The Narrow, Myopic Vision of the Solidarity Caucus

7/14 postscript on doublethink below.
A novice United Federation of Teachers (UFT) caucus, Solidarity, is making a premature run for the 2016 union election. Much attention has been given to related personal controversies. This article takes the opportunity to look at the caucus, its origins and its campaign program or platform.

The caucus had in its genesis an intense opposition to both the MORE Caucus and the Unity Caucus statements of empathy for Eric Garner, who was killed in a chokehold by New York Police Department officers. In the nearly one year since, deadly police brutality, particularly against people of color, has become the civil rights issue of the nation. People from across the political spectrum were shocked and quite disappointed when a grand jury issued no indictment against any of the officials involved in killing Garner. This is important to recall when considering the character and principles of the caucus.

In its founding it insisted on staying narrowly focusing on teacher issues and on eschewing any attention to any other concerns beyond teachers' issues. Yet, while it appropriates the images of Albert Shanker, Unity Caucus leader of the UFT, it ignores that more largely, the labor union movement has taken stances of solidarity with civil rights activists and anti-war activists. It ignores that in 1957 the American Federation of Teachers dismissed locals that refused to desegregate. It ignores that the United Auto Workers, the AFT and other unions marched in solidarity in the 1963 Civil Rights March on Washington.  It ignores that strikes have had their greatest popularity when they had reached out to the community. Witness the work that the Lawrence 1912 Bread and Roses textile strikers did in reaching out to the community prior to their strike. Witness the parallel work that the Chicago Teachers Union has done when it took a year of community outreach in preparing for its 2012 strike. The CTU won widespread parent support after making sure to have a two-way dialog to understand the concerns of parents and students, instead of simply pursuing an employee-centered contract and strike campaign. Teacher-community partnership continues to this day in other examples such as St. Paul, Minnesota

Hypocritically, in the quest for allies for its caucus once it had an election in mind, it opportunistically parted from the caucus' founding principle to eschew larger issues or the community and solicited support from a community anti-high-stakes testing group, Change the Stakes.

Now, let us look at the Solidarity Caucus' platform and what is missing

While it gives attention to the special needs of Absent Teacher Reserve teachers (ATRs) where others are silent, this is almost where its issue attention ends. It does not look to the experiences of the regularly assigned teachers. One wonders if the authors even consulted regular classroom teachers. There is no specific discussion about the Danielson Framework, the New York State-dictated Measures of Student Learning (MOSLs) or other aspects of New York City's Advance teacher evaluation system. There is no attention to structural dynamics such as mayoral control, which determine the parameters of what the City Department of Education can do. There is no attention to the Common Core State Standards, which are alienating teachers from their profession and are alienating students from learning. There is no attention to the parent-student solidarity movement which is so essential for teachers who are suffering under the over-testing regimen, the opt-out movement. 

The caucus platform includes complaints about the use of tests in value-added metrics to evaluate teachers. However, the platform does not recognize how the testing emphasis is directly linked to other larger issues, some of which are issues that lead directly to the excessing of teachers into the ATR category: the DOE's testing focus narrows the latitude of what teachers can do in the classroom, the testing focus on core academic subjects crowds out attention to non-core subjects such as foreign language, the arts or physical education. Moreover, the platform studiously ignores larger social-economic-political realities. It ignores that there is a corporatist campaign by politicians in both major parties and an economic privatization campaign by privatizers that capitalize by the test-based stack ranking (rank ordering) of teachers and students and overall privatization of curricula, tests and schools.

Additionally, the caucus program's focus on the teacher involves an ignoring of the effect of the high-stakes tests on students themselves. It ignores the emotional stresses upon students and the attendant alienation from the schooling process in this overall climate of high-stakes testing and driving non-tested subjects out of the curriculum. Just as a decent doctor would care about a patient personally and their living and working conditions and how those impacted the person's health, one would hope that teachers would care about their student charges and the factors that impacted on their life. Just as one commenter on a blog in reaction to the formation of the caucus by saying that he cared about the living conditions of the students, I would echo those points. Teachers are choking under the attacks by corporatist politicians and by privatizatizers, and more rank and file teachers are recognizing this. Yet, Solidarity has made a big conceptual error to ignore this larger context in their program. In this sense, it is mirroring the conceptual errors that conventional, mainstream unions or caucuses, that Michael Mulgrew and the Unity Caucus makes.

Teachers ought to consider the larger social conditions impacting on students. As emphasized previously on this blog, income disparities are extreme in this nation and within the nation, income inequality is more extreme in New York city and state. (See this posting re inequality in the city; and regarding poverty impact on learning see introductory comments at this blog posting.) The stresses of race and class inequality impact on students' lives and negatively impact their educational performance. From issues of police mistreatment of youths of color to profound personal emotional stresses of poverty, these experiences inform the lived reality of the children that we teach in our classrooms. If we wish our students to have the best educational experience, we as teachers should not only attend to our own craft, our own performance, but we should also be concerned with recognizing the social inequality; we should work to change that inequality. This is why I am a social justice education unionist.

