Cuomo Has Written Off the 2016 Primary / His Common Core Missteps Will Let Hillary Clinton Bury Him

The earlier drafts for this piece had the headline, Has Cuomo Come to His Senses Early Enough on Common Core or Will Hillary Clinton Overtake Him?

POSTSCRIPT: GOP leading Democrats for the 2014 elections --front page of New York Times.

POSTSCRIPT: 13 GOP-controlled states are pushing universal pre-Kindergarten; while Cuomo's pre-K program is questionably universal.

Obviously, the answer to the first part of this sentence is a resounding "no."  Following three years of stolid, unquestioning support for the Common Core States [sic, more like, "National"] Standards and the powerful program for data mining of New York State schoolchildren, inBloom (run by Wireless Generation, which is owned by Murdoch's News Corp. education subsidiary, Amplify; speaking of Education Commercialization Complex, Amplify runs ARIS, New York City's parental link to student "acheivement data"), New York governor Andrew Cuomo has been one of the strongest devotees to the Common Core. His gestures aimed at appearing like he's back-pedaling from the Common Core, will fool no one. Suspicions are that the panel that he chose to "study" the Common Core is stuffed with CCSS allies.

Sure, he will be able to coast into reelection, with his campaign donation war-chest that he's been stuffing since day one in the governor's mansion in Albany. And helping him is that has generated no serious effort to build a campaign for a credible Republican opponent.

Yet, consider how he'll look, coming into the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries. This won't be 1996. Millions of Internet-savvy primary voters will be Googling "Cuomo Common Core." And of course, they'll encounter his early unbridled enthusiasm (from 2010 to early this year) for Common Core, and his later disingenuous attempts to distance himself from Common Core and New York State educational policy, putting the blame on the State Education Department or the Legislature. The upshot of all of this is that Common Come-skeptic parents and educators will see straight through his spin and Cuomo's name will be mud. Cuomo probably never realized how politically toxic the Common Core is. He probably never gave much thought to how his silence in the face of the town hall uproars captured in video might not sit well with voters.

As I've argued previously in "Is Gov.Cuomo Trying to Dodge the Common Core Ball," the Common Core and all of its ancillary testing and commercialization ramifications will be THE domestic snake in the grass issue for voters nation-wide in the 2014 off-year reelections. My prediction is that smart Republicans will be able to mercilessly tar Democratic politicians with this issue (even though the hatching of Common Core began before pres. Obama took the oath in 2009). This issue means that the Democrats can kiss good-bye any gains they expect to make in state and national legislative races. Watch out for critical partisan realignment as it could get worse with Democrats losing seats to Republicans on a grand scale.

Odd, with all the rumored desire that Cuomo has for the White House, you would think that he would have considered this. We can imagine that the Gates, Pearson, News Corp., etc. money was just too inviting. In the quid pro quo department, just remember this report of Cuomo's giving a plum place in the State Education Department to Pearson: a five year contract at $32 million for Pearson Education to administer state tests.

The Hillary Clinton factor
If Hillary Clinton can just keep mum about the Common Core, except to just say scathing things about it, she should have a cake-wake of a time in the 2016, letting Cuomo self-immolate. You think that CCSS has been a hot issue for the last half year? Just wait, until more state legislatures and Congress hold hearings on the travesty of Common Core.

Remember the 2008 presidential primary races? Clinton said no to No Child Left Behind. Obama? He gave us Race to the Top, which has been NCLB on steroids.

It is an important reminder to return to 2008 to see how Obama was to the right of Clinton on NCLB. Nicolas Lemann in The Washington Monthly noticed this back then. If she had the good principles to oppose NCLB, it is conceivable that she will have the sense to oppose Common Core, and, we would hope, Race to the Top.

Barack Obama could have called for eliminating No Child Left Behind, as Hillary Clinton did (although she voted for it in 2001), for liberal reasons: too much testing and teaching to the test; too little funding and teacher autonomy. He didn’t.

