Click to see

Click to see
Obama countdown

Monday, June 15, 2015

Maybe we should call it comical core

This story is not new. It's been in the back of my mind for some months but nothing has changed since it broke. For that matter probably nothing will change in our lifetimes. Did you know that only 9.2% of New York City school teacher received the coveted "highly effective" rating while statewide nearly 60% of teacher were "highly effective". In the NYC system a full 91% were rated either "highly effective" or "effective", 7% were "developing" and 1.2% were "ineffective"
You can read more about the injustices done to NYC teachers here at Chalkbeat, a not for profit whose mission is, hell, I'll let them spell it out.
"Our mission is to inform the decisions and actions that lead to better outcomes for children and families by providing deep, local coverage of education policy and practice."
Look, I'm not the English major on this blog. As a matter of fact I finished out my career as a maintenance mechanic but does anyone diagram sentences anymore? Are we missing a direct object here? Do we inform decisions and actions or people? Anyway these people know all about education. They're highly effective but evidently grammar isn't their long suit. Here is most of what you need to know about the maltreated teachers.
Of the 62,184 city teachers evaluated in the 2013-14 school year, 9.2 percent earned a “highly effective” rating, though nearly 60 percent of teachers outside the city earned that distinction. Still, 91 percent of city teachers earned one of the top two ratings, with 82 percent of city teachers rated “effective,” 7 percent rated “developing,” and 1.2 percent rated “ineffective,” the lowest possible rating.
Outside of New York City, the numbers skewed toward the higher ratings: Only 2 percent of teachers in the rest of the state were rated developing and less than 1 percent were rated ineffective. Those numbers indicated that the city’s evaluation system was more reliable than the ones negotiated in other districts, state education officials said, not that fewer top teachers were working in New York City schools.
“Our teachers are not getting feedback about their relative strengths and weaknesses,” said Assistant Commissioner Julia Rafal-Baer, referring to the large numbers of teachers in other districts rated highly effective.
My question is if 91% of teachers are either effective or highly effective why is the school system's graduation rate only 61%? Do the 1.2 % who are "ineffective" teach 39% of the students? It has to be the students' fault. No, it's worse than that. It's Governor Cuomo's fault too. You see, there was supposed to be an evaluation "safety net" but the governor reneged.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo suggested Wednesday that he will not hold up his end of a much-touted bargain with the state teachers union to keep the use of student test scores from dragging down some teacher ratings.
In June, Cuomo agreed to protect English and math teachers in grades 3-8 from being negatively affected by Common Core-aligned test scores for two years. Only a small fraction of teachers would have qualified for the adjustments, but the governor said at the time he was concerned that any ratings based on the new tests might not be reliable enough to use to fire or deny tenure to teachers.
Should we be surprised that politicians and the teachers union conspired against the students of the state by creating a bogus rating system that frets about test scores and ignores the graduation rate so no one gets fired or is denied tenure?

No comments:

Post a Comment