Apr 10, 2008 9:51 AM
Albany state budget negotiations were contentious, and the final package nine days late, but the logjam broke after legislators and the governor agreed with the city and state teacher unions and the New York State School Boards Association on budget language saying tenure decisions can be based on how a teacher uses test data to shape instruction — but not on how a teacher’s students perform on standardized tests.
The budget language was an attempt to clarify existing state law, which says that tenure should be based on, among other things, an “evaluation of the extent to which the teacher successfully utilized analysis of available student performance data and other relevant information when providing instruction.” The additional language makes explicit that “the teacher shall not be granted or denied tenure based on student performance data.”
That whole section on new tenure criteria will be operational for only two years, while a legislative commission studies “the merits of value-added assessment models in school accountability.”
“Teachers are not afraid of accountability, but the measures have to be fair and accurate,” said UFT President Randi Weingarten. “There is no independent or conclusive research that shows you can accurately measure the impact of an individual teacher on a student’s academic progress.”
Only Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein did not support the compromise crafted by the Legislature and the governor. “It is nothing more than a special interest protection . . . and our children will — once again — get the short end of the stick,” the mayor said in a statement.
The victory came despite full-bore opposition from the two, including several opinion pieces, letters to the editor and memoranda to lawmakers. This is not the first time the mayor and the chancellor have tried to weaken or destroy the protections of tenure. Starting in 2003, they tried to use contract negotiations to limit city teachers’ state tenure protections. The mayor and the chancellor specifically sought to eliminate the requirement that an independent arbitrator had to decide if a tenured teacher — one who had completed a three-year probationary period — should be disciplined or fired.
Despite an agreement last spring between Gov. Spitzer and the Legislature in last year’s budget negotiations that student test data could factor into tenure decisions only with respect to how teachers used that data to shape their instruction, the mayor and chancellor pulled out every stop in their failed effort to reverse that decision.
In March, Klein was in Albany importuning the state Legislature to withdraw new tenure language that clarified last spring’s agreement. Joined at the time by school board members from Syracuse, Rochester and elsewhere, the schools chancellor claimed that the pending language would make it harder for administrators to deny teachers tenure.
“This is a critical issue to our city,” Joel Klein said at his Albany press conference. “We ought to have a meaningful, robust tenure process.”
From April 1 to April 8, more than 7,000 UFT members sent faxes to state legislators urging them to support the proposed tenure clarification that explicitly barred tying tenure to student test scores and to protect teachers’ rights to a fair tenure process.
Bloomberg and Klein charged that the clarifying language would dilute local control and hamstring management in revising the tenure process. They preferred what they called “value-added assessment,” or using student score growth on standardized tests as a basis for judging a teacher’s classroom effectiveness. [See the Insight column on page 7 for more on value-added measurement.]
And tenure, as Klein contended in an April 3 letter to the legislature, gives teachers “what amounts to lifetime job security.”
For Weingarten, that argument was nonsense.
“It’s spurious to think that fair tenure decisions can be based on how a teacher's students do on high-stakes tests,” she argued. “Look how many variables go into student achievement and how inexact the test results are. Also, most teachers don't have classes that are tested, so they will only end up discouraging young educators from teaching middle school math or English or 4th and 5th grades.”
Weingarten cited a school’s resources, class size and the availability of special education among the variables beyond a teacher’s control that affect student learning. Also part of the mix is the performance of early-grade teachers, student mobility, student attendance and parent support, she noted.
“And then there are the technical limitations of the available data and the quality of the standardized tests that make it impossible to isolate the ‘effects’ of an individual teacher,” Weingarten said.
She also reminded Klein that tenure does not equal “lifetime job security,” but only guarantees due process when administrators want to discipline staff.
“State law grants tenure rights, and the mayor and chancellor have strewn a paper trail of relentlessly trying to dilute those rights,” she said.
The core point, Weingarten insisted, is that teachers shouldn’t be evaluated on test scores, but assessed on how they use test scores and other data to adjust their teaching to help students improve.
“This enlightened approach is akin to judging doctors on how they use the results of blood tests, X-rays and the like to prescribe a course of treatment,” she said.