POSTSCRIPT:
There are many aspects about the organizing tactics of the key personalities in the caucus that are at once deceptive and deeply disturbing.  Most recently, a social media page connected with the group has been created. A Solidarity page headline boasts an army of 10,000. It turns out that the organizers of the page snatched up 10,000 names and made them --unwittingly, mind you-- into "supporters." This is putschist organizing at its basest.
New exploitative techniques in political deception on Facebook:
Just when you thought it could not get worse. The leader of Solidarity has taken the names of a few dozen well-known opponents of Michael Mulgrew and posted their names in Facebook postings. The risk is that the uninitiated would think that these persons endorse the Solidarity cult.
Doublethink alert:
The Solidarity leader ignores that the New Action caucus supports Michael Mulgrew in every election in NAC's quid pro quo for executive board seats, and he cries foul when Mulgrew and Unity opponents challenge his desire to ally with NAC, questioning whether they are truly an opposition caucus. Yet, Solidarity claims to oppose Mulgrew and Unity. Thus, this is a classic example of doublethink: the ability to hold two contradictory beliefs at the same time, especially used in political indoctrination. If you cannot be clear how Solidarity leaders think, can you be clear where their true convictions lie?

Ed Reform is Vietnam War of Our Day; Resistance vs. King is Tet Offensive of Our Day

Common Core is a key weapon in the Vietnam War of today. It is the guns rather than butter issue of our day.

Which side is Bill de Blasio on? --Obama, Coleman, Cuomo's or the side of parents, students and teachers?

Even the New York Times took notice of the resistance against John King.

Vietnam War	Education in NYS today
Containment; hawks stayed with this script; prevailed from McNamara to Nixon's years Mobilization and radicalization of millions of draft age youth happened. Yet, it took years of this to make presidents shift their stances on the war.	Fixed tautology: All should go to college, but education is in crisis, and teachers caused the crisis as they are the only ones to be held responsible. Metrics-driven reform is imperative for turning out the teachers. Students must be tested 'til they drop, to root out the teachers. No hope for leaders like NYS Education Commissioner John King or Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch to change their minds on Common Core. Expecting them to listen to the people is like expecting McNamara to turn into an absolute dove. Moreover, check for any flow of Gates Foundation money going their way.
Carpet-bombing	Speaker at 4:30 speaks, in the video Commissioner King Scorned in Port Chester, to how the Common Core mandates will scuttle programs such as music in order to meet those mandates. The above video, this video and this blogpost report that children are becoming ill and depressed from the Common Core.
Tet Offensive- set of Vietnamese rebel offensive caught the war leaders off guard.	The rolling protests will continue from Suffolk County to greater Buffalo. But tin-ear Tisch and King won't get it. As noted by other bloggers here, here, here the more the public protests, the more the Tisch and King sing the same reformy script. The more they ignore the people, the more the people will become enraged. The town halls and the mass PTA meetings across NYS will be the Tet Offensive of 2011-2014. What they (Tisch and King) worry? They're not directly accountable to voters. Besides, the Regents that appointed them to their posts are themselves in their own five year posts until 2015 (NYS Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver 2010 announcement of their appointments). What the Regents worry about either? Legislative appointment insulates them from popular opinion. Already one Regent outright wrote that they will not depose King, whom they appointed in 2011. It'll take a lot of popular rage to get the legislature to make sure that the halls of the Regents get rattled. Now, even the Times took notice on Nov. 18, alas coupling with quotes of a TNTP reformer's insinuating that the parents venting at Comm. King are racists.
After Tet Offensive, worn-down president Johnson threw in the towel.	When will sheriff Cuomo or reformer-in-chief Obama throw in the towel and hear the people? Unimaginable at this point. Definitely not 'til after 2014 elections. Watch for big Democratic losses as voters soundly reject these Common Core at the polls, taking out their rage on Democrats. Backlash against Obama over Affordable Care Act? You ain't seen nothin' yet.

When would Commissioner King ever make this concession? Could he ever make this concession?

The war against teachers, parents, students will rage on.

Tisch and King, listen up well. In the words of Bob Dylan:

What you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters [the parents of New York State schoolchildren]
Are beyond your command

The people are speaking:

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won't come again
And don't speak too soon
For the wheel's still in spin
And there's no tellin' who
That it's namin'
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin'

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There's a battle outside
And it is ragin'
It'll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'

Human collateral in testing and firing campaigns against teachers

The collateral damage of job loss or Danielson/VAM-driven job stress

First off we have the stress, burnout and demoralization issues: the 2012 Met Life survey on the American Teacher showed teacher morale to be at its lowest in decades. This survey is cited in Burris at Strauss in Washington Post.  See Met Life study, Teacher job satisfaction continues to decline, page 45 and this earlier blogpost on plummeting teacher morale.

