Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña last week joined with United Federation of Teachers boss Mike Mulgrew and principals’ union head Ernest Logan to ask for a waiver from the state mandate for outside, independent evaluations of teachers.
You couldn’t ask for better proof that the inmates have taken over the asylum that passes for public education in New York City.
The waiver push came with the announcement of the new plan for rating city teachers — on the basis of classroom observations, tests created by teachers and student portfolios. That’s a system extremely easy to game, as long as no outsider is in the loop.
Yes, good principals will still quietly identify bad teachers, and strive to push them out of their schools. But those teachers will just wind up at another school, with a less-diligent principal — most likely at a school serving underprivileged kids.
Teachers and principals invested only in protecting their jobs and shielding themselves from scrutiny are the big winners. Fariña’s promise that new professional-development programs will fix any problem teachers is laughable.
All this follows on the utter collapse of Gov. Cuomo’s years-long effort to impose tougher teacher-evaluation procedures. The unions fought that tooth and nail. When Cuomo last year gave up his push for student-test data to be used in evaluations, the outside-observer mandate became the last hope for any objective accountability.
Now Fariña and Michael Mulgrew argue that the mandate is too costly — as if money spent to ID failing teachers is a waste.
Will the State Education Department grant the waiver? Sadly, the teachers unions now own SED — thanks to Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, who de facto controls the state Board of Regents and only won the speakership with the unions’ backing.
Goodbye to any hope of getting incompetent teachers fired — or even of denying tenure to newly-hired failures.
The bottom line: The de Blasio administration is putting teacher-employment first, ahead of the children’s needs. Kids trapped in the mayor’s Renewal schools and other failure factories will continue to suffer — while Mulgrew’s union enthusiastically works to help de Blasio win re-election.
One hope for change: an all-out war in Albany to remove the speaker’s one-man control of the State Education Department.
The other hope is that the Trump administration might find a way to break up this corrupt game. With reformer Betsy DeVos helming the federal Education Department, maybe New York could see a pilot school-voucher program to give parents the chance to take their children out of de Blasio’s schools, and into ones that actually care about good teaching.