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Weak Evaluations Aren't Worth $60M

“Better to lose $60 million than have a weak rating system”
Editorial
New York Daily News
December 29, 2011

Now is the time for Mayor Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott to stand firm for city children in the battle to create an effective, streamlined program for evaluating teacher performance.

Both must make clear to United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew that they will accept nothing less in down-to-the-wire talks than the right to subject instructors to meaningful assessments — with the power to remove those deemed ineffective from the classroom.

Mulgrew and other union leaders committed 18 months ago to negotiate an evaluation system that uses, among other measures, progress on test scores to judge how well a teacher imparts learning. The labor chiefs gave their word as part of New York’s applications for $700 million in federal Race to the Top funding and millions more in School Improvement Grants.

Since then, here and in districts across the state, the unions stonewalled in talks. They’ve brought the city to the brink of a Jan. 1 deadline for reaching a deal that would cover a pilot program for 33 low-performing schools.

Properly, after repeated warnings, state Education Commissioner John King has announced that, if the city and Mulgrew remain at loggerheads at the close of business Friday, he will cancel $60 million in improvement grants that were intended to pay for special services designed to lift achievement in that group of troubled schools.

Bloomberg and Walcott must not waver in the face of King’s ultimatum. The waste and pain of forgoing $60 million would be nothing next to the terrible long-term consequences of placating the UFT with ill-defined evaluations that turn out to be just one more teacher job-protection racket, complete with thickets of hearings and appeals.

Expanding such a mess to all the city’s 1,400 schools, as the UFT would insist, would be a travesty of epic proportions. Once more: Better to forfeit the money than agree to a wishy-washiness that dooms the cause of school improvement.

Mulgrew has been joined in intransigence by New York State United Teachers President Richard Iannuzzi. In fact, statewide, eight of the 10 districts targeted to get improvement grant funding to turn around selected schools have been blocked from reaching evaluation deals.

Only Syracuse and Rochester did as they had promised.

And with 80% of those districts out of compliance — including New York City, the largest and most important of them all — U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan may well move to revoke the state’s $700 million as well.

Think he won’t? He just did it to Hawaii.

The unions pledged to negotiate an evaluation program. State officials and the feds believed them, and put money where their mouths were.

Sadly, it’s the kids who are threatened with the real bite.