54.0°,
Mostly Cloudy Bellmore-Merrick school officials shrug off Cuomo’s threat
Administrators aren’t worried about implementing new teacher evaluations
Officials in Bellmore-Merrick’s five school districts say they aren’t worried that Governor Cuomo is threatening to withhold a state aid increase if they do not agree on a new, tougher teacher evaluation system within a month.
Four of the districts –– the Bellmore, Merrick and North Bellmore elementary districts and the Bellmore-Merrick Central High School District –– have already instituted the new system. Meanwhile, officials in the North Merrick Elementary District, which has not implemented it, say they weren’t expecting an aid increase anyway.
David Feller, North Merrick’s superintendent, said, “There were lots of problems inherent in the [state] law” mandating the evaluation system.
Race to the Top, President Obama’s signature education program, requires that states adopt new teacher evaluation systems or risk losing federal education aid. New York stands to lose $700 million in federal money if an evaluation system is not adopted. A number of districts have balked at implementing the system, which they are responsible for developing and instituting at the local level. Too often, Feller said, boards of education and local teachers’ unions cannot agree on specific terms of new evaluations. That’s the case in North Merrick.
How the system works
The new system rates teachers as highly effective, effective, developing or ineffective. A teacher who is deemed ineffective for two straight years can be fired.
Evaluations must be based on a 100-point scale. Sixty points must be based on locally developed rubrics, which must receive state Education Department approval. At minimum, the rubrics must include two classroom visits by supervising administrators. Twenty points must based on students’ scores on year-end state tests. (The state has yet to disclose how it will assign those points.) And 20 points were supposed to have been based on local tests, given at the beginning and end of the school year, according to the law passed in May 2010 by the state Legislature mandating the new evaluation system.
The state Board of Regents, however, later allowed districts to base up to 40 points of a teacher’s evaluation on state test scores, without the use of local tests.
