The teacher-evaluation debate is rooted in bad politics, critics say.
In order to secure millions in federal education funding, the state put out a mandate to New York’s 700 school districts: Come up with your own systems for evaluating teachers.
Now, as 10 school districts, including New York City, struggle to come up with teacher-evaluation systems approved by the teachers unions, Gov. Cuomo says the 2010 law that mandated the local evaluations — instead of devising a single, nonpolitical, state standard — was fatally flawed, and never intended to benefit students.
“The Assembly-led legislation in 2010 protected the teachers union at the expense of the students and instituted a system that was destined to fail,” Cuomo said. “It is unworkable. Some would say it was unworkable by design.”
Critics say it’s crucial to come up with a better way to evaluate educators, and remove the bad ones from the classroom.
The controversy peaked last week as negotiations between the United Federation of Teachers and City Hall broke down, and Mayor Bloomberg called for mothballing poor-performing teachers.