MANHATTAN — Teachers and principals this school year will be rated under a new evaluation system that looks beyond test scores as a way to focus on developing better educators, officials from the Department of Education and unions representing teachers and principals announced Wednesday.
The new evaluation system will combine the two categories under the current system — “Measures of Student Learning,” which includes test scores, and “Measures of Teacher/Leadership Practice,” which are based on principal/superintendent observations — with an overall rating that will be publicly available.
The test scores component will no longer include student performance on the state exams for grades 3 to 8 until 2019-2020, officials noted, because of a statewide moratorium.
Instead, schools will be able to select assessments from an expanded range of assessment categories, including tests, new project based-learning assessments, additional progress monitoring assessments, and new student learning inventories — compilations of student work.
“Our students are more than a score on a standardized test, and our teachers are more than the sum of their students’ test results,” Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers, said in a statement. “We need thoughtful measures of student progress — from essays and projects to the monitoring of learning growth in particular areas.”
His hope, he added, is that Albany will adopt the city’s approach as a new model when the moratorium on standardized tests expires.
“With this agreement, we are starting to replace tests with real work that captures what a student learns over the course of a school year,” Mulgrew said.
Though the state is now requiring school districts to have an independent evaluator observe all teachers and principals, the city applied for a waiver given that such a plan to observe thousands of educators would be costly and place a heavy burden on schools and supervisors.
The waiver will allow principals to continue having a say in evaluating their own teachers — something many were concerned about losing when the state announced its intentions.
While the observation component will remain fairly unchanged for teachers, the city is working to select a new rubric for principal observations. The principals’ union, the Council of School Supervisors and Administrators, will pilot two new systems with the DOE next year in two community school districts, officials said.
“We are pleased that we have been able to work collaboratively with the Department of Education, within the constraints of the law, to come to terms on a plan that is focused on school leader development,” CSA President Ernest Logan said in a statement. “The goal must be continuous improvement of our practice, and we feel that with proper implementation this can be another step in that direction."
Under the current system, test scores counted for 40 percent of a teacher’s evaluation, and observations accounted for 60 percent. The new formula incorporates a table with two axes — student learning on one side and the observations on the other — where scores are looked at in all categories to come up with the overall rating.
By combining the student learning and teacher practice measures and added the performance-based measures, it looks like “they are on the cusp of deemphasizing student test scores,” said David Bloomfield, education professor at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center.
The request to waive the independent observers, he added, “shows the desire to have principals in charge of evaluating teacher performance.”
But the pro-charter group Families for Excellent Schools denounced the waiver.
"After burning almost a billion dollars on laughably low goals for improvement in their so-called Renewal Schools, the mayor and his political allies are now colluding to claim that New York City can't afford the last of any independent checks to see if kids are actually learning in classrooms,” Jeremiah Kittredge, CEO, Families for Excellent Schools, said in a statement.
As DNAinfo previously reported, hiring scores of educators with experience as principals — whose starting salary is more than $142,000 — to do outside evaluations could have cost the upwards of $60 million.
Another option— tapping principals and assistant principals within the school system to trek to other schools and evaluate teachers at institutions similar to their own — would drain school leaders’ ability to run their own schools.
The new agreement will be submitted to the state for review and pending State approval by Dec. 31, officials said.
