Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña, UFT President Michael Mulgrew, and CSA Executive Vice President Mark Cannizzaro announced an agreement on new teacher and principal evaluations starting in the 2016–17 school year. The agreement reached emphasizes our shared goal of a system focused on improved educational outcomes for students and will continue to foster rigorous and fair evaluations that better develop educators’ practice and measure their work serving the City’s 1.1 million students. Teachers and principals will continue to be evaluated on the four-point Highly Effective/Effective/Developing/Ineffective (HEDI) scale, which is more differentiated and allows more targeted support and professional development in comparison to the previous Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory scale.

UFT President Michael Mulgrew issued the following statement:

“Today, we wrapped up some important unfinished business on teacher evaluation. In 2015, we were able to get state lawmakers to make some positive changes to the evaluation law. The next step was to negotiate with the city Department of Education to bring the city’s teacher evaluation system into alignment with the new state law. We went into those negotiations saying that any agreement must reduce the impact of standardized test scores, and we achieved that goal. The new system, when fully implemented, will include more authentic student learning measures — from essays and projects to demonstrations of proficiency in physical education and the arts — that genuinely demonstrate what we do as teachers and what our students are learning. Whatever the assessments chosen to measure student learning, they will carry less weight because the new matrix used to determine final ratings focuses the final rating on each teacher’s strength.

Our students are more than a score on a standardized test, and our teachers are more than the sum of their students’ test results. We need thoughtful measures of student progress –from essays and projects to the monitoring of learning growth in particular areas. We hope that by the time the current state moratorium on the use of standardized tests for teachers’ evaluations expires, Albany will adopt our approach as a model for the rest of the state.”