NY BATs Open Letter to NY Commissioner Elia - Badass Teachers Association

Badass Teachers Association:

NY BATs Open Letter to NY Commissioner Elia

Dear Commissioner Elia,

Welcome to your new office, where we hope to begin meaningful open discussions about the harms of standardized testing in education policy. New York needs a commissioner who will listen to students, parents, educators and taxpayers and "show your work" so the public can understand the decisions made in the Department.

NY BATs are the state chapter of the 55,000-strong Badass Teachers Association, formed two years ago. NY BATs is the largest state chapter with over 3,300 member educators and we are vocal members of our local communities working to inform state and local policymakers on the in-classroom consequences of policies influenced by so many non-educators.

Allied with parent groups, we encourage active engagement in education and electoral debates via a large, resolved grassroots presence. We reject practices coming from the business sector which seek to transform education into assembly line models of efficiency suited for McDonalds hamburgers, just when research tells us the opposite is needed for live children. It is with these goals we ask your office for reasoned rebuttal to specific research indicating these policies are invalid for their stated purposes:

WHY CAN'T YOU BE LIKE SUZIE: The most basic philosophy driving NY's Common Core implementation says that if all learners within a one-year age range do not test in math and ELA on par with college-bound high achievers on pace to exceed an SAT score of 1600, then their most current teacher is to be held accountable, invoking a ladder of punishments.

But established science in the field of child development has always cautioned educators that the individual pace of physical, cognitive, expressive and social-emotional growth in individual children naturally varies widely, due to a host of factors. So we have our first clash between reality and policy. Where do you stand on government mandated benchmarks for child development?

LET'S RUN SOME TESTS: For well over a decade, NCLB has promised that paying outside vendors to administer tests will somehow help low-performing schools, but as the measuring has increased in cost and scope, in-classroom support has never come. Instead, we've seen threats and sanctions for schools which hinge on provably inaccurate metrics. All along, Census data alone was sufficiently showing policymakers where to direct aid. But helping impoverished kids was never the true goal, it was the testing itself, awarding billions annually to contractors who fund political campaigns. Where do you stand on the pay-for-play that has compromised the independence of NY's education policymakers?

FEEL LUCKY? Multiple choice questions allow a one in four guess of a correct answer, even when the question has not been read or understood. This alone introduces wholesale inaccuracy into a formula supposedly measuring the ability of individual teachers. Whether it’s informed guesses or purely random, are luck and chance acceptable in professional assessments informing personnel decisions?

THE SUPER-TEACHER: NY's growth measures also elude scientific reliability by ignoring home-based factors that increase or impede learning. For example, if a family hires a team of private tutors to help a child make gains in math, APPR blindly credits the classroom teacher. Even when tutoring is subsidized by the state, there is no accounting for which students partake, or for how long, throwing outcome-based comparison into the arbitrary. Similarly, academic help that comes from mom, dad,Badass Teachers Association: