CUOMO WORLD!
This is a perfect example of what we face in NYS:
A recent NYT story about 2 simultaneous rallies in Albany: It favors the New York City’s charter school rally in held in a park just outside the Capitol, with video screens, a rock-concert atmosphere, an enthusiastic mix of thousands of students, a raft of state leaders, a pop star, dance troupes and booming club music, including the Republican Senate majority leader, Dean G. Skelos.
The audience was supplied by the main charter organizations in NYC:
- KIPP, recruited parents and graduates to attend.
- Achievement First, brought its Brooklyn students if their parents came along.
- Eva S. Moskowitz‘s Success Academy, closed schools, held class on buses, and if parents did not want their children to make the trip north, they had to send them elsewhere for the day.
At the same time, supporters of teachers’ unions gathered at a convention center adjacent to the Capitol. Smaller in numbers, less festive, the unions were targeted lawmakers, including the heads of education committees from the Assembly and State Senate. Michael Mulgrew, the New York City union’s president told 1,000 parents and members in attendance at the convention center that it was their day to fight.
The points being that we are hidden indoors, union led, talking to pols, and they are packing a public outdoor space with recruited kids and parents in uniformed t shirts and hats and celebrities….
What’s it all about? Governor Andrew Cuomo’s budget proposal! Which is filled with:
THREATS AND BLACKMAIL:
His proposed $1.1 billion increase in school aid is contingent upon the approval of a series his education reform proposals, including a teacher evaluation system based more heavily on standardized testing.
To put pressure on districts, his staff has not released how much money each school district would receive after applying the state’s complex funding formulas. Without the charts, school districts cant plan their budgets, which must be approved by voters in the spring.
These are his demands:
- CHANGE TEACHER EVALUATION. Cuomo described as “baloney” the state’s roughly 700 school districts own evaluation plans.
He wants to:
A – Require that student standardized test scores account for a full 50 percent of a teacher’s evaluation rather than the current 20 percent.
- He ignores the position of the American Statistical Association on how not to use statistics to evaluate teachers.
- Most VAM studies find that teachers account for about 1% to 14% of the variability in test scores, and that the majority of opportunities for quality CUOMO WORLD! | DCGEducator: Doing The Right Thing:
