The city is assuring worried parents that mold is no issue in Sandy-damaged school buildings. (NY1)
With no safety agents on hand, schools shut because of Sandy saw expensive supplies disappear. (NY1)
Millennium High School returned to its building while repairs were still underway. (Downtown Express)
Teachers at Boys and Girls HS say the school will get yet another F if the principal stays. (Daily News)
A group wants research to sway mayoral hopefuls away from current schools policies. (GothamSchools)
Bronx Science’s volleyball coach quit to protest school sports policy before a big game. (Riverdale Press)
One detail in an overview of evaluation talks: Principals think their deal will get done. (SchoolBook)
Board of Regents Chancellor says New York City needs to agree on new evaluations already. (Post)
College students held a march to call for a city-union deal about new evaluations. (Columbia Spectator)
David Bloomfield: Gov. Andrew Cuomo should empower the Regents to effect real change. (Daily News)
Parents aren’t happy about plans to split school zones in Greenwich Village and Chelsea. (The Villager)
California wants to stop school districts from locking themselves into onerous borrowing. (WSJ)
Tim
When will the usual suspects step up and strongly support the DOE’s plan to divide PS 3 and PS 41 into two discrete and separate zones?
After all, if they believe that choice is destabilizing and destructive for kids in Districts 6 and 7, surely they believe the same is true in this case, no?
Former Turnaround Teacher
The Daily News also has an article on the proposed closings of Lehman and Clinton in the Bronx section today.
Nycdoenuts
On the merits of the process, I can deal with the APPR. I realize that it is an(other) attempt to improve schools and I understand that isnt going anywhere anytime soon, so I’ll just have to live with it.
But if Chancellor Tisch keeps hitting the media (first Schoolbook, now The post) with this false notion that we need it because it is just common sense, then she’s engaging in a lie. She knows that if she were serious about leaders providing objective feedback to teachers, that the APPR would not be necessary to begin with. They didn’t need to change the way teachers are fired if they wanted to include a Danielson-based rubric as part of the feedback process (that’s just common sense too) and they have been doing just fine firing teachers for the last give years now.
She also know -full well- that it is going to be significantly difficult for teachers to score anything more than an overall “effective” when this systen kicks in. She knows that NYC’s Danielson rubric, which is harder than other Danielson based rubrics- lumps modt of us into two broad categories in the middle, and leaves the other two catwgories as extremes.
Is it common sense to extol this system when great teachers (who score an 89) will still be limped in with marginal ones (who score a 66) and the same “effevtive” rating? Is it common sense to roll this out when no one is sure how all of the state assessments will look (worth as much as 25% of a teachers’ grade)? And is it common sense to get this in place while there is still no way to arrive at student goals (upon which teachers grades will be based)? No.
I hate it when important people grab everyone’s attention and start telling mistruths. The APPR is a complicated and unproven experiment. It is anything but common sense. The chancellor knows this.
A.S.Neill
Very well said. But I think your observations also point to another issue that is hardly ever publicly discussed concerning APPR which is its discouraging effect on future teacher recruitment. Every honest serious statistician who looks at the APPR model knows that the huge statistical variance in its results means that there is a large random element in the model and it is misspecified. As such, an APPR model may very well have the opposite effect as intended by eliminating genuinely good teachers and protecting poor teachers. Teachers nearing retirement may not care. Middle career teachers may have to put up with it.
But how are new and future teachers likely to view spending tens of thousands of dollars and quite a number of years qualifying them to enter a profession, in which how long they last is likely to be a random crap shoot? Defenders to the APPR point out that the model becomes more valid over repeated use over a number of years. However, under a teacher evaluation system that allows firing after just 2 years (any time during their expected career of 25 years remember), the “longer term” validity of the model argument may be poor solase.
On the margin, I do not believe that a reasonable person with alternative career choices would find this situation acceptable. The already low teacher morale accross the country because of NCLB, APPR, and all the other misguided reform efforts is also bound to filter down to new teachers and education majors in college discouraging them to enter or stay in teaching, and are already probably doing so. The new “reforms” to include greater teacher preparation (e.g. 2 years a teaching assistants) before becoming teachers, making granting tenure more difficulty and lowering tenure protections as well, are all also unlikely to encourage future teachers entering the profession.
The defenders of the APPR may be hoping that the poor state of the economy may just force future teachers to swollow this changing situation. Also, they be hoping that the alternative teaching routes (TFA) will supply sufficient new teachers. On a short term basis this may be true, but teacher retention which is already at critical levels may very well get much worse as APPR evaluation models and other reforms tip the balance against new teachers staying while they still have choices to opt out.
Indeed, current reform efforts to improve teacher retention (usually more PD or mentoring) are completely misguided for real retention as any current teacher is likely to tell you. There is quality PD, but much of the rest is interesting for a day or so but not of long lasting result. “Mentoring” is actually a two-edged sword. The implicit message is “get better or get fired”. And the mentor quality is frequently not that high anyway. Not exactly encouraging if you want teachers to stay on their own because they enjoy their jobs.The real reasons for lack of retention and low morale are somewhere else and just likely to get worse under current “reforms” and APPR.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.