Her talk at a Keene, NH primary campaign gathering in 2007 is tremendously refreshing. She "gets it" about the tested subjects, English and Math, crowding out other subjects, and the need for more projects instead of a singular focus on testing. It is not too surprising that the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) endorsed Clinton for the 2008 presidential contest. Her 2007 Keene talk makes it clear that she would be able to utterly crush Cuomo into chalkdust on education "reform" --if she chooses. Unfortunately, she does give a pitch for broad (national?) standards. Though this last point is a misstep, we would hope that in the 2016 campaign she would realize the disaster that Common Core and Race to the Top have been.

Big reservations about the Clintons
Of course, there's little love for the Clintons from this spot. After all, it was on her husband's watch that the US economy moved toward the Dowton Abbey we economy we have today.
Some of this, particularly the ascendant financial sector, to the neglect of other sectors, such as manufacturing. Note this summary cited in Democratic Underground:

It progresses through the Industrial Revolution to a late-Victorian English ruling elite that was smug, narrowly educated and scientifically illiterate, rich from the financial sector but with a manufacturing base that had been increasingly starved for the capital to keep up with the technological pace of change.

(Bill Clinton's Treasury Secretary Larry Summers warned recently that the U.S. economy is moving in the Downton Abbey direction. I've got news for you, Larry. We've already transitioned into that condition; and odd that you bring this issue up, as others have noted it happened on your watch.) Bill Clinton initially criticized NAFTA, but soon after supported it and other free trade moves, such as granting Most Favored Nation status to China, joining the World Trade Organization, signing onto the 1994 General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs. For these reasons and others Jane White rightly termed Clinton the Outsourcer-in-Chief. And of course, we cannot forget that Bill Clinton signed the bill repealing the Glass-Steagall Act.

All told, it would be nice for Cuomo to remain in the race. Let centrists Cuomo and Clinton battle for the unprincipled corporatist center. This way Elizabeth Warren or Howard Dean would stand a better chance as the progressive dark horse candidate.


POSTSCRIPT: GOP has an edge over the DP for 2014 elections, so the New York Times tells us on front page of February 27, 2014 edition. Gee, do you think that Common Core "State" [National] Standards will do anything to help the GOP this fall?
You wonder how many opinion poll and voting booth losses it will take for Democratic Party bosses to realize that they have a toxic monster on their hands. (Yes, CCSS was due to start regardless of whether John McCain or Barack Obama won. But Obama put huge emphasis on it with the Race to the Top program.)

POSTSCRIPT: 13 GOP-controlled states are pushing pre-Kindergarten; while Cuomo's pre-K program is questionably universal.
Think Progress has reported that 13 Republican-controlled states, including Deep South states as well as reliably Republican plains and western states such as Nebraska, Oklahoma and Texas.

Yet, Cuomo is pushing a program that turns out not to be truly universal. He is channeling pre-K funding to municipalities through a competitive grant program. The only twist is that as Capital New York reports, "Few districts apply for Cuomo’s competitive education grants."

Class Size Matters More Than Fresh TFAs, But Don't Tell Sen. Harkin That

"Progressive" Sen. Tom Harkin (Iowa) has gone reformy.

Jason Stanford, at Huffington Post, Nov. 6, 2013

Is Your Child's Teacher 'Highly Qualified?'

Is your child's teacher highly qualified? Thanks to a loophole snuck into the bill to end the federal government shutdown, there's really no way of knowing.

Here's how it's supposed to work: Under No Child Left Behind, all schools -- even the ones where the poor and minority students go -- are supposed to hire "highly qualified teachers." If a school hires teachers who don't meet the federal definition of "highly qualified," they send letters home to parents about their kids' substandard teachers and come up with a plan to fix it.

This is a great idea. It used to be that inexperienced teachers would get stuck with the hardest jobs in underfunded, underperforming schools. As teachers would gain seniority, they would take their experience to better schools where the kids were easier to teach. NCLB recognized that the worst schools couldn't get better without "highly qualified" teachers.

Unfortunately for Teach for America, their graduates didn't qualify. Teach for America recruits smart college kids to teach in poor communities for two years. TFA gives them five weeks of training after graduation and places them in front of a classroom by the fall with only 15-20 hours of teaching experience under their belts.
Having our kids taught by someone with minimal experience and training is not what parents have in mind when they imagine a "highly qualified teacher," and it's certainly not what NCLB required. So Congress did what Congress does, and created a solution that made the problem worse by allowing teachers still enrolled in training to be classified as "highly qualified." That way, when schools hire TFA grads they don't have to let parents know their kids' teachers are barely trained, inexperienced, and unproven.

Putting someone with 20 hours of classroom experience on the same level as someone with National Board Certification in Teaching is like thinking a 15-year-old with a learner's permit and an adult with a commercial driver's license along with school bus and passenger endorsements are equally qualified to drive the school bus. Only one of those options will get you reliably good results, but congress says there's no problem entrusting your children with the riskier option.

This loophole has been a disaster in California, which tracked where teachers-in-training got placed. Predictably, these inexperienced teachers were more likely to find jobs in schools with low-income, minority students. Shockingly, half of the teachers-in-training were saddled with students with disabilities. Sticking the hardest-to-teach kids with the least-qualified teachers was exactly what NCLB wanted to prevent, so California recently created new rules to keep these rookie teachers away from non-English speaking students.

TFA touts a new Mathematica study that says their teachers are effective at getting results in middle-school math, but most evidence points to the conclusion that TFA alums don't do as well as credentialed teachers. More recently, the National Education Policy Center found that "class size reduction has 286% more impact than TFA." And a meta-study published in Teachers College Record reported that Pre-K showed improvements 1214 percent larger than what the Mathematica study showed.

Dozens of national, state, and local civil rights, disability, parent, student, community and education groups -- basically, everyone who represents the kids who get the teachers-in-training -- lobbied congress and the Obama administration to close the loophole. But Sen. Tom Harkin, the Iowa Democrat who chairs the Senate Education Committee, likes Teach for America and worked behind the scenes to use the bill to end the government shutdown as a Trojan Horse to keep the loophole open, according to Stephanie Simon at POLITICO. And Pres. Barack Obama, whose administration provided TFA with 12 percent of its funding in 2011, let it happen.

A better option would seem to be to invest in proven reforms such as Pre-K and smaller class sizes, to expand financial aid for college graduates to get certified as teachers, and to stop playing political games with the definition of "highly qualified".

But what do I know? I'm just a dad with two kids in public schools. No one tells me anything.

Teacher Job Satisfaction Plummets -Survey

Kenzo Shibata, a member of the Chicago Teachers Union, wrote earlier this week in the Huffington Post, that teacher alienation has worsened to the point that one in three teachers is considering quitting the teaching profession in the next five years, and increase over the one in four teachers that was considering leaving in a survey three years ago.

According to a report on a survey commissioned by Met Life last spring, morale among the nation's teachers is at its lowest point in more than 20 years. Also, roughly one in three said they were likely to leave the profession in the next five years. According to the report, just three years ago, the rate was one in four.
Met Life's results did not shock me. I often felt powerless as one teacher, advocating for the supports my students needed to succeed. In my first two years, not a week went by that I didn't consider changing careers and that had nothing to do with my students or their parents -- it was the system.

And read this posting by Valerie Strauss from The Washington Post, August 7, 2012:
Teacher job satisfaction plummets — Survey

This was written by Kevin G. Welner, a professor of education policy and program evaluation in the School of Education at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and director of the National Education Policy Center. The center is housed at the university’s School of Education and sponsors research, produces policy briefs, and publishes expert third party reviews of think tank reports.

By Kevin G. Welner

It’s not fun to be repeatedly punched in the gut. And we can now quantify how not-fun it is, at least when teachers are the punchees.

Over the past two years of gut-punching, teacher job satisfaction has fallen from 59 percent to 44 percent. That’s according to the annual ­ MetLife Survey of the American Teacher.

