NAACP OPPOSES HIGH STAKES TESTING; GATES SQUANDERED PUBLIC MONEY TRYING TO RATE TEACHERS BY STUDENT TEST SCORES

One of the arguments AFT President Randi Weingarten when she was UFT President used to shove down our throats when defending the test and punish system was that our allies in the civil rights movement are in favor of high stakes testing. It was not a strong position for the Union to take as our members were being blamed for circumstances which went way beyond the control of teachers but the NAACP was cited to defend testing. Times are changing.

This is from Diane Ravitch:
Today, the NAACP released a statement (“issue guidance”) opposing the use of a single standardized test score to determine students’ promotion or graduation.

Ravitch and others want the NAACP to go further down the anti-testing road:

I encourage the NAACP to delve further into the misuse of standardized testing, which is scored on a normal curve and should never be used to make high-stakes decisions about promotion or high school graduation, not even as part of multiple measures. 

Meanwhile, we also learned this week that Bill Gates wasted about half a billion dollars in his quest to have teachers rated by student scores on standardized tests.

This is from the Washington Post in the Valerie Strauss blog called the Answer Sheet. It is written by Network for Public Education leader Carol Burris. We copied the first few paragraphs.

The New York Times called it “the first principals’ revolt in history.” During the fall of 2011, 658 New York state principals signed onto a document voicing their strong objections to the state’s new teacher evaluation system. During the next few months, the number of objecting principals would swell to 1,555. Thousands of educators, researchers and parents joined in. The message that united them was simple — evaluating teachers using student test scores was a terrible idea.

With a disregard that bordered on contempt for school leaders, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, the self-proclaimed “lobbyist for students,” pushed himself into the debate by insisting that teachers who were rated ineffective on the student score component of the new evaluation be rated ineffective overall.

By January 2015, he called the 2011 plan he crafted “baloney” and championed a new plan that further increased the test score component, while demanding that districts call in outside observers to evaluate teachers in an attempt to make sure that teachers got the low scores he believed they deserved. A few months later, his approval rating dropped to under 50 percent due primarily to the public’s disapproval of his education policies. A divided New York State legislature is still battling over how to fix the mess produced by an evaluation system that became known as the plane being built in the air.

Was it worth all the political and financial capital it took to create a broken system that few, if any, believe works?

Apparently not, according to the final report of a longitudinal study by the RAND Corporation and the American Institutes for Research (AIR), which was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. 

The study examined the effects over six years of the Gates Foundation’s Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching (IP) initiative that included, as a key feature, teacher evaluations systems similar to New York’s. It concluded that the IP project did not improve either student achievement or the quality of teachers. In fact, it did more harm than good.

You can read the specific details if you like but we all know rating teachers based on student test scores is an invalid way to judge teachers. Don't forget we have a petition to repeal the NYS teacher evaluation law which bases half of our rating on student assessments. Please sign but just as importantly, encourage others to do so. We have kind of stalled lately at 1300. We need your help.