The most heartbreaking speech at last night's Common Core forum by Lorri Gumanow

There were lots of great speeches last night at the Manhattan Regents forum with Chancellor Tisch and Commissioner King at the Spruce St. School.  Wonderful and eloquent comments from teachers, principals, and parents, including Manhattan CEC leaders Shino Tanikawa, Noah Gotbaum, Tory Frye and Sonja Jones.  But here is a magnificent speech that made many members of the audience tear up.  Shared with Lorri Gumanow's permission.

Commissioner King, Chancellor Tisch, thank you for the opportunity to share with you tonight. My name is Lorri Gumanow, and my husband and I are the proud parents of a very talented 13-year old public school student who is an actor and puppeteer, and wants to work with the Jim Henson Company someday. I am a newly retired special educator. But tonight I am here to ask you to walk in my shoes as a parent.

Our son was born 3 months premature and has several neurological disabilities and an IEP. His disabilities are not the result of poverty, poor prenatal care or poor educational opportunities. He has always thrived in the public school environment. He has had wonderful teachers, wonderful inclusive public schools, and wonderful supports.

All of a sudden he is failing. He failed the math test last year with a score of 1. What happened? The roll out of the Common Core asks 8th graders to now magically perform as 10th graders, without any attention to the skills and knowledge they might have been required to learn and practice in those 2 missing years.

Your solution is that my son just needs to try harder. Increase the rigor! No excuses! And what do you really mean every time you say, "This work?" He does 4 hours of homework every night and still fails his classroom test! If you don't pass, you are a failure, and your teacher is a failure too. Fire that bad teacher! Close that failing school! Failure is not an option. Raise the bar. Unfortunately, when you throw some kids into the “deep end of the pool,” with a brick tied to their ankle - label the brick whatever difference you prefer - it is foolish to believe they are all going to be able to come back up for air. A lot of them are going down! I am tired of the jargon and the rhetoric. You are willing to write my son off as collateral damage. I care about my child! I care about all children! And so do his teachers! Education is not a competition – it is a human right and our responsibility!

My son now says he is stupid, he can’t take it anymore, my teacher will get fired if I fail, why can’t I be normal, he says he wants to kill himself, he has meltdowns regularly over homework – AND he has pulled the kitchen knife out of the drawer. He has always received outstanding medical care and mental health care! Now I have to give him, in addition to his daily medications, a sedative when he loses control – over homework and schoolwork????? I sedate my kid with strong drugs so he doesn’t hurt himself over an ELA quiz??? Something is very wrong with this picture. School should not be a life or death experience. School is not worth dying for!

And as a parent, would you want this medical history about your child on inBloom, for the world to see? (By the way, our son has given me permission to share this with you!) Are we overprotective parents, protecting him from rejection and failure? Absolutely not - he is an actor. He knows that when he experiences rejection after an audition, he picks himself up, works hard and tries again. But it's demeaning to try again when you know you don't have the skills. Experiencing failure is an important lesson in life. But being punished for something out of your control is abuse, and it is discriminatory.

My son is a proud member of the Drama Desk award-winning TADA! Resident youth theater ensemble, and just earned a leading role in their upcoming off-Broadway musical production. Talent exists in many forms, academic talent being just one form. The arts are what save my son’s life! He will reach his dream through hard work, perseverance, and dedication to his craft. Those are qualities that employers value! Your testing and sorting of children, and treating them as human capital will not bring our children down, because we won’t let you. We love and support our children, and embrace all of their special talents! We are active, concerned, informed and intelligent parents and we won’t let you hurt our children. Pull out of inBloom. Fire Pearson now! Drop the Common Core! All children, not just the children of Ivy-league educated and wealthy parents, are entitled to a good education in our democracy. Not just the kids in private schools and charter schools. ALL children!! I hope you were listening. Oh, and by the way. I graduated from an Ivy-league college too and I believe in our public schools! Thank you!

Chicago parents give thanks as their schools pull out of inBloom Inc., but NY Commissioner KIng remains fully committed; why?

