To: The Honorable Andrew M. Cuomo Governor of New York State From: Amy R. Paulin Member of Assembly Date: February 10, 2015 Re: Education Reform Budget Bill As we discussed during our telephone conversation, I met with a group of superintendents from Westchester County school districts to solicit their feedback on your proposed reform agenda. They were uniformly very pleased with a number of your specific proposals, including: • the extension of the probationary period for teachers and principals to five years; • the streamlining of the Section 3020(a) disciplinary process; • the provision requiring the Commissioner of Education to revoke the teaching
certificate of a teacher convicted of a violent felony in which a child was a victim; and • the attempt to ensure that best practices in teacher and principal evaluation are
implemented consistently across the state. The one area in which they believe the proposal needs some refinement relates to ways in which it deals with professional development and the Annual Professional Performance Review (“APPR”): Mandated professional development: • The superintendents did not understand the reasoning behind the reduction to 100
hours from 175 hours (a number chosen because it is supported by scientific evidence)
of required professional development during each five-year period for holders of a
professional certificate (i.e., a teacher who applied for certification on or after
February 2, 2004 or a principal who applied for certification on or after September 2,
2007). Teachers and principals certified prior to those dates hold permanent
certification and are not required to complete any professional development under
current law or under the budget proposal. The superintendents would be comfortable
with the proposed reduction from 175 to 100 hours if all teachers and principals,
regardless of certification date, were required to complete 100 hours of professional
development every five years. • It is critical that superintendents of schools, who know what professional development
is required to accomplish district goals and understand the individual learning needs of
district staff, have the final authority to approve or disapprove the professional
development plans of district staff members. The State Education Department does
not have the knowledge of local courses and providers necessary to determine which
teacher education programs will satisfy the continuing education requirement.
• Superintendents must be permitted, as they are under current law, to include as
acceptable staff development not only formal teacher education programs but also
collaborative work among groups of teachers, or even an entire district staff, on staff
development days or at faculty meetings.
•
Because professional development activities move educators into higher salary ranges
under most teacher contracts, superintendents need authority to approve those
activities in order to ensure that mandated professional development hours result in
benefits to their districts. It would also be helpful to add language making clear that,
to the extent educators fill the continuing education requirement with formal courses,
the holder of the certificate, not the employing school district, is responsible for the
cost of those courses.
Eligibility for tenure: • The requirement that a teacher receive five consecutive years of “effective” scores in
order to be recommended for tenure could either extend the probationary period for
as long as necessary for an educator to receive the five consecutive ratings of
“effective” or lead him to abandon the effort to receive tenure. Superintendents,
who understand local conditions, should be permitted to exercise their professional
judgment to determine who should be recommended for tenure based on multiple
measures of effectiveness, not just on APPR scores.
• A score of “developing” should be viewed as a normal step in the career of an
educator. The purpose of a “developing” score should be to allow newcomers to the
profession—or to a course or grade level--to develop their professional knowledge and
pedagogical skills in order to become the highly effective teachers and principals our
students deserve.
Use of standardized tests: • The superintendents with whom I met agree that it is useful to measure growth from
one school year to the next in what children know and are able to do. They believe
that objections to this subcomponent result primarily from the fact that it gives undue
weight to the results of one test on one day in a child’s life.
• A better-designed APPR, and one that I believe would likely receive support both from
superintendents and from NYSUT, would look at three years of test results, on a rolling
basis, in order to account for dramatic changes in class composition, changes in the
courses or grades taught by a teacher, or similar variables that would make reliance
on a single year’s test unreliable. Other measures of educator effectiveness: • Observations by an outside “expert” would provide the appearance of objectivity, but
would not provide consistency given the wide range of evaluators that districts could
choose. Further, an independent evaluator would not be able to evaluate fairly what
goes on in an unfamiliar classroom or to provide useful follow-up to teachers.
Observations by a building principal are followed by conversations about areas in
which improvement is needed, the development and implementation of appropriate
professional development plans, and subsequent formal and informal observations and
monitoring of classroom performance. Any teacher can put on a good show for 30 minutes; the difficult work is in continuously improving the daily interaction between a
teacher and specific students, each of whom brings to school a unique background and
challenges.
•
•
This subcomponent should include not just observations, but also other important
measures of teacher effectiveness such as use of a class website, communication with
parents, availability to students outside class hours, participation in professional
development activities, collaboration with colleagues and leadership within a building.
Only a principal will be in a position to observe the quality of those professional
practices on a daily basis. Building principals, as the educational leaders of their
buildings, should have the authority and professional responsibility to observe,
evaluate, and work on professional development with the teachers under their
supervision.
Requiring observations by independent evaluators would impose an expensive and
unfunded mandate on school districts. This subcomponent would require school
districts to choose among three alternatives, two of which would require the
expenditure of taxpayer dollars and one of which would require pulling administrators
from their regular assignments. This additional expense is unfair to school districts
that are already struggling to keep expenditures under the tax cap.
The generally positive feedback that I received suggests that, with the kinds of adjustments indicated above, your reform agenda could receive both support from superintendents and less opposition from NYSUT.