Group items tagged

""Empowering students to advocate for change." It's as if this organization was made just for me-just read my headline! If you take a few seconds to search around my blog documenting my vision, my involvement with students through mentoring and being a teachers assistant, my aspiration to be a future teacher, and restless dedication to elevating the student voice, it is no doubt I have full faith in the students role in education policy. As my blog was born out of my realizations of the inequalities in our education system, then continued further as I wanted to expose these silenced truths, this blog took me so far to revolutionizing my life. There is a never ending thirst for truth and knowledge, and the paramount responsibility I feel to share transparency for the sake of students' futures. I have a passion for the human capacity and potential, which is why I aim to be an educator who provides such opportunities for my future students. Which is why I fight hard against the push for more standardized tests, and teacher-evals that claim teacher effectiveness can be determined by a number. As I've stated multiple times before, "I want to leave this world knowing I did whatever I could to make the term "at-risk" one that is not so commonly associated with the term 'school.'" I have a restless drive for educational equity, which is why I stand against Students For Education Reform."

The teachers union is threatening to curb its efforts toward new teacher evaluations if the Department of Education doesn't remind principals again that the old evaluation system is still in place. The threat comes at the end of an angry letter sent by UFT Secretary Michael Mendel sent to the DOE yesterday. In the letter, Mendel says that UFT members report some principals are preparing to use the Danielson Framework, an evaluation model that the DOE favors, to rate teachers - even though the union hasn't agreed to the change.

"Some see us as education's odd couple-one, the president of a democratic teachers' union; the other, a director at the world's largest philanthropy. While we don't agree on everything, we firmly believe that students have a right to effective instruction and that teachers want to do their very best. We believe that one of the most effective ways to strengthen both teaching and learning is to put in place evaluation systems that are not just a stamp of approval or disapproval but a means of improvement. We also agree that in too many places, teacher evaluation procedures are broken-unconstructive, superficial, or otherwise inadequate. And so, for the past four years, we have worked together to help states and districts implement effective teacher development and evaluation systems carefully designed to improve teacher practice and, ultimately, student learning."

"When we sit down with the UFT, there are two groups in the room: the UFT and our school children," Mayor Bloomberg said, adding that the latter group is "who we work for…We have an obligation to stand up for their lives, their futures." He called for merit pay, for more a more stringent teacher evaluation system, more (union-free) charter schools. "It's a legacy thing. Remember, 'I am the education mayor.' Two years left and [test] scores have been flat the whole time. Closing schools has not really worked out. We have the warehousing of students," said Mr. Mulgrew. "Those are problematic, so I'm sure he's worried about his legacy."

"In a direct challenge to New York's most high-profile education initiative, school superintendents from across the region are beginning an independent review of the accuracy of state-generated teacher ratings that are based on student test scores. The Lower Hudson Council of School Superintendents has hired a research center at the University of Wisconsin to study the state's first round of teacher scores, released last summer, and to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of New York's approach. At least 80 school districts in the Lower Hudson Valley and Long Island are turning over data on thousands of students and teachers - all anonymously - so that researchers can run the numbers."

Making teacher evals a semiprivate record is legally difficult.

"Kyle Hunsberger, a math teacher at Johnny Cochran Middle school in Los Angeles, works 60-hour weeks, makes every minute count in class and gets high praise from his principal and students. Yet, according to a key measure of teacher effectiveness used by LAUSD, Hunsberger is average."

Los Angeles Unified teachers are participating in an evaluation project that gives more feedback on their methods.

"Granted, whether and how to alter new evaluations are difficult decisions, and there is no tried and true playbook. That said, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo's proposals provide a stunning example of how not to approach these changes. To see why, let's look at some sound general principles for improving teacher evaluation systems based on the first rounds of results, and how they compare with the New York approach.*"

New Haven's new method of grading teachers spurred low performers to improve their game-and led 34 others to leave the school district, officials announced Monday in the first test of a nationally watched component of the city's school reform drive.

"New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo's school reform proposals have infuriated educators across the state. Award-winning Principal Carol Burris of South Side High School is one of them and in this post, she  explains why. Burris, who has written frequently for this blog,  was named New York's 2013 High School Principal of the Year by the School Administrators Association of New York and the National Association of Secondary School Principals, and in 2010, was tapped as the 2010 New York State Outstanding Educator by the School Administrators Association of New York State. Burris has been exposing the botched school reform program in New York for years on this blog. Her most recent post was "Principal: 'There comes a time when rules must be broken…That time is now.'" (In this post, Burris refers to "value-added" scores, which refer to value-added measurement (VAM), which purports to be able to determine the "value" a teacher brings to student learning by plopping test scores into complicated formulas that can supposedly strip out all other factors, including the conditions in which a student lives.)"

"As with the Vergara case in California, a central claim of the New York City Parents Union is that the presence of statutory tenure protections in New York State leads to a persistent and systematic deprivation of a sound basic education which falls disproportionately on the state's low income and minority children. Let's review again the basic structure of this argument."

"As with the Vergara case in California, a central claim of the New York City Parents Union is that the presence of statutory tenure protections in New York State leads to a persistent and systematic deprivation of a sound basic education which falls disproportionately on the state's low income and minority children. Let's review again the basic structure of this argument."

"The problem with this fight is that it drains the system of energy - energy that should be spent on the teaching and learning process. This very visible fight, often fought through the media, is a significant distraction from the work that needs to occur in schools. What's worse, however, is that the battle is over the wrong things. The problem is that the battle lines are all over a misplaced emphasis on human capital over social capital."