Beyond the general job stress, under corporate education "reform" we have the escalating stress in school districts as teachers cope with the increasingly burdensome conditions, first driven by the No Child Left Behind policies, and then by the Race to the Top policies, with their emphasis on Value Added Modeling teacher evaluation systems (metrics-driven analyses of teacher performance that take no consideration of social conditions, administrator irresponsibility, parental support or student initiative). Incredibly, there is little thorough public discussion of how the people establishing the evaluation protocols have limited or shady teaching credentials. Consider the case of Charlotte Danielson, the architect of the Danielson Frameworks, head of the Danielson Group. She has successfully masked where she taught, at what grades, and for how long. Has anyone asked why she has kept her credentials so secret? Note that these evaluation systems have been rolled out, even though some conscientious education professors and researchers, as in the case of Chicago last year, have questioned their validity and have asked for piloting before mass implementation.

Then we have the matter of greater acute concern to teachers, their families and the economy: Teachers will lose jobs. Those still retaining jobs will endure an ongoing hell, as they pass each day in trepidation that their lessons will be suspected for causing bad scores on high stakes tests (when in many cases these low test scores will happen even with the best of efforts --you can read elsewhere --here and here-- on the external social factors or the poor school administration factors that enable less than ideal school performance).

The profession will take on a menial reputation, impacting individuals, fraying families
It will become more evident that teaching is a menial job demanding pre-Progressive Era 14 hour shifts, whose humiliation and job security make teachers increasingly unattractive as potential partners. Word will soon leak out: teachers under the new conditions cannot "have a life."

Not making the headlines will be the job stress, the broken relationships as partners snap at partners, blow up at kids, make scenes at family gatherings, you can keep imagining the examples. Silently, out of the headlines, the partners and children in these families we compose a generation that has lost the opportunity for a decent, happy family life.

Teacher suicides

Mary Thorson, former Army Reserve; teacher who took her life

Additionally, we should consider that many terminated teachers will find themselves distraught, unsupported and with no options, particularly after experiencing on the job bullying, bullying sanctioned by media rhetoric and politicians' policies. Most tragically, there will be those without strong social supports and take their own lives. Already we have seen teachers commit suicide after harassment (Mary Thorson of suburban Chicago) and termination following shaming in publicly revealed metrics-driven comparison of teachers and their test rankings (Rigoberto Ruelas of Los Angeles).
On Mary Thorson, who took her life, on Thanksgiving, 2011, read this post and this post at Assailed Teacher. Filmmaker and former teacher Mary Richardson, contributing to the Socialist Worker, connected her plight to the larger societal scourge of bullying of teachers.

Rigoberto Ruelas, teacher who took his life

On Rigoberto Ruelas, who scored "average," then took his own life, read Christina Hoag's "Rigoberto Ruelas' Suicide Raises Questions About LA Times Teacher Rankings" at Huffington Post. Yet as his story got attention in the New York Times, "Teacher’s Death Exposes Tensions in Los Angeles," and NBC News, "LA teacher suicide sparks test score pushback: Union says the Los Angeles Times should remove teacher performance ratings from its website," stories such as Hoag's spoke of questions being raised about such stack ranking, sadly the momentum for reconsidering metrics-based evaluation faded from official public discourse.


The downward spiral from the Keynesian multiplier in reverse

We should consider the Keynesian multiplier and the sprawling impacts of a middle class income. Teachers are middle class. The better paid ones have some disposable income. They can take long distance trips with their families, they can pay for sports, camp, dance or music classes for their kids. The ancillary effects of teachers losing their jobs will be weakened local economies that rely on the discretionary spending of those formerly employed teachers, the restaurants, the barbers, hardware stores.

Note that in the industrial Midwest it is often cited that when an auto or auto parts plant closes it is estimated that thousands of jobs are lost beyond the factory gates. This is the Keynesian multiplier in reverse. Remove the economic growth trigger and you decelerate the economy. You can see this from Michigan to the Hudson Valley. The New York City metro region has been less susceptible to the down-turns that much of the rest of the nation, particularly those in which industry has been a large fraction. Yet, with the firings that the consecutive APPR "Ineffectives" there will be a slightly down-ward drag on the economy.

Much as the Vietnam War higher-ups spoke of burning down a village to save it, we have politicians from liberals like New York's Governor Andrew Cuomo (who has called for the "death penalty" for "failing" schools) to conservatives like Wisconsin's Scott Walker that speak of reducing state costs to save the economy. We should not fall for their Frank Luntz-type manipulation of language. "Slashing costs" means cutting jobs; reducing healthcare benefits, slashing pension benefits have very real costs. Lifestyle quality will get downgraded. We should note the aggregate (general, overall, taking all the parts together) economic decline that follows the very specific war on one part of the middle class.