Illinois State Superintendent Chris Koch

As reported in today’s Sun-Times, Chicago is dropping inBloom like a hot potato.  This $100 million project, created by the Gates and Carnegie Foundations, continues to lose adherents.  Already, seven other states originally listed as inBloom “partners” have dropped out or put their data-sharing plans on hold.  (See the timeline and list in my testimony here.)  Up to yesterday, Illinois and New York were the only two states still committed to sharing data with inBloom Inc. 

Some back story: Last Thursday night, November 21, I was an invited to speak at a forum on student privacy in Chicago, hosted by the Chicago Teachers Union and several activist parent groups, including More than a Score and PURE; see the video of my presentation here.  Unknown to me at the time, the Illinois state official who is heading the inBloom project, a man named Brandon Williams, was in the audience. 

Earlier that day, I had been part of a parent and teacher group which had briefed the editors of the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times about inBloom.  At these meetings, both sets of editors appeared seriously concerned about the vast privacy and security implications of the project.  Yet only one article had appeared in the Chicago press about this issue at that point, also in the Sun Times, two days before.

At the forum on Thursday night, Brandon Williams privately told the representative from the CTU that the issue was getting too “hot” and that Illinois Education Commissioner Chris Koch had decided to keep the state’s student data system, called ISLE, completely separate from inBloom, which before they had intended to be conjoined.  Now, district participation would be completely voluntary – even for the 35 school districts that had received Race to the Top funds out of  866 districts in the state.  These districts would NOT have to return their RTTT funds even if they decided not to participate in inBloom, because their data could be uploaded only into ISLE, the internal state data system.

This decision led Chicago officials to immediately drop out inBloom, the first of the 35 Illinois districts to publicly disengage.  Moreover, the Illinois State Education Dept. already had said that even if a district wanted to upload data to inBloom, no student health or disciplinary data could be shared, because this would be too sensitive – only purely “academic” data.

Commissioner John King and Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch

Contrast these developments to what is happening here, where the NY Education Commissioner John King remains wholly committed to this project, despite scathing criticism from state legislators, superintendents, principals, school boards and parents.  The latest Superintendent to speak out against inBloom, John Bierwirth of the Herricks school district, has said that all Nassau County superintendents were “on the same page” opposing this project, and that “I don’t think there’s a person in Nassau County who thinks InBloom is a good idea."  He added that "the state education department hasn’t provided a good answer" when asked what the real purpose of this project is, and that “the commissioner is digging a hole deeper day after day.”

Indeed, at forums in all parts of the state, King is regularly assailed for his determination to provide children’s most private data to inBloom Inc. against the will of their parents.  This personal student data will be stored on a vulnerable cloud, to be provided with for-profit vendors, including those producing the data dashboards.  Last night, at a forum with more than 700 angry parents, teachers and students at Eastport-South Manor High School on Long Island, King was angrily confronted again and again on this issue. One parent said about his data-sharing plans, "I can't sleep at night thinking about this; Dr. King, how can you?" When he tried to repeat the stale inBloom talking points, he was interrupted by parents yelling from the audience. 

Despite this growing fury, the Commissioner continues to insist that even without the support of school boards, even if districts decide to return their RTTT funds as more than thirty have now done, even without the consent of parents, he will share an entire statewide data set with inBloom, including their student disciplinary and health data, and more specifically their suspension records, disabilities and 504 diagnoses.

At the same time, King and other NYSED officials are encouraging districts to share even more confidential  data with inBloom Inc., and to sign up for additional “personalized learning tools” produced by for-profit vendors, who will data-mine and use this information to help them produce products to be sold back to schools and districts.  Even as every other of the nine original inBloom states has apparently pulled away from the project, New York stands alone.  Why the difference?

We can only speculate. Earlier this week, in a front page story in the Albany Times Union, James Odato reported how the Regents fellows, the key officials who are “helping drive reforms” and implementing King’s agenda, are being paid for with $19 million “from some of the nation's wealthiest philanthropists,” including the Gates and Carnegie Foundations, the two backers of inBloom Inc.  Odato described how the Fellows inhabit a separate silo at State Ed: “The three-year-old operation, which now comprises 27 full-time staffers and a half-time intern, is unique in public education systems nationwide… the arrangement is stirring concern in some quarters that deep-pocketed pedagogues are forcing their reform philosophies on an unwitting populace, and making an end run around government officers.”  According to Odato, because they are privately funded, the Regents Fellows are not bound by ethics rules or the Public Officer's Law that govern the behavior of other government officials.

