School to spend Election Day prepping for Quality Review

Only two months into the school year, the Department of Education has started conducting its annual School Quality Reviews, and at least one teacher wonders whether her school is using Election Day to pull a snow job on the reviewers:

My school is kind of in a frenzy right now because next week is our SQR – School Quality Review. This is when people from the NYC Department of Education come for two days and grade the school…. There are about a million meetings we have to go to before school, during our planning periods, and after school. Tomorrow is a Professional Development day (no students!), and from 8 to 3 we have nothing but meetings. We have to turn in a ton of forms, be meticulously planned, have beautiful posters, create student portfolios. … I get the impression that it’s sort of a BS-y evaluation though, since most of the “examplar practices” that the evaluators will be seeing next week were frantically put in place this week, not things that have been in place all year. It’ll be interesting to see if a lot of these things we’re frantically getting ready will stay in place after the evaluation is over.