ALBANY – Say goodbye to seeing teacher evaluations.
The state legislature has passed Gov. Cuomo’s bill to limit disclosure of teacher ratings.
The bill would allow only parents to see evaluations by name, and only for their own kids’ teachers. Teacher names would be redacted for evaluations released to the general public.
The Senate voted 58-1 and the Assembly 118-17 today for the bill Cuomo introduced just before midnight Monday night, hours before lawmakers plan to go home for the summer.
The GOP-controlled Senate had been giving mixed signals until this morning.
Andrew Lanza (R-Staten Island) was the only dissenter in the Senate.
Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos (R-LI), commenting on concerns about confidentiality in small rural districts, said, “I’m sure this issue is going to be revisited in the future, but the reality is, with emails and getting pieces of paper, all the parents are going to know” details of individual teacher evaluations anyway.
Sen. Malcolm Smith (D-Queens) also said the bill would go through “some morphing over the next six, seven months.”
Skelos acknowledged, as Cuomo has, that there’s nothing to stop parents from posting information about specific teacher evaluations on line or otherwise sharing them publicly.
Mayor Bloomberg and State Conservative Party Chairman Michael Long have panned the Cuomo bill, with Bloomberg favoring full disclosure – as current law requires – and Long calling the measure a sellout to the United Federation of Teachers, the city teachers’ union.
UFT and the state teachers union, New York State United Teachers – which provide strong campaign support for state legislators on both sides of the aisle – voiced “strong support” for the Cuomo bill.
Skelos said he talked to Bloomberg last night about the Senate’s plans to pass the bill and said, “He was a bit disappointed.”
Cuomo praised lawmakers today, calling his bill “the metaphorical cherry on the cake to the end of what I believe is one of the most successful and broad ranging legislative sessions in modern political history.
“I believe it (the bill) strikes the right balance between protecting teacher privacy and a parent’s right to know.
“The teachers’ unions made important points and the bill respects their members’ legitimate right to privacy. I also appreciate the opinion of Mayor Bloomberg and I believe the final bill reflects much of his perspective.”
In response to a Post lawsuit, a state court last year ordered the city to fully disclose Teacher Data Ratings, a less comprehensive form of the evaluations that are being developed around New York under new state rules adopted in February.
The unions, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver (D-Manhattan), and state Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch, a Silver ally and the state’s top education policy-making official, also say the Cuomo bill strikes a fair balance between the public’s and parents’ right to see evaluations and teachers’ right to privacy.
“The teacher evaluation bill is apparently something everybody wants, except Mayor Bloomberg, including parent groups,” Silver said on Albany’s Talk 1300 AM radio today.
Parents union president Mona Davids praised the Cuomo bill to The Post earlier this week.