Monday, December 19, 2011

Michael Winerip Lays Waste to NY State Ed Department Testing Program

The headline in today's eagerly awaited Michael Winerip column in the NY Times – 10 Years of Assessing Students With Scientific Exactitude – probably tops all that went before in terms of how far Winerip's tongue is planted in his cheek in the use of the words "scientific exactitude" in describing a decade of NY State Ed Department testing.

He lays waste to former Commisioner Richard Mills - one of the worst people in the world - by capturing some of his rediculous comments after every single test fisaco.

He gives a little credit to current regent head Merryl Tisch – the 2nd worst person in the world – when he says:
Finally someone — Dr. Tisch, the chancellor of the Board of Regents — has the sense to stand up at a news conference and say that the state test scores are so ridiculously inflated that only a fool would take them seriously, thereby unmasking the mayor, the chancellor and the former state commissioner.
Tisch deminstrates she can count to two
Tisch is anything but a fool - though she may be a crook in the way the wives of billionaires can be - call her a moral crook. (Check her family connections below to the K12 online operation the Times exposed last week WITHOUT MENTIONING THE TISCH CONNECTION plus other exposures we have done over the years.) If she didn't do something she would have had zero credibility and zero reputation so she saved her ass, which has brought her into some mild conflicts with her next door neighbor Michael Bloomberg.

Winerip took a nice shot at Tisch back in August as chronicled in this Ed Notes piece:
Aug 16, 2011
Michael Winerip wrote Monday on the evil and the good at State Board of Regents which ostensibly should control the absolutely evil NY State Ed Dept but even eviler (out eviling Eva) Regent boss Meryl Tisch has taken all ...

How well did her choice - David (Give Cathie Black a Waiver) Steiner do before running for the hills after just 2 years? His successor John (I love any charter no matter what) King also comes in for some biting satire in the Winerip piece:

NOVEMBER 2011 New York is one of two states in the nation to post statistically significant declines on the National Assessment tests. John B. King, the education commissioner, says the state is certainly going in the wrong direction, but has a plan to spur students’ achievement. “The new Common Core Learning Standards will help get them there,” he says.
DEC. 19, 2011 Nearly a quarter of the state’s principals — 1,046 — have signed an online letter protesting the plan to evaluate teachers and principals by test scores. Among the reasons cited is New York’s long tradition of creating tests that have little to do with reality.
But my favorite part of the article is this hit at Tweed slug Shael (I can find a way to justify ecery single bad policy decison we make) Polokow-Seransky
Mr. Polakow-Suransky says that even if city test scores were inflated, he is not aware of any credible research calling the city’s 64 percent graduation rate into question.
FEBRUARY 2011 The city’s 64 percent graduation rate is called into question. The state announces a new accountability measure: the percentage of high school seniors graduating who are ready for college or a career. By this standard, the graduation rate for New York City in 2009 was 23 percent.
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I've has the Merryl Tisch "I am not a crook" photo on the sidebar for quite some time. I was going to remove it but thought: It will always come in handy.


From Ed Notes May 4, 2011:

Tisch Family Connections to K12 Board and Charter School

K12’s board is headed by Andrew Tisch, co-chair of Loew’s Corp,  the brother in law of Merryl Tisch, who is in turn, the head of the NYS board of Regents. Meetings of the NY state education department are often held in the Loew’s headquarters, which is run by Merryl’s husband,  James.  http://www.loews.com/loews.nsf/OfficeOfPresident.pdf
The NYS Regents are currently considering eliminating all seat time requirements, and to allow the rapid and essentially unregulated expansion of online learning. In addition, K12 has submitted a charter application to the Regents/NYSED, called “NY Flex charter school” in D2, that has gone through the preliminary approval process by NYSED.  (EDNote: Pedro Noguera who is considered by many to be on the anti-ed deform side chairs the SUNY charter committee. There have been charges he approves every charter request.)
In  an earlier iteration/application, K12 was clearly running the school, now the application has been revised to indicate that the school will “contract” out with K12 for services, including curriculum, assessments, teacher training, and other support and services as requested by the Board and staff of the school.   
This recasting of the application is to avoid legal conflicts w/ the new NY state charter law which bars for-profit companies from operating charter schools. Here is an article about this controversial issue: http://www.citylimits.org/news/articles/4185/pedagogy-and-profits-charter-school-bid-raises-questions

MORE TISCH ON ED NOTES:
May 15, 2011

Ed Notes has learned that the letter Governor Cuomo supposedly wrote to Merryl Tisch and the State Board of Regents calling for a change from weighing teacher evaluations based on state tests from 20 to 40% was in fact ...

Aug 16, 2011
Michael Winerip wrote Monday on the evil and the good at State Board of Regents which ostensibly should control the absolutely evil NY State Ed Dept but even eviler (out eviling Eva) Regent boss Meryl Tisch has taken all ...
Nov 03, 2011

Now as an opponent of using tests to measure everything I hate to jump on the necks of Merryl Tisch and her neighbor Bloomberg - no, I really don't hate to do it - they lived by the sword and should die by the sword. ..

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1 comment:

reality-based educator said...

I have not seen Merry Merryl Tisch's name show up in the K12 Inc. articles that have surfaced lately - not in the Times article, not in the Wash Post article, not in Gail Collins' column on K12 and online ed. I even wrote Collins to say she should look into the Tisch connections so long as she is commenting on the political connections that the company has that enable it to finagle contracts. Never heard back from her, never saw her revisit the issue. I understand that the Tisch connection is through a subsidiary of K12 Inc. and the connection to Tisch is with her brother-in-law, not herself or her husband. Still, the thing stinks.

Somehow Merry Merryl never gets hammered in the press, even when she says stupid shit like state test results "have never, ever, ever exaggerated...” or the public hates teachers but will like them better when the new "objective" evaluation system is put into place...

http://perdidostreetschool.blogspot.com/2011/11/merryl-tisch-public-hates-teachers-but.html

She really is as bad as Eva on this stuff - a self-centered, accountability for others/no accountability for me demagogue.

Steiner was a putz, but it's clear Tisch put the knife into him and brought her man King to the NYSED to consolidate her power.

It would be nice to see Winerip take a look at how the state has done since Tisch has been there and have him ask her why she thinks all the problems are other people's fault, never her own.

She needs to be taken down.

And then she ought to be taken to jail.