While this 15-point plummet is no doubt caused in part by the bad economy and budget cutting, it’s also hard to overlook things like Waiting for Superman, the media deification of Michelle Rhee, and the publishing of flawed “scores” that purport to evaluate teachers based on students’ test results — an offense first committed by the Los Angeles Times and now taken up by the New York Times and other New York papers. Teachers knew these evaluations were unreliable and invalid even before researchers documented those problems.

Similarly, teachers see states and districts implement policies that largely base their performance evaluations on student test scores. These new policies are layered on top of No Child Left Behind and the subsequent years of narrowed curricula and teaching to the test. Teachers have been watching sadly as the sort of engaging learning that attracted them to the profession is increasingly squeezed out. Further, teachers in many states are facing attacks on their collective voice in education policy by anti-union governors such as Walker (Wisconsin), Scott (Florida), Christie (New Jersey), Daniels (Indiana), Kasich (Ohio), and Brewer (Arizona).

While all those governors are Republican, the trashing of teachers has been a bipartisan effort, led by groups that include Democrats for Education Reform and Stand for Children. In fact, President Obama is widely viewed as part of the problem. He will never achieve a Santorum-esque level of anti-public-school rhetoric, but Race to the Top and related policies have continued the drive toward privatization and test-focused instruction. Although the title of a U.S. Department of Education press release from a few weeks ago read “Obama Administration Seeks to Elevate Teaching Profession,” the headline a couple years ago was, “Obama Official Applauds Rhode Island Teacher Firings.”

None of us would want to have our job performance judged on an outcome that we don’t really control. Research suggests that a student’s teacher for a single given school year influences as little as 5 to 10 percent of her or his test-score growth. Sensible policymaking does not leap from “teachers are important” to “teachers can be evaluated as if they are the only thing that’s important.”

Similarly, none of us would want to have our evaluation based on an outcome, like test scores, that we know represents only a fraction of what we do and why we do it. And we wouldn’t want to pursue a good evaluation by doing our job in ways we think unwise or even harmful.

But that’s where teachers now find themselves. Maybe we should feel grateful that their job satisfaction only dropped 15 percentage points.
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By Valerie Strauss | 12:01 AM ET, 03/07/2012

Sparks at UFT DA Over New Evaluations -- Danielson in the News -- the Truth Behind the Efficacy of High-Stakes Tests

Sparks flew last month at the United Federation of Teachers Delegate Assembly over the issue of teacher evaluations. Bryant High School (Queens) Chapter Leader Sam Lazarus called for voting against a resolution endorsing the use of Charlotte Danielson's Framework for Learning, arguing that the application of Danielson at his school has meant that nearly two-thirds of the teachers evaluated under the new system were rated sub-standard, setting them up for termination under 3020-a proceedings. And from the pattern of which teachers have been stuffed into the Absent Teacher Reserve ("ATR") --older, experienced, and expensive teachers, we can imagine which teachers will tend to be found ineffective. (So, Voila!, with accommodating to Governor Mario Cuomo's call for tougher teacher evaluation systems, the older-teacher elimination goals behind Mayor Michael Bloomberg's objective of ending Last In First Out --or LIFO-- would be accomplished.) For more on the DA see Ed Notes and ICEUFT Blog.

2011 seems to be a good year for Danielson: a great number of news reports dated in 2011 on implementation or purchasing of her (and Teachscape's, a collaborating entity) systems.
An interesting pattern is that the names of school systems that are recently publicized as using Teachscape are urban school systems that are facing budgetary crises, actual or threatened teacher layoffs, yet millions of dollars are available to spend on the deploying (the industry's word) Teachscape video evaluation system.
Danielson's evaluation methods have moved beyond her pilot approach introduced in 1996 to walkthroughs for use in a new edition of the "Teachscape" video analysis system.

A report appearing to be a press release indicates that Teachscape software (Teachscape Reflect 360-Degree Video Analysis System) using Charlotte Danielson's Framework for Learning is already being used in New York City schools:
"NYC Schools Deploy New Teacher Observation Tools"
and
http://www.epicos.com/Portal/Main/Home/Pages/ItemDetails.aspx?wIaopCxX2Y8G8sI4fMM9Br3kag3WiwlBeSBdwKJPYazi9V6KSm%2Bk/A%3D%3D

Overwhelmingly the NJ locations where the Danielson system is being introduced are urban districts.

