Why Governor Cuomo’s Education Proposals Are As Bad for Students As They Are for Teachers

[marmar]

from The Nation:


Why Governor Cuomo’s Education Proposals Are As Bad for Students As They Are for Teachers
Leah Brunski on March 13, 2015 - 12:26 PM ET


Last week, I issued the following challenge to a dozen third-, fourth-, and fifth-graders: create a paper airplane that flies farther than your peers’. We worked our way through the design process, brainstorming and sketching ideas, talking about the science of flight, crafting prototypes. We tested our planes, worked collaboratively to make revisions to the original designs, and shared our insights and conclusions. By the period’s end, each kid had a plane that flew significantly farther than her first.

Thanks to an in-house enrichment program at my school, these kids and I meet weekly to explore design challenges and engineering-oriented thinking that extends well beyond the curriculum. If Governor Cuomo’s budget—into which he quietly tucked several major changes to education—passes unrevised, schools across NYS will be forced to permanently forsake programs like this along with content not emphasized on the state exams, like social studies, creative writing, the arts, and social-emotional learning.

NYS families, the clock is ticking. On April 1, the NYS legislature will vote on Governor Cuomo’s budget, including his latest reforms to the state’s public-school classrooms. One of Cuomo’s proposals is to overhaul the way teachers are evaluated.

Under the current evaluation system, students’ progress on the state exams accounts for 20 percent of a teacher’s annual rating. Cuomo is proposing that we increase the weight of student test-score gains to 50 percent. (He’d like the other 50 percent of a teacher’s evaluation to come from classroom observations: 35 percent based on a one-time visit from an outside evaluator and a mere 15 percent based on her own principal’s assessment of performance.) .................(more)

http://www.thenation.com/blog/201441/why-gov-cuomos-education-proposals-are-bad-students-they-are-teachers

[H2O Man]

1. Recommended.

As a school board member, I am finding this an area where the teachers union, administrations, and BOEs are on common ground, strongly opposed to Andrew Cuomo.