NEW YORK—The city’s Department of Education (DOE) and the teachers union are at a standstill in negotiations about teacher evaluations. Lots of money and many jobs are hanging in the balance.
The city won a federal Race to the Top grant of $700 million for a school reform plan that includes better teacher evaluations. The DOE and teachers union, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), agreed on a model for evaluations in May 2010 but have been unable to agree on how to put it into practice.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo raised the stakes in his state budget address on Jan. 17. For the 2013–2014 school year, state aid increases depend on a new evaluation system being in place. Cuomo will step in with his own plan for teacher evaluation reform if the city can’t get its own in place by Jan. 17, 2013.
The city DOE and UFT are both happy about the state’s intervention, but the cost of not changing the system right now is high—about $600 million, said Cuomo’s education deputy, David Wakelyn, citing a New York Coalition for Achievement Now report.
The federal government granted the DOE money to help turn around 33 of the city’s lowest performing schools—but a condition of that grant was improved teacher evaluations.
“What we need to be better teachers is an evaluation system that gives us meaningful feedback,” said Daniel Mejias, a seventh-grade math teacher at M.S. 22 in the Bronx, one of the 33 schools in question. He sat on a panel with Wakelyn last week organized by Educators 4 Excellence (E4E), a teacher-led group that works to involve the voice of teachers in policy change.
Mejias talked about all the benefits—including additional teachers to reduce class sizes and refurbished computers into kids’ homes—that the grant money brought the school until the evaluations dispute froze the money flow.
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