Governor Andrew Cuomo has fast-tracked new, test score based teacher evaluations. Teachers’ unions have predictably reacted by saying, “ZOMG! OH NOES! UR KIDZ IZZ GUNNA BE TEH DUMMER BCUZ WE R BING EEVALYOOATED!!1!eleventy!!“

‘Puter was listening to his local NPR station while running errands and lunch yesterday and heard the City of Rochester teachers’ union leader Adam Urbanski (‘Puter refuses to sycophantically refer to Urbanski as “doctor” like the host– an Ed.D is a bullshit degree) bemoaning the unfairness of it all. Urbanski and his ilk have given up hope that they can stop the imposition of some sort of data-driven teacher evaluations. However, the union thugs are still trying to bend things in their favor.

Urbanksi, when pressed to provide his thoughts on an acceptable teacher evaluation system, thought it should be based on GPA, teacher assessment of student progress, whether the child passes, etc. Sure, that’d be great Adam. Except that your union members control every single rubric you mention.

Jimmy needs a higher GPA so Mrs. Happypants makes the grade? Jimmy with the 75 IQ is now an A student. No potential for gaming the system here, is there?

The sad thing is that there are already reams of test data on these kids. ‘Puter’s kids are constantly being tested. There’s already a fairly good and reliable benchmark for where these kids stand. And it would be relatively simple to establish a correlation between a kids’ test performance and a teacher’s proficiency. If the entire class does better than it’s done before, then the teacher is probably good. The opposite is also true.

If the union were smart, which it isn’t (greedy and thuggish, yes), it would use these data for its own purposes. If ‘Puter were a NYSUT honcho, he’d be correlating test scores to the following: (1) income level; (2) census tract; (3) crime rates in neighborhood; and (4) single parent/no parent household. ‘Puter’s betting that in general, that the higher the income, the better the neighborhood and the greater parental involvement, the better the outcome generally. This would be a good argument for paying inner city teachers a ton more money. It’s also an argument for paying suburban teachers less, but ‘Puter doesn’t expect the union to make that argument.

‘Puter’s greater point is that the teachers’ union, particularly NYSUT, will stop and nothing, including cratering your child’s education and bankrupting the state, in order to enrich itself and its members.

Remember that the next time you hear “it’s for the kids.”

'Puter

Always right, unless he isn’t, the infallible Ghettoputer F. X. Gormogons claims to be an in-law of the Volgi, although no one really believes this.

’Puter carefully follows economic and financial trends, legal affairs, and serves as the Gormogons’ financial and legal advisor. He successfully defended us against a lawsuit from a liquor distributor worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid deliveries of bootleg shandies.

The Geep has an IQ so high it is untestable and attempts to measure it have resulted in dangerously unstable results as well as injuries to researchers. Coincidentally, he publishes intelligence tests as a side gig.

His sarcasm is so highly developed it borders on the psychic, and he is often able to insult a person even before meeting them. ’Puter enjoys hunting small game with 000 slugs and punt guns, correcting homilies in real time at Mass, and undermining unions. ’Puter likes to wear a hockey mask and carry an axe into public campgrounds, where he bursts into people’s tents and screams. As you might expect, he has been shot several times but remains completely undeterred.

He assures us that his obsessive fawning over news stories involving women teachers sleeping with young students is not Freudian in any way, although he admits something similar once happened to him. Uniquely, ’Puter is unable to speak, read, or write Russian, but he is able to sing it fluently.

Geep joined the order in the mid-1980s. He arrived at the Castle door with dozens of steamer trunks and an inarticulate hissing creature of astonishingly low intelligence he calls “Sleestak.” Ghettoputer appears to make his wishes known to Sleestak, although no one is sure whether this is the result of complex sign language, expert body posture reading, or simply beating Sleestak with a rubber mallet.

‘Puter suggests the Czar suck it.