This is a pivotal moment for our public schools. Last week, the city and the teachers union submitted to the state what amount to competing proposals for the rules we will have to follow to evaluate our teachers.
We have tried to negotiate a deal with the United Federation of Teachers over the past few months but have hit an impasse on some key issues. If we don’t come to an agreement by the end of the month, the state will intervene, leading an arbitration process and then imposing an evaluation system on the city June 1.
No matter how we reach a deal, it has to be the right one. It must set clear expectations for teachers, provide them with meaningful feedback, help them develop and remove those who cannot improve and educate our students....
We are now at a point at which the teacher evaluation problem will either be solved or grow worse. We will continue to work to reach a settlement with the UFT, but we won’t agree to a system that puts adults ahead of students.
Splitting the difference down the middle between the UFT’s position and ours might seem like a practical solution, but the stakes are simply too high for that approach.
Paralyzing our principals’ ability to run their schools would be a tragedy for our children.
The union’s rhetoric that we are simply interested in removing bad teachers has always been a calculated distraction. Our goal is to give our students the best education possible, and that entails support, development and accountability.
There's a lot of additional jive in the piece, but let's deal with what I excerpted for now.
First, Walcott is right about one thing: this surely is a pivotal moment for schools.
After 11 years of mismanagement by market forces, the NYC school system is near the breaking point.
The school closure process has become a farce, as the NYCDOE targets "low-performing schools" (always schools with the highest poverty demographic and many students with special needs), closes those schools, sends those children to new schools that they then starve of the needed resources to handle the influx of students with special needs and/or in need of academic remediation, then, as the test scores drop, targets those schools for closure too.
If Walcott and his boss actually cared about giving "our students" the "best education possible, and that entails support, development and accountability," they surely would give the schools targeted for closure all the supports they need instead of starving them of much needed resources or stealing those resources and giving them to neighboring charter schools.
Which brings me to the next reason why this is a pivotal moment for schools.
Bloomberg and Walcott and Klein before him have continuously attempted to steal as many resources from the public school system as they could in order to give it to their pet ideology project - their beloved non-unionized charters.
Juan Gonzalez at the Daily News exposed just how close charter operator Eva Moskowitz was to Chancellor Klein and just how happy the DOE was to give Moskowitz and her charters anything they wanted, especially space in public school buildings.
Bloomberg has set up a dual school system of have's and have not's, purposely starved the have not's in order to target them for closure and open up more charters.
Again, for Walcott to say that he and his boss are concerned with giving all students the best education possible is disingenuous at best, a bald lie at worst.
Walcott and his boss pick winners and losers in this system every day in order to promote their vision of a market-based school system.
Walcott says the state must not split the difference between the city's evaluation plan and the union's plan because this will paralyze principals from being able to run their schools.
Actually the thing that is going to paralyze principals' abilities to run their schools is the new Danielson rubric which requires administrators to observe every teacher in their building multiple times over the course of the school year using an observation rubric with a 57 page checklist for a 45 minute class. The evaluation system paperwork is so cumbersome that principals and assistant principals will soon do little else but teacher observations, pre-and post-oberservation conferences, and paperwork related to the observations.
Add in the new work that will have to be done over the Student Learning Objectives part of the evaluation, which will require principals and assistant principals to make sure every student has multiple pieces of standardized work in folders in every class in every subject for every teacher, not so that students can be evaluated but simply so that there teachers can be evaluated, and you can see just how much more paperwork principals and assistant principals are going to have to do around this new evaluation system.
On top of that, APPR puts a huge emphasis on tests scores, so that if a teacher is found to have not "added value" to his/her students' scores and receives a zero on the test part of the evaluation (20%-25% of the entire evaluation), they must be declared "ineffective" as teachers no matter how they score on the other 75%-80% of the evaluation, including all those "rigorous" classroom observations the new system is forcing.
The value-added measurement the state is going to use on teachers for the test-based part of the eval system suffers from large margins of error and wide swings in stability - does not a system that places such emphasis on voodoo statistics harm principals ability to run their schools?
You betcha - which is why over 1/3 of the principals across the state have signed a petition calling for the state to not evaluate teachers using test scores.
I get why Walcott felt the need to spin in the DN this morning.
He and Mayor Bloomberg are starting to feel the heat as their grip on power slips.
That was why they both felt the need to criticize the mayoral candidates this week for not getting on board with their reforms or praising their "legacy" running the school system.
Walcott and Bloomberg should feel threatened, because after 11 years of mismanagement, constant reorganizations, corporate cronyism, and authoritarian rule of the system by the Tweedocrats, we may be going back to a time when parents and teachers get some kind of say in how the system is run.
In addition, the Bloomberg/Walcott statistics are under attack as the union has called for an investigation into the last 11 years to see where the Tweedies and City Hall have played funky with the numbers.
They should feel threatened over that too.
Walcott can try and spin his reign of error over the system, can try and put one last stamp on the system by spinning the state to impose the worst evaluation system possible onto NYC before he and Bloomberg ride off into the sunset.
The reality is, when Bloomberg and Walcott go, many of the reforms they cherished and promoted over the objections are going to go with them.
And that includes the reforms on the teacher evaluation issue.
The system is so convoluted and complex that it is unworkable - even vaunted reformer Paul Vallas said so last week at a reform function.
And no amount of spin from Waclott is going to change that fact.
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