We can add administrators to the mix, as they get thrown out of jobs when schools close. Yet, we will see exceptions to the downsizing of administrators, as we see in frequent columns in Chaz's School Daze, there is a double standard for administrators, as they can be charged with highly unseemly conduct, yet often remain in their positions. Watch administrators in closed schools get rotated over to other schools while teachers take the hit for the bad test scores. While administrators get rotated, many teachers will lose their positions. Watch also for the veteran teachers be in line to take the hit, as school leaders will be eager to replace them with younger, cheaper teachers.

It is particularly easy to get replacement talent. The stagnant economy means that there are limited positions for recent college graduates. There will be eager graduates will and ready to replace the veteran teachers. This is particularly a problem in vibrant cultural magnet cities that attract college graduates around the surrounding region. In our region it is New York City; in the Midwest, it is Chicago; in southern California, Los Angeles and so on.

Therapy: a growth industry
The only people benefiting from the ratcheting up of pressure on teachers will be therapists who will see a boom in the number of clients, until their insurance runs out after termination, and the moving companies that will move families from big suburban homes to downscale apartments or back in with mom and day.

Political expediency of scapegoating and mass bullying
We also have the amoral politicians that do not see the harm in their social policies. Ignoring the social factors that can contribute to less than ideal student test scores, they will scream for the heads of "ineffective" teachers, gaining political capital from these teachers' scarlet I status. Pundits and legislators with no teacher experience demand impossible results from teachers and create evaluation schemes that are increasingly becoming apparent to teachers and even superintendents as inappropriate and untenable. Yet, teacher union leaders, long absent for the classroom, as New York City's United Federation of Teachers president Michael Mulgrew endorsed every governmental step that created the evaluation mess that is degrading teaching and stealing administrators from their traditional school leadership duties. See this video on Mulgrew's endorsement of the new evaluation scheme from its 2010 inception roots.

 
(photo from demonstration of the Cranston Teachers' Alliance)
Out of humane empathy, more of the public should speak out against what education policy makers are doing with teachers.

Think of pastor Martin Niemoller's First They Came piece. What profession might be next, to follow teachers, in a broad-reaching political attack campaign? Really, who has spoken up for us, besides Diane Ravitch?


To the contrary, we have Democratic federal education official and president that cheer the mass firing of teachers, as Arne Duncan and Barack Obama in the Central Falls High School, Rhode Island case.



And more recently, we see New Jersey Republican governor Chris Christie's becoming unhinged with anger at a teacher Melissa Tomlinson. His "I am tired of you people" outburst and the universal silence on this explosive public verbal abuse among politicians of either major political party, as well as the professional opinion shaping community, the pundits, speaks volumes to the social marginalization of teachers and the apparent legitimacy of the blanket targeting of teachers.

For the sake of the dignity of the profession, for the humanity of their families and their relationships, for the dignity of the national community, the scapegoating and the punishing policies must end.

Teachers, Feel Oppressed By Danielson, APPR? HBS Researcher Links Modern Micro-Management Policies to U.S. Slavery Practices

Forbes magazine --of all places!-- has published a story that reports on a Harvard Business School researcher that has produced a story on modern business management practices and slavery. While the story does not raise issues of applicability to teachers, we can clearly read penchant for micro-management as having clear applicability to the experience of school teachers in the United States today. The micro-management problem is particularly acute in public schools as teachers are held accountable to test scores, when attention to test scores ignores the influence of external social factors or school administration mismanagement.

This study inherently raises parallels with modern tools against teachers, such as Charlotte Danielson's Danielson Framework (which assumes compliant, attentive, intellectually precocious students shall be the norm, evidently, showing little awareness of real world living and working conditions -notice how she has never publicly divulged the specific grade levels at which she taught, her tenure or service or the district in which she worked). Additionally, the HBS researcher's report resonates with Bill Gates/Microsoft-informed stack ranking that enables Jack Welch/GE-style yearly 7 or 10 percent workforce shedding. 

Incidentally, Aaron Pallas of Columbia University's Teachers College reports in "Ratings madness: Are there really no highly effective elementary or middle-school teachers in Syracuse?" that no elementary or middle school teacher in Syracuse public schools rated highly effective, as indicated in that school system's cumulative rating report. Pallas looked carefully and found that the culprit lay in the school-wide local measures. They dragged down the rating for individual teachers. Can we really anticipate that the Annual Professional Performance Review, APPR, implementation will be fair and appropriate? 

Katie Johnston, in Forbes, January 16, 2013

The Messy Link Between Slave Owners And Modern Management

Caitlin C. Rosenthal didn’t intend to write a book about slavery. She set out to tackle something much more mundane: the history of business practices. But when she started researching account books from the mid-1800s, a period of major economic development during the rise of industrialization in the United States, Rosenthal stumbled across an unexpected source of innovation.