We also know through a FOIL submitted by activists in Louisiana that that Amrit Singh, the Regents Fellow in charge of inBloom in New York, was actively recruiting John White, the Louisiana State Superintendent, into the project last year, and helped persuade him to provide a statewide set of student data to inBloom Inc.  A few months after the Louisiana student data as uploaded, White ordered the data be deleted from the inBloom cloud, after protests by parents and school board members. 

We also know that the Gates Foundation gave at least $15 million to the NY State Education Department between 2007 and 2012, for this and other programs, including the Common Core. See our spreadsheet here.  In the Washington Post, principal Carol Burris pointed out how Gates Foundation has provided financial support to Common Core Inc., which produced the highly flawed math modules that NYSED purchased for $14 million, drawing on earlier research by Jessica Bakeman of Capitol NY. 

Last week, an article in the Catholic Education Daily reported that the Gates Foundation has donated more than $10.5 million to private companies like Common Core Inc., to help them develop Common Core aligned curricula.  Mercedes Schneider has explored how Gates has spent at least $150 million to develop these products and convince states to adopt the Common Core.  

We also know that last year, the NYC Department of Education received $1.8 million from the Gates Foundation through its private fundraising arm called the Fund for Public Schools, for the “integration of Common Core implementation strategies with new forms of teacher professional development to align with emerging functionalities and capacity of Shared Learning Infrastructure [SLI is another name for inBloom’s data system].  Thus, Gates has more than a quarter of a billion dollars invested in the Common Core and inBloom alone.

At this point, we don’t know what other financial incentives the Gates Foundation may have provided to NYSED officials since 2012 or now may be dangling in front of them, as they watch one state after another disengage from their data-mining project. All we know is now, New York is the last state standing that appears willing to sacrifice the privacy of its public schoolchildren at the altar of the Gates Foundation and inBloom Inc. 

Southold Superintendent demands right to opt out of data sharing, citing state's contract with inBloom

Superintendent David Gamberg credit: Suffolk Times

As more and more districts give back their Race to the Top funds to protect student privacy, so they don't have to sign up for data dashboards that will be populated with personal data from the inBloom cloud, they also realize that this does not spare their student data from being uploaded by NYSED anyway.   

Commissioner King has been adamant that personal and highly sensitive data from the entire state's public school population will be shared with inBloom whether districts sign up for dashboards or not.  
See this comment from the School board President in Spackenkill NY, Arij Kurzum, upon returning these funds and turning down the dashboards, because it "was what people in the community wanted and the reaction seems favorable.

“I think our job is not done by just pulling out of Race to the Top,” she said. “The state is still going to get that information ... and they’re still going to put it in inBloom.”

But see the letter written to inBloom by Superintendent, David Gamberg of Southhold LI, below.  He identified a provision in the state's contract with the Shared Learning Collaborative (which later became inBloom Inc.) allowing districts to opt out -- despite what the state currently maintains. 

The relevant clause appears on page 9 of Exhibit C, of the Data Privacy and Security Plan, under the heading “District Opt out from SLI.” It states: “If a school district decides they no longer wish to use the SLI system, they may request that district student data be deleted from the SLI data store."

The SLI stands for the Shared Learning Infrastructure, inBloom's data system. According to NYSED officials, this contract or "service agreement" has not been amended or updated since it was signed last year, and it is still posted at the SED website here.  

Other Superintendents should emulate Southhold's demand, and follow up with a lawsuit if inBloom does not agree to comply.

Letter to InBloom from Southold-1.pdf

Data Privacy Day: send a message to the NY State Ed today, demanding that your child's data NOT be shared with private corporations

UPDATE:  See the great letter Sen. Liz Krueger just sent to Commissioner King about this issue, here and below.

Dear Parents:  Today is Data Privacy Day.    Here are some questions you can ask your school about your child’s private education records.

Unfortunately, we already know that NY State intends to share the most private information from your child’s educational records with the Shared Learning Collaborative, a project of the Gates Foundation, without your consent, who in turn intends to hand it over to private for-profit companies.

