Principals meet at South Side High School to challenge teacher-evaluation plan

Continuing her outspoken opposition to New York state’s new teacher and principal evaluation system, which links educator ratings to student test scores, South Side High School Principal Dr. Carol Burris organized a meeting of 100 of her colleagues from the metropolitan area Monday afternoon. The gathering kicked off a campaign to alert the public and legislators to what educators describe as the weaknesses and costs of the Annual Professional Performance Review, which has been championed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo and state Education Commissioner John King.

Signifying their unity on the issue, the principals began by posing for a group photograph on Fireman’s Field, adjacent to South Side High. They plan to use the photo as part of an advertisement that will be placed in the Legislative Gazette and other publications to illuminate the evaluation system’s problems. The message of the campaign will be that the APPR is flawed, that it is too expensive and that it will not serve the best interests of the state’s public-school students.

“A teacher-evaluation system that has not been piloted and relies heavily on student test scores is a poor indicator of teacher quality,” said Burris. “Students and communities will lose, while consultants and other vendors will profit from the over-testing of students.”

As a first step, the principals are calling on legislators to make three modifications to APPR regulations in the state budget: apply the confidentiality provisions of Civil Rights Law 50-a to teachers and principals, preventing teacher ratings from being made public; adjust the scoring ranges so that the 40 percent of an educator’s rating that is attributed to test scores cannot be the deciding factor in his or her evaluation; and use the APPR initially as a pilot program, gauging its effectiveness before fully implementing it.

The principals contend that a government system of evaluation cannot accurately rate teacher performance. They reject the premise that standardized exams should play a central role in determining individual teacher effectiveness, pointing to research that has concluded that students’ scores are not a reliable indicator of a teacher’s skills.

“Teaching to the test,” they say, limits the development of students’ talents and is potentially detrimental to their learning. The principals are also critical of the redirection of limited state funds from schools to testing companies, consultants, trainers and lawyers in an effort to develop an “unproven” evaluation system that has no track record of improving student achievement.

Monday’s meeting was the culmination of a four-month effort to capture the attention of Albany policymakers and the State Education Department. Burris started the movement when she co-authored a letter with Principal Sean Feeney of the Wheatley School on Nov. 2, outlining principals’ objections to the APPR. Some 1,400 of their colleagues — more than 30 percent of all principals in New York state — and 6,050 supporters (superintendents, school board members, teachers and parents as well as former Education Commissioner Dr. Thomas Sobol) signed the letter, which attracted national media, and the initiative was the focus of a story in The New York Times.

Although the principals say they agree that educator evaluation should be improved, they are dismayed by the rapid implementation, high cost, unfinished nature and lack of research associated with the APPR system. They also say they are concerned about the growing number of standardized tests that are being imposed on students in part to measure their teachers’ performance.

A spokesman for Cuomo, Matthew Wing, responded to the news of the educators’ ad campaign by sending the Herald a list of supporters of the plan, which include U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, TNTP (formerly The New Teacher Project), the Education Trust Statement, the Boards of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES), Democrats for Education Reform, the New York Campaign for Achievement Now, Educators 4 Excellence, Students For Education Reform and Opportunities for a Better Tomorrow.

Wing also included a statement from Desmond Ryan, executive director of the Association for a Better Long Island, supporting Cuomo’s commitment to creating accountability in schools. “Governor Andrew Cuomo has rightly been pushing for education to be about putting our students first and demanding better performance from our schools,” the statement read. “Like the governor and over 70 percent of New Yorkers, we believe that implementing meaningful teacher evaluations is the first step to reforming our schools. For years Long Island taxpayers have helped fund our education bureaucracy without getting the best results, which is why New York spends more than any state in the nation on education but is only 38th in graduation rates. Governor Cuomo’s push for establishing real teacher evaluations is the first step to changing that trend.”

King could not be reached for comment.

This is not the first time that Burris, who was named 2010 Educator of the Year by the School Administrators Association of New York State, has spoken out against proposed educational reforms. Comments that she posted on a Washington Post website, detailing her concerns with federal education initiatives included in the Race to the Top program, led to two conversations with Duncan last summer, when he called her after reading them.

“We’ve been trying for a while to get it changed,” Burris said last November of the teacher-evaluation system. “They’re not hearing us, so we’re taking it public. I’m hopeful this will make a difference. If no one in the field believes in the system, how can it be effective?”