By Joe Williams, DFER Executive Director
Another school year is drawing to a close in New York State and that means yet another school year has passed without meaningful evaluations of teachers and principals. The latest fake hurdle has been a ginned-up controversy over whether or not new teacher evaluations should be made public. Gov. Andrew Cuomo has offered a reasonable compromise in this meaningless ongoing dispute. The Legislature should take his bill, pass it, and bring back to their local districts a strong statement to both school management and labor that it is sick and tired of watching both sides act like toddlers while the state’s confidence in public education continues to tank. Creating better evaluation systems for school employees was an issue worth fighting for because it pretty much made sense to anyone with a heartbeat. The idea was to allow school managers to make better informed decisions about how schools are operated and about who should be allowed the privilege of teaching children in the Empire State. Radical, right? The side-issue of how or whether to publicize those evaluations got turned into a classic Albany freak-show that has only given cover to those “leaders” in management and labor that have no intention of actually implementing the evaluation systems the Legislature has already put into law. Please end this asinine disclosure debate so we can spend our summer preparing for the next lame excuse for inaction.