Rosenthal, a Harvard-Newcomen Fellow in business history at Harvard Business School, found that southern plantation owners kept complex and meticulous records, measuring the productivity of their slaves and carefully monitoring their profits—often using even more sophisticated methods than manufacturers in the North. Several of the slave owners’ practices, such as incentivizing workers (in this case, to get them to pick more cotton) and depreciating their worth through the years, are widely used in business management today.
As fascinating as her findings were, Rosenthal had some misgivings about their implications. She didn’t want to be perceived as saying something positive about slavery. On the contrary, she sees her research as a critique of capitalism—one that could broaden the understanding of today’s business practices.

The work is part of her current book project, “From Slavery to Scientific Management: Capitalism and Control in America, 1754-1911,” and the forthcoming edited collection Slavery’s Capitalism.

The evolution of modern management is usually associated with good old-fashioned intelligence and ingenuity—”a glorious parade of inventions that goes from textile looms to the computer,” Rosenthal says. But in reality, it’s much messier than that. Capitalism is not just about the free market; it was also built on the backs of slaves who were literally the opposite of free.

“It’s a much bigger, more powerful question to ask, If today we are using management techniques that were also used on slave plantations,” she says, “how much more careful do we need to be? How much more do we need to think about our responsibility to people?”

The next part raises the topic of absentee ownership; this brings to mind the way that current policy is set by people that do not live in the affected districts, by people that do not send their children to public schools (Bill Gates, for one, on both counts)

Absentee ownership

According to Rosenthal, the history of detailed record-keeping on plantations goes back to at least the 1750s in Jamaica and Barbados. When wealthy slave owners in the West Indies started leaving others in charge of their plantations, she found, they asked for regular reports about how their businesses were faring. Some historians see this rise in absentee ownership as a sign of decline, but it is also among the first instances of the separation of ownership and management, Rosenthal says—a landmark in the history of capitalism.

Slave owners were able to collect data on their workforce in ways that other business owners couldn’t because they had complete control over their workers. They didn’t have to worry about turnover or recruiting new workers, and they could experiment with different tactics—moving workers around and demanding higher levels of output, even monitoring what they ate and how long new mothers breastfed their babies. And the slaves had no recourse.

“If you tried to do this with a northern laborer,” Rosenthal says, “they’d just quit.”

Here we find ourselves thinking of the emphasis of metrics over all things student and teacher-related. And on competition and pitting one against the other, we can think of merit pay. On collective punishment, we can think of New York City's mad Measures of Student Learning, which punish gym teachers on the basis of an entire science department's test scores. Has anyone ever considered that many teachers demeaned under the new metrics will "just quit"?

Looking forward

This led owners to experiment with ways of increasing the pace of labor, Rosenthal explains, such as holding contests with small cash prizes for those who picked the most cotton, and then requiring the winners to pick that much cotton from there on out. Slave narratives describe how others used the data to calculate punishment, meting out whippings according to how many pounds each picker fell short.
Similar incentive plans reappeared in early twentieth-century factories, with managers dangling the promise of cash rewards if their workers reached certain production levels.

Planters also used group incentives to encourage honesty, doling out a barrel of corn to each hand with the caveat that if anything was stolen from the farm and no one turned in the thief, double the value of that corn would be deducted from each of their Christmas awards. Collective penalties would later be adopted by salesmen and companies like Singer Sewing Company to encourage workers to police one another.

 . . .

These account books played a role in reducing slaves to “human capital,” Rosenthal says, allowing owners who were removed from day-to-day operations to see their slaves as assets, as interchangeable units of production in a ledger, instead of as people.

 Again, on human capital, we can think of the objectifying conception that education policy rulers have of students.

MOSL, Collective Punishment in the NYC Teacher Evaluation System -Portelos Got the Eval Proposals

*Postscript: the DOE, UFT Evaluation Proposals, acquired, via FOIL! -scroll to end.

Queens high school teacher Arthur Goldstein writes, posted at Diane Ravitch's blog, as "Our Thoroughly Insane Teacher Evaluation System," of the absurdity of the Student Learning Objectives, otherwise in New York City called Measures of Student Learning (MOSL). He wrote of how some teachers will be evaluated by the test scores of students in areas they do not teach. [Notice how the NYC Department of Education and the union, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), have been more recently using the official name, "Advance." --Probably, among other reasons, to reduce the number of people using the politically charged phrase, "King's imposed teacher evaluation system."]

 For state measures, some were mandated to reflect individual classes of teachers. In those cases, we opted to have department results reflect the local measures. In other words, your department Regents results could be the local measures. This would reflect not only the exams in areas you teach, but those given by your entire department. For example, if you teach algebra, the results in geometry and trigonometry will also be part of your local measures.

