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Mulgrew attacks chancellor’s tenure guidelines
Feb 18, 2010 1:17 PM
Calling Chancellor Joel Klein’s move to use student test scores in tenure decisions “another example of mismanagement,” UFT President Michael Mulgrew said it underscored the need for a teacher evaluation system that teachers can trust.
“It is a shame that rather than doing the hard work of trying to create a better process — something we have been working on with the state — the chancellor chose to make up his own misguided rules and rely on tests the state has deemed unreliable for this very purpose,” said Mulgrew.
Without negotiating or even conferring with the UFT, Klein told principals in the Feb. 11 edition of the Principal’s Weekly to include student test scores as one of the criteria for making tenure decisions this spring.
In a letter to union members on the same day that Klein announced his plan, Mulgrew wrote, “In order to protect you and your students from this ill-considered plan, we will pursue any and all legal remedies available to us.”
The UFT on Feb. 12 filed a complaint with the state Public Employment Relations Board charging that the Department of Education had an obligation to negotiate with the union before changing the procedures for making “tenure decisions.”
Of the approximately 6,800 teachers up for tenure this year, the new policy would affect about 700 teachers in grades 4 through 8 who have been teaching the same subject or grade for at least two years and whose students have taken the state math or English Language Arts exams.
“Mayor Bloomberg in November called on us to take the long overdue step of considering a teacher’s impact on student learning in tenure decisions. Linking tenure to a teacher’s results in the classroom makes common sense,” Klein wrote.
The chancellor said the change would make for “a more rigorous tenure system,” where 93 percent of teachers who were eligible for tenure last year received it.
The union contends that in addition to the violation of the Taylor Law, the action contravenes current state education law, which prohibits the DOE from using student grades on state standardized tests in tenure determinations for certain teachers whose probationary period ends this year.
The law sunsets on June 30.
The chancellor’s memo advises principals to take extra care in deciding whether to recommend for tenure teachers who have low scores on their Teacher Data Reports. (These reports give each eligible teacher a score based on the progress that her or his students have made on the state tests.) He is requiring principals to explain to superintendents their rationale in writing if they decide to recommend tenure for one of the lowest-scoring 15 percent of teachers.
The union, along with numerous scholars, cites well-grounded research showing that the method used to compute teachers’ Teacher Data Report scores is not a valid or reliable indicator of teacher quality.
The state ELA and math tests, on which the Teacher Data Report score is based, in particular are unreliable. While the most recent state test scores showed New York City students leaping over their previous years’ scores, results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, called “the nation’s report card,” show minimal improvements by city students.
In an interview with New York 1, Mulgrew posed the key question, “Why would you tell people to use broken tests? Why aren’t you working with us at the state level to move this issue forward?”
Teachers will be receiving their Teacher Data Reports via DOE e-mail in early March. Principals will have them earlier.
