By Omar Lopez, DFER Policy Analyst
Change does not often come without hardship and the new teacher evaluation program in New York State is a prime example of this. The program, which was approved by the New York State Legislature in May 2010 as part of the federal Race to the Top competition, is being protested by over 600 principals, mostly from Long Island. They recently signed an open letter to the New York State Board of Regents rejecting the plan. The evaluation system is an update to the existing framework that functions on a binary (teachers can only be marked satisfactory or unsatisfactory) to one that uses four bands (ineffective, developing, effective, and highly effective). Part of the performance review (20%-40%) will be taken from standardized test scores, though the details are still being negotiated at the local level with union input.
The principals’ concerns center around the use of evaluation systems that incorporate test scores. They claim that the act of evaluating teachers has a direct negative impact on the nurturing relationship between students and teachers. Moreover, they say that tax dollars are being redirected from schools to testing companies.
The Daily News has already weighed in against the principals’ letter. They highlight the fact that districts and unions have not worked out the details of the teacher evaluation program through collective bargaining and encourage Governor Cuomo to create a deadline for negotiations.
Let’s be clear here, though the Long Island principals claim that their positions are based purely on research, their disagreements are overwhelmingly ideological and philosophical. For example, in their recommendations to the Board of Regents, they say, “An evaluation system that even partially bases an individual teacher’s evaluation on his or her studentsʼ scores ignores the reality that student success is often predicated on the work of many adults in a school” [my emphasis]. Even partially? Are they suggesting that a student’s ability to read and do math at their grade level, a baseline assessment, should not be used to any degree in evaluating the effectiveness of their teacher? That’s just counterintuitive.
The laissez-faire approach that these principals are proposing will disproportionally disadvantage students in poor and working class neighborhoods with consistently failing schools. Schools that are in high poverty areas also tend to have the least experienced teachers, where creating evaluation systems to support teacher effectiveness are most needed. Poverty is an aspect of society that needs to be addressed in order to improve education, but not having a teacher evaluation is not going to accomplish that goal. If a student comes from a poor family, does that mean that we have different expectations for their teacher’s performance? Absolutely not. The correct response is to identify which teachers are doing the job well and shine a bright light on them. Those who are not performing need to be identified so that they can be supported (or redirected to another profession). The idea behind teacher evaluations is not punitive, it’s constructive.