Last year, the New York legislature banned the use of any district's student test scores to decide if a teacher should earn tenure, thanks to heavy-duty lobbying by state teachers' unions. The ban came after New York City announced its intention to start using test scores as a factor in tenure decisions.
The deal brokered with the teachers' unions under Democratic Governor David Patterson was this: the legislature would create a commission to study the issue before the ban expired in two years.
But that was then, when the legislature's power was divided between the GOP-controlled Senate and a Dems-led Assembly.
Now, with Democrats controlling both houses, the decision has been relegated to legislative purgatory. For a year now, the chair of the Assembly's education committee, Catherine Nolan, who has added $12,000 to her campaign coffers from the teachers' unions since 2001, hasn't let the study commission come up for a vote in her committee. The panel is scheduled to report its findings by the end of this year.
Nolan attributes the reason for the delay to her hip replacement last summer. However, in the past year, Nolan has found the strength to hold public forums and roundtables on a number of other education issues, including giving a speech at the United Federation of Teachers lobby day and chairing 11 other committee hearings (See here).
Sounds like she just isn't hip to the new political realities.
New York's chances of using test scores for evaluating teachers don't look too good, but the Dallas school district is pushing ahead with the idea and then some.
First, the district was one of the few in the country which factored in a teacher's performance when laying off teachers last fall. About a quarter of the tenured teachers who were laid off were targeted because they had earned one or more areas "below expectations" on their annual evaluations. In almost all districts, a teacher's seniority is generally the deciding factor when layoffs must occur.
Now, Dallas has informed another big batch of teachers that their jobs are in jeopardy because they have been tapped for intervention or because they rank in the bottom fifth on the district's "Classroom Effectiveness Index." The controversial CEI uses state test scores over several years to measure how the learning growth attributable to each teacher stacks up. CEI scores have been used to decide which teachers get to keep their jobs when a troubled school is reconstituted and, more recently, to award bonuses. But the district always maintained, until now, that the index wouldn't play a part in firing decisions.
Many Dallas teachers are hopping mad. They mistrust the CEI, which is derived through complicated statistical maneuvers few understand and includes individual scores that can be a bit unreliable. Union officials have also pointed out that since administration of the state tests that will feed into CEI scores for next year had started before the warning letters went out, some teachers were not put on notice early enough to fight for a new CEI ranking.
The terminations are planned for 2010-11.