This information is supposed to include your child’s name, test scores, grades, disciplinary and attendance records, special education status and much more. The information will be put on a data cloud run by Amazon.com, with a system built by Wireless Generation, owned by Rupert Murdoch and run by Joel Klein.  Here is a fact sheet about this issue. 

Please email State Ed Commissioner John King today, with a copy to Chancellor Walcott and Stacey Childress of the Gates Foundation, demanding that your child’s information NOT be shared with ANY third parties, including the Gates Foundation.  Also copy the email to Michele Cahill of the Carnegie Corporation, which is supposedly in charge of the long-term governance and business plan for a new, separate corporation that will soon take over the project from the Gates Foundation.

___
To:  jking@mail.nysed.gov

CC: DMWalcott@schools.nyc.gov, stacey.childress@gatesfoundation.org, mc@carnegie.org

Dear Commissioner King:

As a NYC public school parent I demand that you NOT share any of my child’s confidential information with ANY third parties, including the Gates Foundation or ANY other private entity or corporation.  I do not give my consent.

Instead, I ask that you hold public hearings in NYC to explain the purpose of this project, offer all New York parents the right to consent as the law requires, and inform the public who will be legally and financially responsible if this highly sensitive data leaks out or is used in an unauthorized fashion.

Yours,

Signed: [Your Name and address]

Parent [or legal guardian] of [your Child’s full name, grade and school]

Senator Krueger's letter to Commissioner King by Molly

Autopsy of the failed teacher evaluation deal

In all the conflicting accounts between the city and the UFT about the collapse of the teacher evaluation negotiations, there is one clear point of agreement:  the Mayor refused to accept a two year sunset for the plan. In this, he was deeply wrong for disallowing the city to pilot what is essentially an experiment that could go badly, for both teachers and children.  Meanwhile, 90 percent of the districts in the rest of the state, appropriately, have a one year sunset on their teacher evaluation systems.  As I commented on the Schoolbook site, this insistence that the plan should be set in stone, with no sunset, shows Bloomberg as an arrogant wannabe Mayor-for-life. 

• On the UFT site, Edwize, Leo Casey posts what appears to be a DOE document, showing that the two year sunset had been accepted by the DOE before the Mayor blew the deal out of the water.  This evidence further contradicts Bloomberg's claim that it was the UFT who tried to slip the sunset provision in at the last minute. His claim is also inconsistent with what Ernie Logan has revealed, that the DOE had already agreed to an even shorter sunset of one year with the principals union, before Bloomberg blew up their evaluation deal as well.

•  Casey also reveals that towards the end, DOE tried to change “numerous scoring tables and conversion charts” that would incorporate the different components of the evaluation plan, including the growth scores based on student test scores, and that the DOE and the UFT then agreed to form a committee that would work on the scoring tables after the agreement was signed.  This suggests that even before the mayor rejected it, the deal was not really complete but could have faced serious conflicts in the future.

• There’s a good piece in the Village Voice with lots of quotes from Bruce Baker of Rutgers, about the fact that the state still owes NYC billions of dollars in funds through the CFE decision, and  that the Governor should not be allowed to cut $250 million, as he has threatened, because of the city's failure to come to an agreement.  If so, he will merely be hurting the children of NYC who deserve these funds no matter whether there is a new teacher evaluation system or not.  The article also contains links to Baker’s analysis, showing that the growth scores that would be included in the plan, required as part of Race to the Top,  are particularly unreliable, and the problem with “[these] policy prescriptions is they're trying to do it in a particularly dumbass way."

• Yoav Gonen reveals in the NY Post that the man who was primarily responsible for these dumbass prescriptions, Arne Duncan, called the Bloomberg and the UFT to urge them to make a deal.

• Meanwhile there is NY State Education Commissioner  King’s statement that the city and the UFT still have a “legal obligation to continue to negotiate,”  I suppose because the State promised this in return for getting RTTT funds, but whether anyone will take this seriously is doubtful.

