Another Nimrod of Negativity Bashes Teachers

We don't have Bloomberg to kick around anymore when the Daily News publishes anti-teacher columns like it did today. I mean does Mort still fear the wrath of Uncle Mike?

So just who is this Katharine A Stevens that wrote another ill informed hit piece against NYC teachers today?

Kathy it seems is super duper smart. She is great at telling others how to do things yet never implementing and practicing anything she spews to actually experiencing it. Like a priest who can give marriage advice, Kathy is a professional students and policy wonk who can't and won't put her money where her blue blooded money comes from.

But wait! She does have skills according to her LinkedIn page;

Excellent written and verbal communication skills with exceptional talent for building relationships with diverse stakeholders.
♦ Demonstrated ability to conduct original, relevant policy research, with special expertise in legislative and regulatory analysis.
♦ Strong entrepreneurial and project management skills.
♦ Quick learner with well-developed critical thinking skills; ability to operate effectively in complex environments.
♦ Creative, resourceful, big-picture thinker with demonstrated capacity to bridge worlds of practice, policy, and research.
♦ Fluent in Spanish.

But let's take apart her arguments from today's article.

...the premise of a groundbreaking lawsuit now being heard in Los Angeles Supreme Court that challenges entrenched California state laws protecting the jobs of public school teachers who are “grossly ineffective.” The nine student plaintiffs, Vergara vs. California, argue that laws protecting even abysmally incompetent teachers violate the guaranteed civil right of the state’s children to access a decent education.

 What Kathy fails to share is that this lawsuit is spearheaded by a group known as Students Matter led by research scientist David P Welch. Dave's expertise in education is that he is a parent. Dave has a B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Delaware and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Cornell University. 

Now The Crack Team does not know too much about Vergara v California and we are hoping that our brethren in the Golden State can shed some light. What we do know is this is a method to usurp collective bargaining and to end tenure.

Does Kathy know of the provenance of the law suit or is she just ignorant? We'll let Kathy share. 

Despite the state’s highly visible new teacher evaluation law and a perception of radical change under the Bloomberg administration, a scandalous reality remains: Here, as in California, it is virtually impossible to dismiss a grossly ineffective teacher.

What Kathy fails to mention is that the lead attorney for Vergara v California is none other than Ted Olson who as a founding member of the Federalist Society has said;

"it is emphatically the province and duty of the judiciary to say what the law is, not what it should be." 

Hypocrites be damned.

But isn't it scandalous that as Newsday reported today that state officials are finding flaws in the new teacher evaluation system?

New York State law governing teacher dismissal, 3020-a, was left essentially untouched by both the contentious new teacher evaluation legislation and recent city reforms. Under that law, only the state can dismiss a teacher — and it rarely does.

Who should it be left up to?

I recently completed an in-depth study of a decade of official reports on the state’s dismissal hearings for New York City teachers.

Where is this study Kathy mentions? Who wrote it? Who paid for it? 

My analysis shows that the problem of extraordinary job protection for grossly ineffective teachers in New York is worse than many understand.

What is an ineffective teacher? Describe please. 

Even attempting to get the state to dismiss a teacher is prohibitively expensive and burdensome. According to the New York State School Boards Association, the average 3020-a proceeding for a single incompetent teacher extends for 830 days and costs taxpayers $313,000

There are many reasons for this. One is because most of the time the teacher is not incompetent. It's also because they decide to throw the proverbial kitchen sink at a teacher with trumped up, out of context charges as well.

Over the 10-year period I studied (1997-2007), just 12 of New York City teachers (of whom there are 75,000 at any given time) were dismissed for incompetent teaching. Teachers who had years of “unsatisfactory” ratings; who were proven over months of hearings to be grossly incompetent; who were verbally and physically abusive to children, parents and colleagues, or who simply failed to come to work for days and weeks on end were returned to classrooms.

My analysis further reveals that the minimum level of teaching effectiveness required for tenured teachers to keep their jobs in New York City schools is defined not by the schools (much less parents and communities) but behind closed doors in arbitration proceedings controlled by the state.

Again, where do you get this information? You keep talking about your analysis yet you don't share anything how you came to such conclusions nor where you drew your conclusions from!

In practice, teachers are dismissed only if they are proved to have been grossly ineffective and “incorrigible,” without even a remote possibility of improving. That is, the operative state standard for returning a teacher to the classroom is not demonstrated effectiveness, but a teacher’s potential capacity to be even marginally competent in the future.

Actually the essence of 3020-a is to fix, not to terminate. But whilst we are are the subject of bad employees, what about this NYPD officer that made the Daily News today? And there are more. Yet, will we be reading in op-ed pages about how these cops get to stay on the job?

But in the first year of the new evaluation system, just 1% of teachers received that rating. And all dismissals will still go through 3020-a, which makes removal almost impossible.

And this is a bad thing? Which proves the point that the new evaluation system was implemented as "gotcha!" To remove veteran teachers.

Kathy is good at being a kvetch and saying, "you should, you should." Yet, the professional student that Kathy is will not come down from the tower and show us peons how it is done. All she can do is wonk off and point fingers.

It's time Kathy comes clean about her connections with Students First and the materials she used to write her article in today's Daily News. Better yet, let's have Kathy put all her ideas to good use.

Here is chapter 1 of Kathy's doctoral dissertation. Funny how it mentions she is a Doctor of Philosophy candidate while in the Daily News it is mentioned that she received a PhD in educational policy. Hey, when you stretch your truth one tends to forget.