The Democratic Party, Andrew Cuomo and the Death of a Thousand Cuts

The following is a letter I just sent to NYSUT United, the magazine of New York State United Teachers:


Dear Editor:

I'm taking some time this morning, before spending the rest of my Sunday grading a pile of practice college application essays, to share a deep concern. 

Something about President Iannuzzi's essay, "Courage in the Classroom", in NYSUT's October magazine, didn't sit well with me. His explanation that using "multiple measures," including teacher effectiveness, to account for student test scores seems reasonable. But what are those factors? How will they be accounted for? 

There is a term for the type of measuring I believe President Iannuzzi is referring to; "value added modeling" or VAM. According to the Economic Policy Institute (www.epi.org) there are concerns, discussed in an August, 2010 briefing paper titled "Problems with the Use of Student Test Scores to Evaluate Teachers," in utilizing this model:

"For a variety of reasons, analyses of VAM results have led researchers to doubt whether the methodology can accurately identify more and less effective teachers. VAM estimates have proven to be unstable across statistical models, years, and classes that teachers teach. One study found that across five large urban districts, among teachers who were ranked in the top 20% of effectiveness in the first year, fewer than a third were in that top group the next year, and another third moved all the way down to the bottom 40%. Another found that teachers’ effectiveness ratings in one year could only predict from 4% to 16% of the variation in such ratings in the following year. Thus, a teacher who appears to be very ineffective in one year might have a dramatically different result the following year. The same dramatic fluctuations were found for teachers ranked at the bottom in the first year of analysis. This runs counter to most people’s notions that the true quality of a teacher is likely to change very little over time and raises questions about whether what is measured is largely a “teacher effect” or the effect of a wide variety of other factors." (Baker, Barton, et al)

I am highly skeptical about the origin of both Washington D.C.'s and Albany's impulse toward education reform, and my skepticism was firmly justified the moment Education Secretary Arnie Duncan and President Obama endorsed the wholesale firing of teachers at Rhode Island's Central Falls High School back in February. That was a milestone, and should have been a profound wake up call for every chapter of every union across America.

But it wasn't.

Historically, the Democratic Party has been a staunch supporter of public schools and progressive education. The Party's candidates have depended on our support for one successful election campaign after another. But now something insidious is happening, and no good will come of it.

Why did President Obama select Arnie Duncan secretary of education? According to Diane Ravitch, in her excellent The Death and Life of the Great American School System, he was not Obama's first choice:

"...For a brief time, it appeared that the new president might pick his main campaign advisor on education, scholar Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford University. This prospect alarmed the champions of corporate-style reform, because Darling-Hammond was known as an advocate of teacher professionalism and a critic of Teach for America; the new breed of reformers thought she was too friendly with the teachers' unions. Consequently, writers in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and other publications warned President-elect Obama not to choose Darling-Hammond, but to select a "real" reformer who supported testing, accountability, and choice. True reformers closed low-performing schools and fired administrators and teachers. True reformers opposed teacher tenure. Never mind that these had long been the central tenets of the Republican approach to education reform.

...The same views might as well have appeared in conservative journals, such as National Review or the Weekly Standard. Slogans long advocated by policy wonks on the right had migrated to and been embraced by policy wonks on the left." (Ravitch)

Once President Obama was sworn into office, a well organized opposition campaign began delivering body blows to him, his administration and the Democratic Party. Using well written talking points distributed widely and delivered on the Sunday morning news programs, the political right backed the Democratic Party, which to this day hasn't a clue how to respond to a well organized opponent, into a corner. Rather than push back, the Democrats began, incrementally, co-opting those talking points in a cowardly attempt to maintain its constituency, much of which assumed that no aggressive defense must mean the Republicans were right... no matter how absurd the claim. This is why the Republicans are poised to make political gains on November 2nd.

This is why the Democrats have abandoned the teachers' unions. This is why Andrew Cuomo, as President Iannuzzi states in his November column, supports a property tax cap, changes to the pension system and holds across the board, anti-union positions. 

For two years the mainstream press and both political parties have been hammering our profession. It is my own perception that the teachers' unions have, at every level, instead of standing up and pushing back hard with facts, been drawn into the Democrat's slipstream to the right.

We do this at our own peril. The Republican agenda includes the elimination of the Department of Education, the extinction of the teachers' unions and the privatization of the public school system. 

Yes, we can do much to improve our effectiveness and police our own ranks. This should be done. There are other ways that will actually work. But in the meantime, I have 140 students. During open house, eight parents showed up.  I hope this doesn't shock anyone. If all parents hear is "teacher accountability," why should they assume any accountability on their part? If the problem is defined as the "bad teachers," fueling the anti-teacher sentiment running rampant across America right now, why should students feel accountable?

There is irony in my next task for the day. So much emphasis is placed on test performance that many of my seniors cannot write a competent college application essay, the most important writing product of their lives. They are uncomfortable writing about themselves. The focus on formulaic, test prep writing is so ingrained I have to start the school year with a crash course on personal writing. 

This is the tragedy in our high stakes testing environment. We need to ask ourselves if, in our individual classrooms, we have bought into it by allowing the assembly line testing machine to rip the heart out of our profession. Are we allowing the testing madness to force us into creating hollow men and women who have no idea who they are because all we do is train them to perform on tests that have no relevance to their lives?

Are the current crop of "reformers" actually forcing us into destroying ourselves? If so, we are, indeed, "going gently into that dark night."

Sincerely,

Michael Lambert

Gloversville Teachers' Association