By Elizabeth Ling, DFER NY State Director
Last year, New York state won a $700 million Race to the Top (RttT) award in large part by agreeing to revamp its teacher and principal evaluation system to incorporate student achievement measures. While this plan sounded nice conceptually, sharp-eyed education reformers warned that the devil would be in the details. And the one big detail, or catch, was that the elements of the new evaluation system had to be determined through local collective bargaining at school district levels.
With the State Education Department now doling out competitive award funds–both those related to RttT and others such as school improvement grants–it has been basing districts’ grant eligibility on union commitments to negotiate teacher evaluation details by a certain date. Linking funding to the realization of these plans is the state’s greatest lever to get the unions to the bargaining room.
The UFT is dragging its heels at every step, however, with the latest press reports describing how it continues to throw sand in the wheels of the process. The union’s stalling has real implications, because NYC can’t qualify to apply for the full range of award programs without demonstrating labor support for the new evaluation system. This means that that the city is potentially leaving federal money on the table at a time when its public schools are already facing budgetary hardships.