Pineapplegate and the media storm that has ensued

Credit: Bramhall Cartoons, Daily News

Here is a rather breathless account of what is now being called Pineapplegate.  I had no idea what a media storm would erupt as a result of Thursday’s blog post.  Please also be sure to fill out this short parent survey about the testing regime in NY State.  If you are a teacher, fill this one out, and if a principal fill this one.  These surveys were developed by the NYS principals who wrote the protest letter to the Commissioner, opposing the new teacher evaluation system.

On Thursday morning, on the train to Washington DC, I posted my piece revealing the absurd Pineapple reading passage and questions on the 8^th grade ELA exam. By the time I returned to NYC Friday night, NYS Education Commissioner John King had already released the full passage and its associated questions, and put out a statement, saying the section would not be scored because of their ambiguous nature of the questions.

Ever since, I haven’t had time to catch my breath about the plethora of articles being published about what is now being called Pineapplegate.   There are nearly seventy stories about the issue listed on Google News. 

The first media outlets to jump on the scandal late Thursday night were the Daily News (which credited this blog) and NY1.  By Friday afternoon, the Washington Post and Time magazine had blogged about it, and the Wall St. Journal interviewed Daniel Pinkwater, author of the original story from which the passage on the exam was based.

The NY Times reported on the story on Saturday, and though the reporter credited the Daily News rather than our blog with breaking the story, at least she had the good sense to quote Diane Ravitch and Debbie Meier.  Also on Saturday, the highly conservative Daily News ran an editorial blasting Commissioner King and Regent Merryl Tisch:

Allowing nonsense like “The Pineapple and the Hare” to be placed before New York students, many of whom found it absurd, gave testing foes powerful ammunition to argue that standardized exams cannot be trusted.

Tisch and King must a) get their acts together, b) recognize that they have no margin for error, c) build a consensus that their testing program is excellent, d) all of the above. The right answer is unambiguous and obvious.

The Fordham Institute, right wing home of many of the worst corporate reform ideas, carried a strong critique of the carelessness of NYS and the testing companies for including these indefensible questions, and strengthening the arguments of “anti-testing” advocates like me:

But the real outrage among those of us who care deeply about accountability is why these problems aren’t being caught earlier. For too long we have been focusing our attention on expanding the use of tests to more grades and more subject areas and increasing the consequences tied to the results of these tests without taking a hard look at the uneven quality of the tests themselves….’m sure this story will only add fuel to the anti-testing fire, and frankly, it would be very hard to argue that it shouldn’t. After all, how can we possibly hold students accountable to such poorly written questions aligned to such poorly written prose?

The NY Post reporter chimed in, adding new revelations about complaints rolling in about other passages on other ELA exams this year, including from teachers of deaf kids.

On Sunday, Daniel Pinkwater, the author of the original story, had an oped in the Daily News, calling these world’s dumbest test questions, and saying he got “dirty money” from “sleazy people” in return for allowing them use his story in their tests.

A teacher/blogger put out a clever parody, called The Fruitcake and the Big Banana, about Race to the Top and the damaging policies of the Obama administration.

Newsday reported that because the exams were so long and grueling this year, many students had trouble completing them, and some were so tired that they began to fill in answer sheets at random, a phenomenon known as “bubbling.”

About the only organization not to speak out is Pearson itself, which created these tests, using the same confusing reading passage about the Pineapple and the Hare, and ridiculous, unanswerable questions in at least six other states over SEVEN long years.  And to whose benefit, the NY State Education Department has decided to refuse to disclose their exams, even after students have taken them.

But never fear.  Pearson was paid $32 million for these tests, and the company’s pre-tax profits surged last year by 72%, totaling nearly $1.8 billion.  Meanwhile our school budgets are cut to the bone, class sizes are increasing each year, and our children are subjected to baffling high-stakes and expensive exams, with NO oversight and NO quality control.   Pearson is also spending more on lobbying to further expand their market and ensure that the government encourages even more absurd and unreliable high-stakes tests for years to come.

Oh, and the trip to DC?  I was with a group of Parents Across America representatives from throughout the country, who attended a parent meeting at t the US Department of Education. We also met with Congressional staffers.  Nearly all of these inside-the-beltway officials were absolutely clueless about how outraged parents have become about the expansion of high-stakes testing in their children’s schools, and the hugely negative effect it has had.

