The UFT Delegate Assembly passed a resolution at its Nov. 20 meeting to make it a priority in its negotiations for the next teachers’ contract to have a much larger menu of options for the local measures of student learning in the teacher evaluation system.

Twenty percent of a teacher’s year-end rating is supposed to be based on local student achievement measures. But because the Department of Education has been slow to create performance assessment options. The state exam scores of students are counting for 40 percent of many teachers’ evaluations.

“The local 20 percent should never have been test scores, but the performance of the child during the 10 months from September through June,” said UFT Assistant Secretary LeRoy Barr, who introduced the resolution. “We’re calling for the strengthening of that 20 percent, taking into account multiple measures, so it’s a professional dialogue to show the work teachers are doing.”

The resolution also called for the UFT to advocate in negotiations for an immediate review for any teacher who is rated ineffective on both the state and local student measures and ineffective overall to determine if the learning measures were “appropriate, fair and reliable.”

The delegates also passed the following resolutions at the November and December meetings:

To uphold the rights of teachers to create their own lesson plans and to protect them from supervisors’ intent on dictating lesson-plan formats;

To ban standardized testing in prekindergarten through 2nd grade;

To call on New York City to direct fewer tax dollars to Wall Street and more toward public schools and a fair contract for teachers;

To honor the legacy of Nelson Mandela in the fight for justice and equal opportunity for all; and

To call on New York State to halt implementation of the contract with inBloom for collecting and storing sensitive student data.

— Linda Ocasio