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While in Washington D.C. yesterday, Mayor Bloomberg said the city will start to use students' test scores when evaluating teacher tenure. The NY Times called the proposal one "that has been bitterly opposed by the teachers’ union and criticized as putting too much weight on standardized exams."
Bloomberg, who was appearing alongside U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, pointed out, "You can evaluate teachers on any criteria you want, just not on student achievement data. That's like saying to hospitals: 'You can evaluate heart surgeons on any criteria you want - just not patient survival rates!'"
The Mayor also said the State Legislature should permit teacher layoffs based on performance, “The only thing worse than having to lay off teachers would be laying off great teachers instead of failing teachers. With a transparent new evaluation system, principals would have the ability to make layoffs based on merit — but only if the State Legislature gives us the authority to do it.” However, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver told the Times he wasn't touching that hot potato, "These are all contractual issues that should be dealt with at the bargaining table."
United Federations of Teachers union president Michael Mulgrew told the Daily News, "This really blew my mind today. The state education commissioner and [Regents Chancellor] Merryl Tisch have both said publicly that the test scores are broken, and then the mayor stands up in public and says he wants to use the broken test scores to evaluate teachers."
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I think there's an issue with the tenses in the first sentence there.
you mean the test scores that says getting a 35 is passing?
or real test scores and issues like not preparing students for college.
students not graduating in 4 years due to more remedial work needed to get
city students on par with students from other States.
How about they evaluate teachers by actually having principals sit in the classroom and figure out if they are good teachers or not? I know that would be horrible for people's bosses to evaluate them. Also, this is dumb because new teachers are going to have the hardest time getting used to teaching for tests and then are never going to get tenure.
Alas - having supervisors evaluate teaching performance makes far too much sense for our Mayor. He is obviously a quant guy. A quant guy who prefers to narrow evaluations, not to mention people, their talents and skills into a small sliver of data. Yep - a lazy man's way of dealing with the world.
and now teachers get to cheat! ;)
So instead of teachers teaching, now teachers will be forced to prep students for these standarized tests, in order to make sure they keep their jobs.
Great! Even less reason for anyone to want to teach in inner city schools where simply keeping students in their seats is already 90% of the job in and of itself. Oh, well. I guess there's enough Teach For America cannon fodder to keep things going--for now.
Teachers should be evaluated on their students' text messages.
On one hand, teachers should be held accountable for the quality of their work. And tenure should be based on such accountability.
On the other hand, standardized tests are by definition stupid, and do nothing to assess the quality of the teaching or the students' ability to learn.
I don't see any practical way to solve this problem, but Bloomberg is treating this the way he treats everything--as a business decision.
THE HEADLINE SAYS IT ALL:
"Gothamist is a publicity arm of The Bloomberg Kingdom"
The headline, if it were honest, would read "Bloomberg goes insane again" b/c no mature human agrees with this psychotic billionaire.
FACT: we all saw with our OWN EYES that the teacher is secondary.
DUH: you can't find many public school teachers whose every student gets "A"s or "bad" teachers whose every student gets "F"s.
JUST LIKE IN THE SCHOOLS WE ALL WENT TO, the SAME teacher will have students who get As, Bs, Cs, Ds, Fs----it's based more on the STUDENT than the teacher.
(Bloomberg says poor kids do worse than rich kids b/c them damn negroes got no work ethic!) (Gothamist thought most of Mike's top staff are jewish b/c it's pure racial coincidence!)
BLOOMBERG IS LEGALLY INSANE and has no grip on reality. (Being a billionaire who gets (fake) standing ovations every time you enter a room will have that effect on you.)
Again, Gothamist protects the naked emperor, and Jen and the gang can get as mad as they like at the messenger (me) but they don't disagree with what I've written.
THE MEDIA SIMPLY WILL NOT TELL SOCIETY THE TRUTH.
It's never been more corrupt than today.
There was even more dissent under Hitler and STalin (both whom were monsters CREATED and empowered by... the MEDIA!).
The Fourth Reich is in full effect, but the sheep can't tell!
[author eats some chips and calls it a day]
And the child who is howling, cursing, does no work, threatens everyone...and yet is allowed to suck the air out of the room ...who usually has a equally antisocial parent....how is that factored in? Most classes have not just one but often several of these students who hamper learning.....These are the children that Charter Schools don't have to deal with......yet suddenly the teacher is responsible for them and truly is made to believe that if there was magical motivation, better planned lessons, advanced technology, parent outreach, cooperative learning, differentiated instruction, textbooks, no textbooks, worksheets, no worksheets, sunny days, teacher standing on head, ....all would make a difference...and it's all the teacher's fault that a student was born in poverty after a precarious pregnancy, to a parent with no parenting skills, perhaps drugs and violence are involved, schools is considered babysitting and schoolwork an inconvenience. Not to mention the teacher is also responsible for buying a student's school supplies - pencils, notebooks, crayons, loose leaf.....good luck to whomever actually gets tenure out of this mess......Youw ill be teaching the Charter Schools rejects in our two tiered system.......Bloomberg does not have a clue to the realities of a NYC classroom.