GUILDERLAND — “Things are flying around fast and furious,” said Demian Singleton on Tuesday, a day after committee work here on teacher evaluation was delayed because of mixed messages from the state.

On Monday, a district committee was set to work on coming up with an evaluation system for Guilderland teachers. The district, like 90 percent of those across the state, had gotten a waiver on developing the plan for the Annual Professional Performance Review, commonly call APPR.

Also on Monday, a committee made up of the Board of Regents members met and voted to immediately remove state test scores as part of the evaluation process, suspending their use for four years. That moratorium was formally adopted on Tuesday, with only the outgoing chancellor, Merryl H. Tisch, voting against it. Elected by the legislature, the Regents oversee public education in New York State independently of the governor.

The four-year delay follows the recommendation made by Governor Andrew Cuomo’s Common Core Task Force. The task force’s final report, released on Dec. 10, was accompanied by a press release from the governor, supporting it.

The stance is very different than Cuomo’s January call for the standardized test scores to count for half of teachers’ evaluations.

“We were not confident we should do deep work until we knew which way to go,” said Singleton, Guilderland’s Assistant Superintendent for Instruction, of Monday’s meeting.

Instead, the Guilderland committee changed its focus to discuss what the district should advocate in terms of legislation.

“The constant flow of changes is making work impossible,” said Singleton. “The state shouldn’t make more piecemeal changes until they have it right, and then let’s start again.”

He also said, “Everyone is a little shocked at the complete 180 the governor has taken.”

Cuomo, last January, had pointed out the small number of teachers that were given the lowest state rating, less than 1 percent, as “ineffective” while state tests showed roughly two-thirds of students did not make grade level marks on state tests for math and English.

Some teachers and parents had been upset by the added weight the governor wanted to place on state English and math tests, leading to many students opting out last spring; at Guilderland, 15.5 percent opted out of English and 20 percent opted out of math.

“We’re awaiting guidelines from State Education,” Singleton said this week. “We’re in a wait-and-see mode for the impacts in the short term.”

An email that the Guilderland superintendent received Tuesday from the Council of School Superintendents advised the test scores from students in third through eighth grades should not be used for individual student or teacher evaluations in 2015-16, this school year, Singleton said. Rather, the teachers should be evaluated by observation, the very method Guilderland had formerly used before the new state requirements came into play.

“We have no official guidance on what will replace it,” Singleton said of the student test scores that were to have made up a large part of the evaluation for teachers.

“Stakeholders and school leaders have lost trust in the process and system in place,” he said. “I do feel like a ping pong ball.”

He also said, “The governor’s position last year was there would be no state aid for schools unless they had an approved plan; that’s still in the law. With the APPR process so flawed and constantly changing, it harms

students."

Task force report

On the task force’s report, Singleton said, “Overall, the committee made some very sound recommendations.” He said, too, that the task force had gone beyond its initial charge of assessing Common Core Standards, also looking at such related matters as APPR.

The task force’s 36-page report groups 20 recommendations into three broad categories, with the final recommendation on the last page — to wait four years, while the new system is fully phased in, before linking test scores to evaluation of teachers.

The first five recommendations have to do with establishing new “high quality New York State Standards.”

As part of a national movement to improve education, the report explains, New York in 2009 joined more than 40 other states in adopting the Common Core Standards.

“The Common Core Standards are better than the state standards were,” said Singleton. While there is room for revision and adjustment of the Common Core Standards, Singleton said, “It would be a misstep to throw out Common Core. It takes years of research behind good standards.”

The botched rollout of the Common Core Standards caused a backlash that had little to do with the merit of the standards themselves, he said. “The Common Core had been a political lightning rod,” he said.

The State Education Department had recently posted an online survey on EngageNY to get feedback on the standards. “It was not blanket criticism,” said Singleton, “but telling which standard or which indication you don’t like and why.”

The thought behind the survey, he said, was: “Let’s stop the rhetoric and find logical places for revision or change.”

Singleton himself spent six hours answering just the portion of the survey on math. Collectively, Guilderland educators filled out the entire survey, using members of the district’s curriculum cabinets, he said.

Four of the task force recommendations center on developing better curriculum guidance and resources. One of them is to release updated and improved sample curriculum resources.

“Most districts picked and chose,” Singleton said of the modules that the State Education Department had posted. “We didn’t find them to be really all that valuable. They didn’t lead to any grand change. We developed the right resources and materials.”

He went on, “That’s where the value comes in, spending time to develop your own materials rather than copying someone. If they put out something different, we’ll see how it adds to our work.”

Other recommendations in that category call for ensuring local districts have the flexibility to develop and tailor curriculum to the new standards, as Guilderland did with the old, and launching a digital platform so educators can share resources.

The third broad category includes 11 recommendations to “significantly reduce testing time and preparation and ensure tests fit curriculum and standards.”

Educators, parents, and other stakeholders are to be involved in the creation and review of state standards-aligned exams and students are to be surveyed on the quality of the new tests. Teachers are to be supported with authentic assessments and there is to be flexibility for students with disabilities.

English language learners are not to be double tested, and the duration of standards-aligned tests is to be reduced.

“Any effort they put forth to make sure testing time isn’t having an undue effect, I’m all for that,” said Singleton.

The Guilderland Teachers’ Association this past year agreed to forgo the added layer of pre- and post-assessment tests by which their worth was measured. The growth from one year to the next was to apply equally to all teachers in a school. The goal of the teachers’ union was to meet state mandates for teacher evaluation without “testing students to death,” Erin McNamara, the president of the GTA, told The Enterprise at the time.

Singleton said this week, “The use of the test is most important. If you decouple the test from the evaluation of teachers, you won’t have the momentum to teach to the test. It’s only human nature to make test performance paramount if that’s what you’re being judged on.

Asked if tying teacher evaluation to student testing could ever be useful, Singleton said, “I do believe there is a place for student performance in the evaluation system, but not through standardized testing.”

He went on, “Assessments are best developed at the school level, not at the legislative level. To include student performance is perfectly fair, but state-level testing is not the right measure.”

An example of a worthwhile method, he said, would be for a student to demonstrate learning through a project or portfolio, and those authentic assessments could be used to evaluate the teaching.

The standardized tests are the easiest for the state, Singleton said, and the data has a useful role in informing curriculum and program. For example, Guilderland has used the data from state tests to analyze the challenges of educating students with disabilities and is now exploring an inclusion model.

But, Singleton went on, data from standardized tests isn’t useful “when you try to link it to effectiveness of the teacher.” Singleton noted that learning is affected “by many, many variables,” such as influences in the student’s home and the wealth of the family and community.

“How do you separate these?” he asked of the variables. “No one has come up with an effective method. There is no direct correlation to effectiveness.”

Singleton concluded of Guilderland, “We are paying very close attention. Big decisions have to be made that can change the course for public education.”