 . . .
If your subject, like music, art, or physical education, does not have a state assessment, your evaluation would be based on schoolwide state tests. Your local evaluation would be based on the lowest third of schoolwide state tests.

Make no mistake, this MOSL plan is collective punishment. Of course, low performance is not always attributable entirely to a teacher. The test can be poorly written. The school administration can be slipshod. The student and the community could face very difficult social circumstances.
Yet, no matter. Any teacher outside of the state-measured area will be punished for the so-called mistakes of the other teachers.

The nasty irony is that teaching to the test to ensure good test scores will not work. Yet, administrators insisting on teaching to the Common Core will want instead Danielson-compliant, Common Core-compliant lessons. Heads, you lose, tails, you lose.
A very appropriate post at Ravitch's blog in June, 2013: Carol Burris: John King’s Absurd Educator Evaluation Plan.

As Perdido Street has been chronicalling, Mulgrew has been defending APPR since May 30, before the imposed evaluation deal, defending every bit of it from Value-Added Modeling, VAM to the SLOs/MOSL. [See also his more recent post on how the new "Advance" system turns teachers into factory workers.]
And surreal that in late August and the first week of September, the UFT has been frantically trying to repeat the myths, that Common Core is a necessary and imperative curriculum, that the Advance APPR system is the best way to evaluate teachers. Most recently, at the chapter leader meeting at its Brooklyn headquarters president Michael Mulgrew went through great effort to tout NYSED Commissioner John King's imposed system as just wonderful, and that it the new system will get principals to be more fair.

The story has seeped into one mainstream education news site, Gotham Schools, September 16, 2013, which provided news that illustrates how teachers in non-tested subjects will be subjected to the effects of the test, "Instead of telling teachers apart, new evals lump some together."

Note the details in Gotham Schools' photo caption: Teachers attended training sessions about the city’s new teacher evaluation system over the summer, but some features of the system – including how teachers whose students don’t take state tests would have their student growth measured — were not decided until the school year began last week. [How ludicrous and sneaky that the DOE only announced or determined the procedure until last week. And the UFT still promotes this system, on principle? See important note on the MORE caucus at the end of this post.]

[A]cross the city this year, thousands of teachers will be rated in large part based on test scores of subjects and students that they do not teach.

[T]he scenarios are examples of how schools have tried to comply with a new teacher evaluation system that must factor student performance into final ratings. They also represent how the original purpose of the evaluations, to differentiate teachers’ effectiveness, has been squeezed by restrictive state laws, limited resources, and a tight timeline for implementation.

“It’s insane to me that 40 percent of my evaluation is going to be based on someone else’s work,” said Jason Zanitsch, a high school drama teacher who will share the same “student growth” score with colleagues in his school this year.

An incomplete evaluation system, implemented rapidly

Sixty percent of teachers’ ratings this year will come from observations by administrators. The state’s evaluation law mandates that the remaining 40 percent come from a combination of state tests and assessments chosen by each district, whose scores are all crunched to determine student growth.

But neither kind of test exists for Zanitsch and other drama teachers, at least this year. They are among the thousands of city teachers for whom the state has not approved any way to measure student learning. They include librarians, 5,000 physical education and arts teachers, and others who teach foreign languages, health, and career education.

New York City principals had until the first day of school last week to choose from a menu of limited options, first made available in early August ["Still no word from city on final details of teacher evaluation plan", August 1, 2013], for evaluating their teachers on student growth. Principals and teachers told GothamSchools that their schools have picked a ”default” option in which all teachers — even core subject teachers — will receive the same score cobbled together from all of the state tests taken in the school.

“What we are advising most of our schools and principals this year is since the principal’s rating is based on how their school collectively is doing, just take the default, especially since it means the minimum of extra work and testing for everyone,” said a person who works in a network with many high schools.

The arrangement has drawn a lawsuit in Florida ["Florida, Teacher Lawsuit Could Spread to Other States", Governing.com May 14, 2013] and criticism from dozens of city principals who last week pledged not to help execute it ["First Day of School Means Start of Controversial New Teacher Eval System", ]. But in lieu of state-approved assessments for all subjects, officials say rating teachers by their colleagues’ scores is the best option available until more credible alternatives can be developed.

This will no doubt drive teachers away from serving in challenging schools. And so, the schools will get further labeled as failing.

Collective punishment. We can call John King and his local collaborators the 21st century barbarians.

New York City teachers, band together: The MORE caucus of the UFT is pursuing a campaign for a moratorium on the use of the teacher evaluation system --text and online petition. This writer has signed. Will you? Visit the MORE site for the analyses of the new Advance teacher evaluation program. Download the hard copy of the moratorium petition and collect signatures of colleagues. Share with chapter leaders and delegates. Keep posted to the MORE site, for upcoming events (such as its first general meeting, tomorrow, Sat. 9/21, 12 - 3 pm, 224 W St., 14th Floor) to learn more about MORE and to get plugged into the moratorium campaign.

