections, Revive NYSUT went out of their way to claim that the UFT held no extra sway over NYSUT’s leadership and that the UFT were simply one of NYSUT’s hundreds of locals.  They scoffed at the notion that the installation of new leaders (other than the UFT/Unity Caucus’ own Andy Pallotta, of course) was a power grab by the UFT leadership.

Yet yesterday we read about Mulgrew being involved in these secret meetings.  Again, this isn’t suprising.  Anyone with even a passing interest in NYSUT understands that the head of the UFT calls the shots in both the UFT and NYSUT.   Mulgrew’s presence in the Cuomo meeting only furthers that notion.  It’s why they shouldn’t be allowed to get away with claiming that he is simply just another local president.  If that were the case there are hundreds of other local presidents they could have called on.  Virtually all of them would have had more classroom experience, and therefore be more in touch with our membership, than Mulgrew.  As a matter of fact, I am sure our very own Beth Dimino, who was busy teaching science last week, would have cleared her schedule to send the governor a message.  Dimino, after all, has some skin in the game, as they say.  She will be evaluated, just as her members will be, by whatever APPR scheme New York’s teachers end up with.  That doesn’t apply to union elites like Mulgrew or Magee.  After all it’s doubtful they have been inside many more classrooms than Cuomo has this year.

Cuomo and Union Elites Meet Secretly- Now What?

These meetings apparently aren’t as secret as the ones that secured double pensions for NYSUT officers, however the NY Daily News reported yesterday that NYSUT’s Karen Magee and the UFT’s Michael “Take my Common Core and I’ll punch you in the face!” Mulgrew have quietly met with aides for Governor Cuomo recently.

Via the Daily News…

Shortly after unveiling ads last week attacking Gov. Cuomo’s education plans, the heads of the city and state teacher unions met with aides to the governor, the Daily News has learned.

City teachers union President Michael Mulgrew and New York State United Teachers President Karen Magee attended the meeting on Friday at the state Capitol.

Sources say the unions during the meeting may have agreed to temporarily pull their attack ads, leaving some insiders to question whether the sides are trying to hammer out some type of agreement on how to move forward.

 

Today the New York Post reported that the unions are not, in fact, pulling the ads…

The union leaders said the talks were not unusual and insisted they were not pulling back on their TV ads and social-media outreach attacking the governor’s proposals to strengthen teacher evaluations, streamline disciplinary hearings and expand charter schools.

“We talk to elected officials all the time,” said UFT spokeswoman Alison Gendar. “We . . . are engaged in the largest grass-roots campaign in recent memory to empower teachers and to protect our students.”

NYSUT rep Carl Korn added its campaign is “accelerating.”

Over at the Perdido Street School blog, Reality-Based Educator has several good posts up already on this topic.  Be sure to head on over and check them out.

Norm Scott of Ed Notes Online warns that a sellout is coming…

Sources say the unions during the meeting may have agreed to temporarily pull their attack ads…
This goes into the category of Mulgrew “threatening” to go to court to enforce the CFE lawsuit over state funding that was “won” 10 years ago. Threatening. Why not wait another 10 years to go to court?
Cuomo puts outrageous demands on the table and the unions put nothing on the table. So they negotiate from where Cuomo started and even if they split the baby — 4 year tenure instead of 5? 35% based on eval instead of 50%? It is  – as Fearless Forecaster often says — a LOSS.

There is a lot to process here.  One publication says the ads may be pulled as part of a deal.  Another publication quotes a NYSUT spokesperson saying that the campaign against Cuomo is being accelerated.  I don’t honestly believe that the ad campaign is being pulled.  I think that even NYSUT and UFT officials know they can’t do that.  They have to at least continue to give the appearance that they are fighting for their members.  Pulling the ads now would be virtually impossible for them to do.  Particularly since it is certain that doing so would only ramp up the anti-Cuomo actions that are being planned and carried out around the state by the rank and file NYSUT members.  Nothing would make NYSUT leadership look as out of touch with the rank and file as calling off a fight while it’s dues paying members ratchet up the intensity of theirs.  Cuomo surely knows this too.

