New York at Risk of Squandering A Once-In-A-Lifetime Opportunity

Late last week we sent a letter to New York’s Regents’ Advisory Task Force on Teacher and Principal Evaluations that raised serious concerns about how the state plans to use a huge chunk of its $700 million Race to the Top grant to help teachers improve the quality of classroom instruction and to ensure that every student – regardless of race, family income, or zip code – has access to a highly effective teacher.

Unfortunately, the State Education Department’s draft regulations provide only a few vague changes that fail to inject any rigor into the evaluation process. The regulations squander the significant potential within the law itself to create a process that substantively and usefully evaluates educators in the Empire State.

The very reason to have a teacher and principal evaluation system is to ensure that all students receive the best education possible. It is a means to the end of guaranteeing that children in every community in New York have access to well-run schools and high-quality teachers. If the regulations allow evaluation criteria that are too vague to be meaningfully measured, and if the state passes too much responsibility for designing and executing evaluations to resource-strapped districts, this ambitious and important project could well become a missed opportunity.

New York’s educator evaluation system needs to have clear and achievable goals for teacher and principal growth and effectiveness. The state education leadership ought to provide districts in need of effective evaluation systems a rigorous statewide rubric that these districts will adopt. And because the ultimate goal is ensuring that all New York schools meet serious standards of excellence, these evaluations need to be directly tied to decisions about teacher and principal hiring, professional development, retention and promotion.