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Educators to evaluate Klein, DOE

by Dorothy Callaci

Jun 5, 2008 3:33 PM

This year the city’s 100,000 active educators will not only be evaluated but, as part of everyone being accountable, the educators will evaluate the performance of Chancellor Joel Klein and the Department of Education.

At a special meeting on June 9 at the Brooklyn Marriott, chapter leaders were one vote shy of unanimously recommending to the union’s Executive Board and Delegate Assembly that the union circulate the evaluation surveys in order to give every UFT member in the schools a voice in assessing the job being done by the chancellor and Tweed.

(Later that day, the Executive Board overwhelmingly voted to do this assessment.)

The union surveys, designed to be candid and completely confidential, will add the missing component to the DOE’s School Progress Reports by providing 360 degree accountability. Since November, the union has advocated that the chancellor and Tweed, not just teachers, principals and schools, must be held accountable.
“This is in keeping with the notion that everybody gets evaluated at the end of the year,” UFT President Randi Weingarten said.

The 15-question UFT survey — which should take less than five minutes to complete — is modeled on the DOE’s own Learning Environment survey and uses some of the same language and formulations as the DOE survey uses.

“When the DOE issued the School Progress Reports based on the Learning Environment Surveys it conducted in 2007, we in the union noted that a major component was lacking in them, namely a system for evaluating the chancellor and Tweed and holding them accountable just as schools, principals and teachers were being held accountable,” Weingarten said.

She reminded chapter leaders of the union’s attempt last March to provide a fairer, more accurate and transparent method of evaluating schools when it developed the four pillars of accountability: academic achievement; a safe, orderly learning environment; teamwork for student achievement; and DOE accountability.

“But one pillar has been ignored,” she said, “the one about DOE accountability.”

As the statement at the top of the survey indicates: “It is important that the chancellor and the mayor hear from you — New York’s corps of educational professionals — who work directly with our school children. We ask you to be completely candid in your answers.”

The union has stressed the complete confidentiality of the process to encourage teachers to be objective and unbiased in their responses to all the questions and the importance of widespread participation so the results are viewed as credible.

The surveys are designed only to measure the performance of the chancellor and the central DOE and not principals or other school-level adminstrators.

Teachers are instructed in the survey to indicate whether they agree or disagree with 15 statements directed at the chancellor and/or the DOE such as:

• Chancellor Klein has confidence in the expertise of his educators.
• Chancellor Klein encourages open communication on important school issues.
• Chancellor Klein and the DOE have made effective curriculum choices for my students.
• Chancellor Klein invites educators to play a meaningful role in setting goals and making important decisions in their schools.
• Chancellor Klein focuses on the academic, social and physical development of the whole child.

The unsigned surveys will be sealed into unmarked envelopes that must be returned by June 18 for tabulation by the American Arbitration Association, the group that tallies union elections and contract ratification votes.

Weingarten told the chapter leaders about a reporter’s recent question to Klein after noting that everyone else is being evaluated. How, the reporter asked, would Klein evaluate himself?

“I’ll leave that to others,” Klein said.

“We’ll be the ‘others,’” Weingarten said to cheers and applause from the chapter leaders.

“This is the first real, confidential and candid evaluation of our chancellor,” she said. “A real evaluation to try to make things better.”

Weingarten said that accountability flows in two directions — from the school up to the Department of Education and from the DOE back down to the school. “All parties involved in the education process — teachers, support staff, parents and school administrators — are responsible for the achievement of New York City’s public school students,” she said. “For all of us to fulfill our responsibilities to ensure that students have the opportunity to learn, it is both logical and essential that just as we are evaluated, the performance of the Department of Education and our schools chancellor be evaluated as well.”

Weingarten said the union hoped that the department would integrate this survey into its School Progress Reports and evaluation program and provide the same opportunity to parents in future years to evaluate the DOE and the chancellor. “This would provide an essential missing instrument to ensure that everyone responsible for the success of our students is evaluated,” she said.

Survey results will be announced before the end of school.