NY bill would bar districts from tying test scores to teacher tenure
While the state was consumed by the downfall of Gov. Eliot Spitzer last week, the New York Assembly passed a bill that would pre-emptively bar New York City and other school districts from linking teacher tenure to students’ test scores. Randi Weingarten, the president of the United Federation of Teachers, said that she had not pressed for the legislation, though she was, of course, supporting it. Some legislators said they were taken by surprise to learn that the provision was tucked into the huge budget bill passed by the Assembly last week. But the Bloomberg administration, which has embarked on an ambitious experiment in which some 2,500 teachers are being measured on how much their students improve on annual standardized tests, is now fighting. A spokesman for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s legislative office in Albany, Farrell Sklerov, said: “To make sure kids have the best possible teachers, we need to look at all available data. Teachers should be accurately evaluated with information about how well they’re helping students learn. We cannot afford to restrict the city’s ability to set high standards.” The legislation would require that decisions on teacher tenure follow standards set by the state’s Board of Regents. That would make it impossible for local districts to add their own measures, like including student academic performance and improvement in the judging of teachers.
In 2006, Gov. Eliot Spitzer said that the state should set tougher requirements for teachers’ tenure, and he introduced language in his budget proposal to include “an analysis of data and other information on the performance of the teacher’s students where such data and information are available.” But that language—opposed by the teachers unions—was later softened to require only that teachers be measured on how well they use student performance data to shape instruction. “That was the compromise written into the law, and now the city is really trying to get two bites at the apple,” Ms. Weingarten said. “This isn’t an open issue. We’ve already said that using tests scores in this way to judge teachers is not legally or educationally sound.” Timothy Kramer, the executive director of the New York State School Board Association, said he was concerned that legislation to toughen standards for teacher tenure “keeps getting watered down further and further.” “What you’ve got here is that the teachers’ union have gotten to them in both houses,” Mr. Kramer said. “This would severely limit the factors that districts could utilize in making their own determinations for tenure, whether it’s student performance or something else. And that’s very concerning.”
Source: New York Times, 3/18/08, By Jennifer Medina
[Editor’s Note: Meanwhile, Pennsylvania reportedly is considering establishing a statewide curriculum. The Towanda Daily & Sunday Review reports below that Towanda School Board member Pete Alesky, who heard of the proposal at a regional meeting of the Pennsylvania School Boards Association, said he believes the state has more in mind than a “suggested” curriculum. “As you know,” he said, if a curriculum is suggested by the state, “it is a curriculum you are to use.” Ironically these proposals come at a time when, as Education Week reports in the story excerpted at the second link, other states are exploring ways to reduce micromanagement of local educational decisions.]
Source: Towanda Daily & Sunday Review, 3/18/08, By James Lowenstein
NSBA School Law pages on education deregulation