Union And City Reach Agreement On Teacher Grading System

The New York City Department of Education and the United Federation of Teachers agreed Friday on an evaluation and compensation system at 33 failing city schools that would for the first time link educator effectiveness to student performance.

The agreement was made under pressure of $65 million of withheld federal grants through months of disagreements between the two parties. This comes at a time when more schools across the country are assessing teachers in part based on student test scores.

"If we have an opportunity to look at this on a small scale, we might come to a better understanding of some of the issues inside of that legislation," UFT President Michael Mulgrew told The New York Times.

The deal will take effect next year and will score the teachers annually as ineffective, developing, effective or highly effective. The teachers are only currently assessed as "satisfactory" or "unsatisfactory." More than 95 percent of teachers in those failing schools are rated "satisfactory," The Wall Street Journal reports.

The city has yet to determine a new teacher evaluation system for the rest of New York's 1,600 schools, but "we're nowhere near having those conversations," Mulgrew told The Journal.

The New York Post reports that under the deal:

• City gets $65 million in federal grants to fix 33 low-performing schools
• Pays for higher teacher salaries, nonprofit consultants
• Union agrees to a more rigorous teacher-evaluation system
• Principals can be replaced with new leadership

Still, The Times reports that two controversial issues have yet to be resolved: how much, exactly, to weight student exam scores as a proportion of overall teacher effectiveness and whether the union will accept or reject the city's new standardized tests.

Comments

[MDCA]

01:28 PM on 07/20/2011

A teacher was telling me that he has had students with more than 80% absence in a semster, and when the teacher finally located a "parent," he was told, "What do you want me to do? My daughter is 17 years old. She will not listen to me."

[MDCA]

01:26 PM on 07/20/2011

In one school in Los Angeles, an average of 14 parents show up for every 150 students classroom teachers carry on their rosters on teacher-parent conference nights. Half are parents of good students, and the other half acknowlege lack of interest and/or skills in their child, thank the teacher and leave, never to be seen again.

[MDCA]

01:23 PM on 07/20/2011

City gets $65M to "FIX" problems in 33 schools! This is not the first time that truckloads of money is being thrown at so called failed schools. If throwing money at these so called failed schools were the answer, they wouldn't be failing any more. This money will be best spent if it were directed toward parent involvement. Instead, I am sure the bulk of it will be paid for teachers' "professional development," which means sitting through endless hours of being talked at by people who either have never been inside a classroom, or have been away from it for a decade or so!

[cybexg]

02:23 PM on 07/18/2011

Lol...typical Americans and their inability to accept responsibility

study after study indicates the home environment is the predominant factor in a student's performance. However, notice how the poor performance of students is always the teacher's fault, the unions fault...anyone else's fault other than the student's and parent's

[stopnlisten]

01:55 PM on 07/19/2011

It's a rule...never call a voter a bad parent.

[MDCA]

01:18 PM on 07/20/2011

BRAVO. Fanned. American parents are sacred cows in education discussions. Elected officials are fearful of losing their votes. That is why you never hear a peep out of any elected officials about the necessity of parent involvement.

[jeffrey678]

07:28 AM on 07/18/2011

Although mainstreaming in education has been shown to provide benefits, there are also disadvantages to the system.

Tradeoff with non-disabled students' academic education: One potentially serious disadvantage to mainstreaming, is that a mainstreamed student may require much more attention from the teacher than non-disabled students in a general class. Time and attention may thus be taken away from the rest of the class to meet the needs of a single student with special needs. The effect that a mainstreamed student has on the whole class depends strongly on the particular disabilities in question and the resources available for support.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainstreaming_%28education%29

[Dee Ster]

01:49 AM on 07/18/2011

While teachers do need to be held accountable, you also have to take into account the demographics in the classroom. As a parent who did a lot of volunteering, I saw many classrooms with children that had high volumes of learning disability students versus other class rooms with more kids proficient or better at their grade level. Teachers, at the end of the day can only do so much with the numbers they are given, and the students they are given. The testing would need to take into account many things other than just how the 25-30 students in their class scored on their assessments.