What I think will ultimately happen is that NYSUT will continue to run it’s ads and use it’s #InviteCuomo and #AllKidsNeed hashtags while behind closed doors our surrender is negotiated.  We will end up with an APPR agreement that continues to erode tenure and is worse than what we currently have.  Because it will be somewhat less damaging than the one Cuomo proposed in his budget NYSUT and the UFT will claim “victory!”  Of course a “victory” in which every teacher, student, and community in the state loses out on will ring as the hollowest of “victories.”

This all may very well end up as what  Arthur Goldstein heard a few weeks back.  That an APPR deal was likely done and that it would either raise test scores to 40% of teacher evaluations or give the entire state the awful deal that the city teachers have dealt with for the past couple of years.  Arthur also outlined the likely spin coming from NYSUT and the UFT, that by holding Cuomo off of 50% this is some how a “victory” for our teachers. Via NYC Educator…

I don’t have a lot of time right now, but several sources I trust tell me there is already a deal in place for a new APPR plan. They think it will either be a 40% junk science plan, or that it may be a statewide model based on the NYC plan. The NYC plan, while we in NYC don’t much like it, is a better one than those in a few upstate cities that were poorly negotiated. It is not nearly as good as those many small locals came up with.

…

An agreement could actually still be made to make an NYC-style evaluation statewide, which Mulgrew alluded to at the last DA, or 40% statewide junk science. In either of these scenarios, UFT/ NYSUT could argue that Cuomo wanted 50% and we kept it down to 40.

All of this makes one thing crystal clear.  The one and only weapon left to fight back corporate education deform in New York State is the refusal movement.  Here in Comsewogue last year, where we had in excess of 60% of our students who refused to take the grades 3-8 assessments, very few teachers received growth scores from the state because not enough of their students took the exams.  The message is simple.  If you deprive the APPR machine of the data it needs, the entire evaluation scheme breaks.  It is the last remaining weapon at our disposal and it is the one thing that every New York State teacher should be picking up.

BTF’s Kevin Gibson Thrown Out of Public Board Meeting for Speaking Up

Via Diane Ravitch…

Watch the fascinating video embedded in this blog post from Buffalo, New York. Kevin Gibson, the Secretary of the Buffalo Teachers Federation gets up to speak. Board member Larry Quinn (yes, the same board member who was texting as a high school student was speaking at a recent meeting) waves to a police officer and has Gibson escorted out of the Board room. He was not allowed to speak. Democracy in action. Under what interpretation is a representative of the district’s teachers barred from testifying at a public hearing of the Board of Education?

Here is the video of the incident…


Sean Crowley of the B-LoEdScene adds…

Pay close attention to the body language, the facial contortion and the flicking gesture Quinn gives to the Buffalo cop when he tells him to give Kevin Gibson the hook. It’s as if he’s dusting a scone crumb from his turtleneck. Also of note is that Quinn again tried to deny his actions when confronted by Sandra Tan of The News of all people. Instead he made a weasel run implying that the cop took action on his own. He then follows it up by attacking Tan for reporting on his behavior classifying it as a minor thing. You see, to the Larry Quinns of the world, muzzling public input and curtailing the democratic process in a public meeting to suit your point of view IS a minor thing. All that democratic process crap does is let the little people run around inside the castle and shit everything up for their betters, you see.  And if you weren’t convinced the guy is completely clueless on top of being a pompous ass, he can be heard in a whiny sniveling voice protesting aloud  “I don’t go to their meetings and speak.” No, Lawrence, you’re correct, board members do not attend union meetings and offer their input. But feel free to try. I doubt the cops would throw you out. Only BTF doesn’t serve alcohol at its meetings. 

In lieu of the recall petition, which I am sure is forthcoming, I can only observe that “The Movement” for lack of a better word, is standing on Larry Quinn’s last effing nerve. In any fight there’s the moment where you go for the knockout or go home. I’d say it’s time we jump up and down on that last nerve and send Larry to the showers. You think he’d give you a break? Exactly.