CORE: Cuomo Flips on APPR: Teachers Not That Good?

[Chris_Wendt]

Governor Cuomo had negotiated with the Legislature to further delay using Common Core Assessment scores for teacher evaluations, but suddenly did an about-face and vetoed his own bill yesterday, because the State Education Department released the 2013-14 APPR Teacher Evaluation results which had only 0.7% (7 tenths of one percent) of teachers rated as "ineffective" across the entire state; 98% were in the "Effective" or "Highly Effective" rating categories. Cuomo admitted that such results did not reflect reality.

---

Thinking about Wantagh Schools and Wantagh Teachers, I think 98% effective or highly effective teacher performance rather accurately reflects our reality, although that very good teacher performance did not translate into mastery outcomes on the ELA Student Assessments. But our crappy ELA Assessment scores are not a reflection on the effectiveness of our teachers as much as they reflected the crappiness of the Assessments themselves, for the most part, and on the current capabilities of our students to have caught on to the Common Core Curriculum material without much of a foundation in either the material or the methods of the Common Core.

Regardless of which came first, a crappy curriculum, crappy implementation, or crappy tests, Wantagh students did generally crappy on the last two years CC ELA Assessments. Next year, or the year after that, Wantagh's teachers will be held personally accountable for the defects in the CC material, the poor implementation and lack of foundation, the crappy tests, and, the less-than-stellar capabilities of some of our students.

This will create stress, meaning even more stress, on our teachers, on our principals, and ultimately on our students and their parents to overcome imagined reported deficits in our heretofore crappy ELA performance under the so-called Common Core concept.

Good luck!

Chris Wendt

link to source article (Newsday-dot-com)

[rr]

I'm curious what is your 98% effective or highly effective rating based on?

[Chris_Wendt]

I have not seen the actual NYSED APPR district results for Wantagh, so this is a hypothetical conversation, basing on the general state-wide performance of 98% quoted in the Newsday article. My own assessment of that, of the propriety of a potential 98% performance rating for Wantagh is based on personal experience, many years of service on the Board of Education, and having seen my own children pass through Wantagh schools. Yeah, my perspective is dated, but our (Wantagh's) end results, our 4-year cohort graduation rate and our college attendance rates continue to speak excellently for the effectiveness of our faculty and professional educational leaders. If I had to become more finite (which I do not intend to do), I would estimate the Wantagh may have 1 or 2 ineffective teachers in each of our 5 buildings (some more, some less or none), so that whatever 2% of our total faculty is, that would seem the right (maximum) number to me. In reality, we may presently have no ineffective teachers in Wantagh, and the district-level APPR results may bear that out, when published.

---

Everyone in the District knows who the ineffective teachers are, including those teachers, their union reps, their principals or department heads, and the senior leadership team, and more than likely the members of the school board, the PT(O)'s, and the parents whose children are in the classes taught by those few ineffective teachers. This is no secret. The problem is, with our without APPR, there is no effective way of terminating any of them involuntarily without a huge expense, and a long, drawn-out, and uncertain legal battle. APPR (or the Common Core) is NOT the solution to ineffective teachers; reform Section 3020a of the NY Education Law, and allow principals or department heads to initiate progressive discipline against ineffective teaching, up to and including termination of employment by the Superintendent subject to ratification of the Board of Education, of ineffective teachers who do not improve after 3 semesters on notice. This could also be accomplished without amending 3020a, if the Wantagh Teachers Union and the unions representing department heads and principals would agree to contact language that would facilitate this, locally, through collective bargaining.

Okay?

Chris Wendt