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.
The evaluation agreement is in accordance with New York State Education Law 3012-d, which requires that educators are evaluated based on measures of student learning and measures of educator practice, as well as Board of Regents Regulations that require that educators cannot be evaluated based on student performance on grade 3-8 English Language Arts (ELA) and math State exams until the 2019-2020 school year. By using multiple measures in our assessments of student learning and educator practice, we will get a more complete evaluation of educator quality.
“As a lifelong educator, I understand that the most important work happens in the classroom, and that’s why we are so committed to an evaluation system that develops teacher and principal practice and leads to better instruction and outcomes for our students,” said Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña. “Today’s agreement builds on our work to improve and increase professional development opportunities for educators while holding them accountable, and I look forward to having a system in place that better serves our students.”
“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,” said Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers. “With this agreement, we are starting to replace tests with real work that captures what a student learns over the course of a school year.”
“We are pleased that we have been able to work collaboratively with the Department of Education, within the constraints of the law, to come to terms on a plan that is focused on school leader development,” said CSA President Ernest Logan. “The goal must be continuous improvement of our practice, and we feel that with proper implementation this can be another step in that direction. We look forward with optimism as we remain focused on educating our city’s 1.1 million students.”
The new, rigorous evaluations will foster better educator development without placing an additional burden on schools – as schools will be able to select assessments from an expanded range of student assessment categories (known as Measures of Student Learning, or MOSL), and the observation process (known as Measures of Teacher Practice, or MOTP; or Measures of Leadership Practice, MOLP) will remain largely consistent.
Under the previous evaluation system, which was in accordance with New York State Education Law 3012-c, teachers and principal evaluations consisted of 40% Measures of Student Learning (MOSL) – including 20% based primarily on student performance on State exams and 20% based on student performance on local MOSL assessments – and 60% Measures of Teacher/Leadership Practice (MOTP/MOLP).
Starting this school year, the new evaluation system will combine the two categories, with a publicly available table that produces the “overall” rating a teacher or principal will receive based on their two ratings on MOSL and MOTP/MOLP. The MOSL will also no longer include student performance on 3-8 ELA and math State exams until 2019-2020.
As part of fostering better educator development and better measurement of classroom work, the City has begun developing additional assessments for teacher MOSL purposes. The assessments include additional performance-based assessments, new project based-learning assessments, additional progress monitoring assessments, and new student learning inventories – compilations of student work. These will build on existing assessments allowed for MOSL purposes that this administration has developed and continued to improve upon. As in years past, schools will be able to choose from a menu of assessments approved for use for MOSL to evaluate their teachers, and these new options will be available as early as 2017-18 in select grades and subjects in addition to existing assessments. The assessments are being developed by the DOE’s Office of Curriculum, Instruction & Professional Learning, in collaboration with the UFT.
While the observation process (MOTP) will remain largely consistent for teachers, the City is working to select a new rubric for principal observations (MOLP) by superintendents and Principal Leadership Facilitators. The CSA and the DOE will pilot two rubrics in the 2017-18 school year in two community school districts and at the schools supervised by two of the City’s high school superintendents, with one to be selected for citywide implementation as early as 2018-19.
The City, UFT, and CSA also agreed to apply for a waiver from the State’s requirement of having an independent evaluator observe all teachers and principals. This requirement would be costly and place an additional burden on schools and supervisors.
This agreement will be submitted to the State for review and pending State approval by December 31. Prior to being included in teacher and principal evaluations, new assessments for MOSL purposes and MOLP rubrics will also be subject to review and approval by the State. The DOE will support implementation at schools starting in January through superintendents’ offices and Field Support Centers.
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