EXPERT EXPLAINS FAULTY NEW NYS TEACHER EVALUATION BILLS

Aaron Pallas is a Columbia professor and a testing expert. In the Daily News, he wrote an op-ed explaining the new teacher evaluation bills that both houses of the New York State Legislature passed overwhelmingly on Wednesday. We have been critical of the bills as they do not decouple student test results from teacher and principal evaluations.

Here is a little from Pallas:

The parallel bills under consideration in the state Senate and Assembly remove the requirement that the state assessments in grades 3 through 8 in English Language Arts and mathematics be used to determine a teacher's effectiveness. Districts can, through local collective bargaining, decide to do so, but it’s not mandatory. In contrast, teachers’ contributions to student performance can be evaluated via Student Learning Objectives (SLOs), an academic goal for each student based on assessments approved by the State Commissioner of Education. The SLO is supposed to be customized to students' starting places, so that an end-of-course assessment can be used to determine if a student learned the amount expected in a given year, based on where they started. Each child can then be judged as to whether s/he met the target of a year's growth on the assessment.

In order for a teacher to be rated Effective, 75% of his or her students must meet a target of one year of expected growth, based on a state-approved assessment.

Nothing is really changing much if Governor Cuomo signs the bills that passed the Senate and Assembly. Teachers will still be rated based on student scores on assessments. 

Pallas concludes:

Can these bills succeed in reducing the student testing burden, while still holding teachers accountable for student performance in a sensible way? Unfortunately, measuring student learning is messy, and it's easy to substitute algorithms for calculating Student Learning Objectives for careful thought about the links between teaching and learning.

That’s the real risk of these bills: They purport to get us out of the testing trap, and actually throw us right back in it.

In case all of that information with SLO's and student growth was a little too much for a Friday night, we will put the new evaluation bills into simple terms with all apologies to Pete Townshend:

MEET THE NEW JUNK SCIENCE, SAME AS THE OLD JUNK SCIENCE!

There is only one way forward: Repeal the entire evaluation law and start over. Please spread our petition asking people to do that. (The link is also at the right side of this page.)