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Six months after the city wanted to start a pilot program to evaluate teachers at 11 troubled schools, it has yet to come to an agreement with their union on the terms.
The delay is causing critics to question Gov. Cuomo’s proposal to start a similar program statewide by September, which has to be negotiated in each school district.
The city’s Department of Education and the United Federation of Teachers still haven’t agreed on the rating system for teachers in just 11 public schools — and there are less than four months remaining in the school year.
The DOE and UFT also have to come to a collective-bargaining agreement on a broader evaluation system in a state bill introduced last week by Cuomo, which the governor wants in place this fall rather than phased in over two years.
Not surprisingly, the finger-pointing between management and labor is running both ways.
“We’ve been trying for months to get the UFT to agree to a transformation plan for 11 struggling schools that includes a teacher-evaluation system to reward great teachers and remove ineffective ones,” said Deputy Chancellor John White. “Yet even in 11 struggling schools out of 1,700 schools citywide, the UFT refuses to collectively bargain an evaluation system that could remove ineffective teachers.”
The biggest disagreement is over whether this year’s pilot program will count against teachers rated “ineffective” — the bottom mark of a new evaluation system that can lead to dismissal after two such ratings.
DOE officials say it absolutely should count — especially because the 11 schools are among the lowest-performing in the city — but the UFT says the city agreed to a practice run and only recently tried to make it count.
“This was supposed to be a pilot — and let’s figure out what’s working and not working — because as you’re rolling anything out, you need to find out where the kinks are,” said UFT President Michael Mulgrew.
Mulgrew said poorly performing teachers at the 11 schools could still get “unsatisfactory” ratings under the current evaluation system, but not the harsher consequences of an “ineffective” rating.
Cuomo’s bill, which has the support of the teachers union, would seek to remove ineffective teachers using the evaluation system — rather than relying on layoffs to rid the system of bad teachers.
Mayor Bloomberg yesterday weighed in on teacher evaluation in an interview on KISS-FM
Asked whether there is merit in the tenure system to protect teachers from political decisions, he replied: “I couldn’t agree more. There should not be political influence.”
But he also warned, “We all live in a world where we get judged — or most of us do — judged subjectively.”