A commenter on the above blogpost at Diane Ravitch's site (Our Thoroughly Insane Teacher Evaluation System) has this suggestion on positive action teachers and supporters outside the classroom can take:

LISTEN to me! I know there is something at least pro-active you can do. Contact Carol Burris or Sean Feeney of New York Principals. They are collecting data and anecdotal data of teachers in NY State who have just received their evaluations for the first time.
Yours is a CLASSIC TEXTBOOK example of the hideous lies and injustices of this new junk science system. Write down your situation and literally send it to John King, every member of the Board of Regents, and Merryl Tisch. Send it to EVERY newspaper, local and national, hardcopy and online. Send it to your local and even the stinky NYSUT union. 

Carol and Sean can be reached at:
burriscarol@gmail.com
scfeeney@newyorkprincipals.org
I am getting my evaluation results this Tuesday, and I would not at all be surprised if I face this same situation as you.
Don’t despair!!!!!!

Postscript: Francesco Portleos secured the evaluation proposals by Freedom of Information Law requests, shared at his blog, Protect Portelos:

FOILed NYCDOE and UFT Teacher Evaluation Proposals Acquired. Let’s Compare.
What did the UFT Want? What did the NYC DOE want? What did Mayor Bloomberg want?
…and how did those topics differ from what NYSED Commissioner Dr. John King wanted in the end? 

I FOILed those May 8th proposals on May 22, 2013. Although there was some delay and loss in communication, the FOIL officer at NYSED, just emailed me both proposals. I withdrew my appeal. 

I quickly browsed through them, but then I realized “Wait…my termination hearing continues on Monday at 51 Chamber Street, 7th Fl at 10AM. I have to prepare for that over this right now.” [The entrance to use is 49 Chambers St., right next door to the parking lot (where the crew for "Law and Order" park, and tape the show). Read more on Monday, September 23's hearing here.] 

Therefore I am sharing them with you all, so you can read, dissect and compare. Enjoy and I look forward to your analysis.
UFT Evaluation Proposals
NYC DOE Evaluation Proposals

Would be a shame to see how much the DOE, UFT had coincided on the nasty elements.

Gates Brings Microsoft's Cannibalistic Culture to Teaching

*Postscript: scroll down for the Pledge on the Ethical Use of Student Data, student data being the basis for teacher cannibalism
This is all coming to make sense: Design metrics to numerically rank teachers. Have teachers compete against each other. Watch the low scorers get demoralized and quit or get terminated. Get new hires at low rates.
P.L. Thomas' very essential piece at "The Becoming Radical":

Gates’s Cannibalistic Culture: Coming to a School Near You!

August 26, 2013

Bill Gates has adopted education as a billionaire’s hobby for many years—once supporting small schools projects, but more recently focusing on teacher quality.

Little attention, however, has been paid in the mainstream media to Gates’s struggles in business (Microsoft) or his complete lack of expertise, experience, or success as an educational entrepreneur.

Until this expose by Vanity Fair addressing the key practices at the foundation of Microsoft’s failures (“Today, a single Apple product—the iPhone—generates more revenue than all of Microsoft’s wares combined”). [1]

Gates has argued for a need to identify the best (and worst) teachers in order to control who teachers teach and how:

What should policymakers do? One approach is to get more students in front of top teachers by identifying the top 25 percent of teachers and asking them to take on four or five more students. Part of the savings could then be used to give the top teachers a raise. (In a 2008 survey funded by the Gates Foundation, 83 percent of teachers said they would be happy to teach more students for more pay.) The rest of the savings could go toward improving teacher support and evaluation systems, to help more teachers become great.

In effect, Gates’s plan to address teacher quality is shared among almost all education reformers, including the USDOE and Secretary Arne Duncan, and focuses on labeling,ranking, and sorting teachers—a practice eerily similar to the “Cannibalistic Culture” identified as central to the failures at Microsoft:

Eichenwald’s conversations reveal that a management system known as “stack ranking”—a program that forces every unit to declare a certain percentage of employees as top performers, good performers, average, and poor—effectively crippled Microsoft’s ability to innovate. “Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees,” Eichenwald writes. “If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, 2 people were going to get a great review, 7 were going to get mediocre reviews, and 1 was going to get a terrible review,” says a former software developer. “It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.”

“Competing with Each Other”: Students as Weapons of Mass Instruction

It all starts with a lie. A very compelling lie that has the weight of common sense reinforced by the proclamations of people with wealth, Bill Gates, and power, Secretary Arne Duncan: Teachers are the single most important element in the learning of a child.