Clearly, a revolution is brewing, but whether the corporate reformers will have the sense to realize and step back before it is too late is still uncertain.  Perhaps only the Pineapple knows for sure, and he’s not talking.  As one teacher tweeted over the weekend, Pearson has moved it to an undisclosed location.

See also video from WABC news below.  And don’t forget to take these parent and teacher surveys!

Survey For Parents, Survey for Teachers; Survey for Principals.

On teacher evaluation: the responsibility of the media to dig a little deeper

The mainstream media has contributed heavily to the rampant public confusion over the teacher evaluation debate in recent weeks.  Most recently, on Sunday the NY Times featured two superficial accounts of this issue.   

The first, by Nick Kristof, told a familiar if touching story about an Arkansas school librarian named Mildred Grady, who bought  some books by a favored author and slipped them onto the shelves to appeal to one particular at-risk student who later became a judge--to prove the  notion that good teachers can change lives.  This story was apparently first told in a Story Corps 2009 piece on NPR radio.

Kristof concludes that this example reveals how “we need rigorous teacher evaluations, more pay for good teachers and more training and weeding-out of poor teachers.”   

Not so fast.  The so-called “rigorous” system currently being promoted by the state and the mayor would base  teacher evaluation largely on unreliable test scores, combined with the opinion of a principal only, without any assurances that the sort of librarian described in this story would ever be recognized as “effective” and indeed could be “weeded-out” herself – as many librarians have already, due to recent budget cuts.

In fact, Kristof's column could more easily be used to buttress the other side of the debate: showing the many imponderable ways that teachers – and librarians – transforms lives that are unquantifiable; and that cannot be captured in the sort of reductionist systems now being imposed on states throughout the country because of “Race to the Top” and the support of corporate executives like Bill Gates, who claim that the major cause of school dysfunction is incompetent teaching. 

The other NYT column that ran Sunday was written by Ginia Bellafante and entitled “Petty Differences Mask Consensus on Teachers”.  It was just as misleading as Kristof’s, implying that the differences in the positions taken by the state and the city versus the teacher unions on the teacher evaluation system were trivial.  

Nothing could be further from the case.  NYSUT, the state teacher’s union, sued the state in court and won, because Education Commissioner King had subverted their agreement to include multiple measures for teacher evaluation.  Instead, he wrote regulations that would allow districts to use state test scores as 40 percent of the evaluation system, rather than the 20 percent that the union had agreed upon.  More importantly – and missing in most press accounts – is the way in which King devised a rubric that would make it impossible for any teacher who did not succeed on the test score metric alone to be rated “effective” – no matter how highly he or she was found to be through observations or any other means. (See the judge’s ruling here.) 

The differences between the city and the UFT are just as fundamental.  The NYC Department of Education obdurately refuses to allow any independent appeal of a negative subjective evaluation by a principal – no matter how obviously wrong it might be.  Many  principals have shown themselves to be unfairly give poor evaluations to teachers in recent years, under the system of "principal empowerment," with little or no oversight from DOE. 

Nothing in this system would protect great teachers from vindictive principals or inherently volatile value-added test scores – and in fact, DOE has built in to its school funding system a poison pill that incentivizes principals to fire experienced teachers, since they have to pay for their higher salaries out of their school budgets.

Both authors fail to recognize that the current evaluation system being proposed could hurt teacher quality and undermine the quality of education our children receive, by causing teachers to focus even more on damaging and inane test prep over reallearning – something that is already severely damaging our schools. 

Neither author bothers to mention the fact that over one-third of the principals in New York state strongly oppose the evaluation system the state is pushing…which one principal calls "nutty" and which will calls for even more ridiculous  and expensive assessments in all subjects, including music and art.

Both also apparently support the same prescription of merit pay for teachers, as though this is a given: “Paying good teachers more is important — and the mayor, admirably, has committed to doing that” writes Bellafante. Both ignore the fact that merit pay has never worked to improve outcomes for kids, and that in 2011, NYC just axed its program that cost $75 million, because of null results.  