*And like many new developments, there is a money trail: links to familiar foundation and institution names, from Teachscape's own PR press release: Teachscape's partners include Kogeto, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Stanford University, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and Charlotte Danielson to help shape its vision, its products, and its strategies. --http://www.epicos.com/Portal/Main/Home/Pages/ItemDetails.aspx?wIaopCxX2Y8G8sI4fMM9Br3kag3WiwlBeSBdwKJPYazi9V6KSm%2Bk/A%3D%3D

(And for a take from a different angle: a satiric animation video but making serious statements about the interlinking of investors, foundation philanthropy and money for video evaluation software in the face of limited funds for classroom essentials: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpmQZ5MXs8c&feature=results_video&playnext=1&list=PL12864A4208592D9E)

WHAT STUDIES REALLY SHOW ABOUT THE EFFICACY OF INCENTIVE PROGRAMS IN CHANGING STUDENT TEST SCORES:
As writer Valerie Strauss said at "the Washington Post" in "Report: Test-based incentives don’t produce real student achievement:"

Incentive programs for schools, teachers and students aimed at raising standardized test scores are largely unproductive in generating increased student achievement, according to a new report researched by an expert panel of the National Research Council.

The report [by Michael Hout and Stuart W. Elliott, "Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Education"] said that standardized tests commonly used in schools to measure student performance — including high school exit exams and tests in various grades mandated by former president Bush’s No Child Left Behind law — “fall short of providing a complete measure of desired educational outcomes in many ways,” according to a summary of the lengthy document.

The report, together with a number of other studies [summarized by Diane Ravitch] released in the past year, effectively serve as a warning to policymakers in states that are moving to implement laws, with support from the Obama administration, to make teacher and principal evaluation largely dependent on increases in students’ standardized test scores.

The practice doesn’t bring about the kind of student achievement policymakers say is necessary for the United States to compete with the highest-performing countries, according to the 17-member Committee on Incentives and Test-Based Accountability convened by the National Research Council, which is the research arm of the National Academies (including the National Academy of Sciences, the National Council of Engineering and the National Academy of Medicine).

The panelists — who include experts in assessment, education law and the sciences — examined over the past decade 15 incentive programs, which are designed to link rewards or sanctions for schools, students and teachers to students’ test results. The programs studied included high-school exit exams and those that give teachers incentives (such as bonus pay) for improved test scores.

The panel studied the effects of incentives, not by tracking changes in scores on high-stakes tests connected to incentive programs, but by looking at the results of “low-stakes” tests, such as the well-regarded National Assessment of Educational Progress, which aren’t linked to the incentives and are taken by the same cohorts of students.

The researchers concluded that the effects of incentive programs tend to be “small and . . . effectively zero for a number” of such programs.

Gains that were detected were concentrated in elementary grade mathematics and “are small in comparison with the improvement the nation hopes to achieve,” according to the summary.

The researchers concluded not only that incentive programs have not raised student achievement in the United States to the level achieved in the highest-performing countries but also that incentives/sanctions can give a false view of exactly how well students are doing. (The U.S. reform movement doesn’t follow the same principles that have been adopted by the other countries policymakers often cite. You can read an analysis of that by educator Linda Darling-Hammond here.)

Strauss closed by critiquing the efficacy of "value-added" evaluations because they ignore the effects of factors of social ills (outside the school) upon student learning:

Other studies in the past year have also cast doubt on the effectiveness and reliability of the value-added method of teacher/principal evaluation, which takes student test scores and puts them into a formula that is supposed to factor out other influences and determine the “value” a teacher has brought to a student’s learning.

The method often ignores outside-school factors that can influence how a child does on a test, including lack of sleep, hunger and illness, but even formulas that are said to take these into account are not especially reliable, some experts have said.