The problem is, of course, this is factually untrue. Nonetheless, the follow up lie (when you base a conclusion on a false permise, that conclusion is also false) is also compelling: Teacher quality must be improved!

The balance of evidence shows that measurable student outcomes (itself a serious flaw in how we draw conclusions about both student learning and teacher quality) is overwhelmingly linked with out-of-school factors—anywhere from about 2/3 to well over 80% of that data correlated with out-of-school factors.

Even arguing that teachers are the single most important in-school factor in measurable student outcomes is problematic since the research on that claim is mixed at best (some evidence suggests that school leadership and culture are as important, if not more so, than teacher quality).

Gates and the USDOE, then, are making a foundational problem of seeking solutions to problems that haven’t been identified. In other words, no one has shown definitively that teacher quality is the primary or even one of the primary causes of low student outcomes.

Now, once we move beyond that problem, approaches to teacher evaluation and pay may need to be revised, but ample evidence shows that the proposals being offered by Gates and Duncan, as well as all across the U.S., are also without solid evidence to support them (disproportionate teacher assignment has been identified, but that reality is somehow often ignored since the privileged children are winning in that inequity [see Peske & Haycock, 2006]).

Incentive-based evaluation and compensation have a long record of being ineffective, counter-production, and not cost effective (see Hout & Elliot, 2011, and Kohn, 1993/1999). Yet, as with the compelling message about teacher quality and student outcomes, competition and incentives are almost universally embraced in U.S. culture without regard for the evidence (see Worthen, et al., 2009, regarding competition).

That leads to the revelations about the previously unexplored problems at Microsoft exposed by Eichenwald—the Cannibalistic Culture of stack ranking by which all workers are evaluated on an imposed scale of ranking in order to identify the elite workers.

If Eichenwald’s characterization of the ranking as corrosive is accurate, leading as it did to workers “competing with each other,” then we can anticipate a truly disturbing reality to occur when teachers are held accountable for their students’ grade as significant percentages of their evaluations and compensation: Teachers will begin to use their students as weapons of mass instruction to defeat the students of the competing teachers, either in their own school or within the district.

This is a debilitating and ethically corrupt outcome that cannot be avoided if we continue to seek incentive-based, VAM approaches to teacher quality.

Education and teacher quality absolutely need to be reformed, but increasing the Cannibalistic Culture for teachers and students is not the path we need as a free people seeking universal public education as a central institution supporting democracy.

Education is a collaborative venture; a culture of competition is poison in the teaching/learning dynamic. Labeling, sorting, and ranking teachers and students is inexcusable in any form as long as we are genuinely committed to fostering a culture of collaboration necessary for learning.

The Cannibalistic Culture has created the winners who call for expanding that game. The Cannibalistic Culture benefits only the winners as it forces the status of loser upon most people regardless—again consider the stack ranking at Microsoft.

Teacher evaluation and education need to be reformed toward a culture of collaboration, a culture that encourages human interactions that are not about winning or losing and not about fighting for ever-shrinking pieces of the pie.

Public education and teacher quality reform currently being pursued is certain to drive good people from teaching and to ask less and less of both teachers and students. We have ample evidence from the disturbing Microsoft story being revealed to us, but we also have the stories of generations of teachers who know how education and teaching need to be supported and reformed.

Teachers want all students to succeed. Teachers want to be treated as professionals. Teachers want school conditions that support their work as educators.

Teachers do not want to use their students to outperform some other teachers’ students.

A Cannibalistic Culture will certainly create students as weapons of mass instruction that will destroy universal public education.

[1] See also The Poisonous Employee-Ranking System That Helps Explain Microsoft’s Decline, which prompted this reposting from Daily Kos July 5, 2012.

Michelle Gunderson of Chicago has developed a great graphic on the Ethical Use of Student Data. Remember that student data is the essential instrument for ranking and sorting teachers. The extolling of some and termination of others --in parallel fashion to Gates' Microsoft's stack ranking-- cannot happen in the age of metrics over everything cannot happen without student data. Here is Gunderson's essential analysis:

Now, we see standardized test scores used to justify privatizing our schools. Over and over again our downtown administration starves neighborhood schools of resources and refuses to address the needs of our impoverished students. Then when these schools have low performing test scores, they are closed. Charter schools, which are private enterprises even when non-profit, are opened up to fill this void.
Hence, in my career as a CPS teacher I’ve witnessed standardized testing used to sort, punish, and privatize.
And I am saying enough is enough.
I’ve developed a Personal Pledge for the Ethical Use of Student Data. This pledge is my way of communicating to fellow teachers, parents, administrators, and education policy allies my stance on standardized testing. It’s a document that helps codify my moral stance, and it is hoped it will help others take a similar action.
I realize it is just a start. If I could wave a wand and make the tests disappear I would. But I do know that if my school district insists on giving these tests, I can insist upon exercising some control over how they are used.