So why in his State of the City address did the mayor now propose an even more expensive merit pay proposal , that will cost $250 million to implement; at the same time that schools have suffered huge budget cuts and our kids are crammed into the largest class sizes in eleven years? 

When challenged on Twitter to provide evidence for such heedlessness, both Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson and Andy Jacob of The New Teacher Project pointed to a New Year’s Day front-page story in the New York Times by Sam Dillon, which featured an interview with a DC teacher named Tiffany Johnson, who had received a big bonus from DC’s new Impact evaluation system.  Ms. Johnson said that her bonus might persuade her to teach longer.  When it was pointed out to Wolfson that this article consisted of anecdote not evidence, Wolfson responded on twitter that this was “good enough for him.”

At the time the DC Impact article was published I criticized it for the way it completely glossed over the fact that the vast majority evaluations of teacher merit pay have had negative results; though I could not have guessed that a single flawed article would lead the mayor to make such a wasteful proposal.

Now praise for this bonus system from the very same DC teacher, Tiffany Johnson, has been recycled repeatedly several times. On Jan. 9, she was interviewed on local DC TV;

And two weeks after the NYT article, she was quoted again in a story in the Daily News, making the very same points.

 Of course, one teacher’s comments do not prove anything, and unfortunately, there will apparently be no actual evaluation of the Impact system because the DC Schools Superintendent could not agree on a methodology with Roland Fryer, the researcher who had been selected for the task.  Fryer had found no positive effects of the previous NYC merit pay program.  This lack of a study doesn’t look to me that the people in charge have much faith that the Impact system could prove itself through actual results.

 After Gov. Cuomo joined in the charge in his budget address, and threatened to cut state aid from any  district which did not impose a new test-based evaluation system within a month, the howls from the editorial boards at the major dailies have grown even louder, inveighing against the unions for resisting whatever bogus evaluation system the state or the city have the yen to impose.  

 On Sunday, the Daily News spread spread more misinformation by publishing an oped by a teacher who wrote that her group, the Gates-funded Educators for Excellence, looked at all the failed merit pay programs, and found “that the efforts that have failed either didn’t offer a compelling enough incentive or linked bonuses to school-wide results and not individual performance.”

Again, this is complete misinformation.  The best study of a  merit pay program in the nation was of the Nashville program that provided bonuses of up to $15,000 to individual math teachers whose students saw the greatest gains in their test scores – very similar to what Bloomberg is now proposing.  This study showed no results in terms of improved student achievement or teacher retention.

At least the News oped was accompanied by a far wiser column by Arthur Goldstein, veteran teacher at Francis Lewis HS, who pointed pointing out how merit pay would likely incentivize teachers to focus on test prep even more or even tempt them to cheat: 

“These days, we work in a pressure cooker environment, in which test scores are almost everything. Ridiculous credit recovery programs render credit meaningless. Media outlets feign shock when they discover predictable “erase to the top” style scandals where scores are fabricated.  What do they think will happen when teachers are asked to raise grades to the exclusion of everything else we do?

….We are role models. We inspire kids. We teach them to speak out, stand up, to express themselves. That will be particularly tough if we’re all placing knives in one another’s backs chasing bonuses.”

We have also posted the account of Stephanie Black, a teacher who quit DC schools because the Impact system threatened to make her become less of a teacher than she yearned to be.

In a recent Scholastic survey funded by the pro-merit pay Gates Foundation, teachers overwhelmingly rejected performance pay, with this coming in last of nine proposals to help retain good teachers.  In another national survey by Public Agenda, merit pay again came in last – with only 12% of teachers saying that ‘tying rewards or sanctions to teacher performance” would be a “very effective way” to improve the quality of instruction in our schools.

 In contrast, 86 percent of teachers told Public Agenda that reducing class size would be “very effective” way to improve teacher quality – a proven reform that is rejected by the same corporate reformers, like Mayor Bloomberg and Bill Gates, who relentlessly promote merit pay.

If columnists like Kristof, Bellafante and others really respect teachers and want to dip their toes in the education debate, they should take a serious hard look at the research. They have a responsibility to dig a little deeper before drawing broad conclusions  –lest our children’s education be furthered damaged and millions more wasted on policies that have repeatedly failed in the past.