[Jeffrey Marks]

08:31 AM on 07/18/2011

Other countries do not include students with LD in their scores.

[Dee Ster]

03:19 PM on 07/18/2011

Maybe not, but our teachers, from what I have seen in the classrooms, have as many as 1/3 of their class who are not qualified for an IEP, yet unable to keep up with the main class. When they do not qualify for the IEP, they aren't given allowances for the state assessments, thus, driving down that classrooms overall scores. This is what I was referring to. Not the idea that we should include them in our scores.

[changing]

03:52 PM on 07/17/2011

Blood money. The union should quit appeasing and trying to please. NYC teachers, get ready for DC and Atlanta. Teachers in DC fired at the poor schools not at the rich ones for sure. Guess what, most of the "good" teachers are at the more middle class schools. Enough of this witch hunt and takeover by the testing companies.

[quietfortoolong2]

03:37 PM on 07/17/2011

Stop evaluating teachers based on what students do. Evaluate students based on what students do, and evaluate teachers with classroom observations. It should not be the job of the teacher to ensure that the students actually put forth effort in their studies - that is the job of students and their parents to prioritize education. I can be the best teacher in the universe, but if a student is not motivated to learn, has no incentive to learn, and knows that he/she will not be blamed for poor performance (since the teacher will be blamed), nothing I could ever do would change that student and turn them into a high achiever.

The party of personal responsibility that implemented NCLB and measuring teacher effectiveness by standardized test scores of kids who may or may not like the subject they are being tested on is doing a great job of teaching our kids that everybody else is responsible when they fail. Evaluate students using student grades. Evaluate teachers using the observations of their peers. Test students at the end of the year with one standardized test, and if the student does not pass, they do not go on to the next grade.

[christine1971]

12:08 PM on 07/18/2011

Thank you for expressing what so many of us (teachers and not) feel. The other question that hangs in the air is what about all of the social issues that effect a students ability to perform in school. We have lost our social workers, our community-based organizations, and other necessary services for student success. How can teachers be evaluated by a student's test score when that student has only been to class three to four times?

[timbeaux]

03:32 PM on 07/17/2011

This might be a step in the right direction, if people are open to fine-tuning it as necessary. There's no reasons for teachers to belong to a profession in which competence is never evaluated.

But what I want to know is, who's working on the evaluation rubric for administrators? Bad teaching is often at least partly a result of bad administration. (Look at Atlanta.) I won't be happy with this arrangement until they broaden it to include administrators, all the way up to the school board level.

[quietfortoolong2]

03:45 PM on 07/17/2011

I would say that bad teaching is a result of too many chiefs trying to control every little aspect of how a teacher teaches. Sure, there are some people who are not cut out for teaching, but there are many more teachers who have a passion for education, who could be exceptional teachers if 1) they were allowed to teach the subject matter in a way they feel connects best with their students, 2) parents would be more involved with their child's education and would communicate with teachers on a regular and ongoing basis (e-mail is amazing), and 3) students were taught at home and in community to prioritize academics instead of sports and other extra-curricular activities that have nothing to do with academics. If those parents who spend 2 hours each day helping their kids with batting practice, or cheerleading, or football, or whatever would take 1 of those hours and devote it to helping with academics, we could turn around many underperforming schools overnight. But when inner city kids see their only chance at college to be in the form of an athletic scholarship, it is understandable as to why priorities are misplaced.

Finally, pay teachers better, and people with great teaching skills, who avoid the profession because of the lack of money, will probably change their minds and go into teaching.

[Mr Anonymous]

08:26 PM on 07/17/2011

What do you mean teachers' competence is never evaluated. There is testing for getting licensed. There are so many classes and programs that need to be taken to for that license to be reinstated after so many years. There are walk throughs and evaluations done by administration. Just like every other profession, there are going to be a few bad ones out there.