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Now that the tempest in a teapot is over, perhaps someone might be interested in my view of teacher evaluations.  It is part of the larger “dilemma of discretion” in public hiring, firing, and contracting.
 
Give public managers the same discretion private sector managers have, and put public employees in the same position the rest of us are in, and you open the door to hiring, firing, and contracting decisions based on political favoritism, nepotism, cronyism, tribalism, whatever.  Which is why the civil service system and low-bidder rules were created.
 
But those rules and union contracts provide a legalistic playground for the incompetent, shirkers, and predatory contractors.  It should be noted that the original civil service system had no restraints on firing, on the theory that if they couldn’t replace good workers with cronies, managers wouldn’t fire them.
 
The UFT has been totally hypocritical on the dilemma of discretion.  It argued against the “biased” judgment of principals, and brought the replacement of the incompetent and grifters to a standstill.  But when Bloomberg fell for the bait and went for an “objective” measure like the change in standardized test scores, suddenly the UFT was against that.
 
In any event, they seem to have settled on a hybrid mess.
 
So what would I have done about the dilemma of discretion?  I would have put discretion back, and made the relationship between the teacher and principal voluntary.  No complicated scheme can match the motivation provided by the fact that a good teacher can move to another school if not well treated, and a bad teacher can simply not be invited back at the end of a school year if they haven’t done the job.  A teacher not retained would have the summer to catch on somewhere else.
 
In addition, to prevent higher paid experienced teachers being released just to save money, I would have required that severance pay be taken out of a school budget, severance pay that would grow greater the more years of experience a teacher had.  The principal would really have to prefer a green teacher, and a smaller budget temporarily, to get rid of someone.  Finally, in lieu of severance, I would have suggested a discount to another principal who took non-renewed teacher on, to make sure they got another look.
 
Perhaps the new system will allow NYC to get rid of the worst teachers, and perhaps it won’t.  Either way the city will be inhibited from hiring qualified replacements and paying them well for a generation, because of the cost of the retroactive pension deals.  Which is why I don’t get hot and bothered about bureaucratic messes like this.

Really interesting stuff.  My thoughts:

1. I think the incentives involved with “public managers” are so poor that a better solution is to avoid “public management” when possible, e.g. charter schools.  To the extent we insist upon “public management”, we should give effective managers near-full discretion and focus government oversight on accountability for managers, rather than the teachers that report to them.  (My understanding is that the system has so many highly ineffective principals that we couldn’t move to a system that gives near-full discretion to all principals immediately.  Rather, we should give this discretion only to certain principals and increase that number over time.)

2. I agree with you (or what I think you believe) that allegedly-ineffective teachers shouldn’t be terminated by the DOE but only by the particular school they work for — this would allow them to find a job with another principal if they can (very similar to how the ATR system works in certain respects but with a limited time period before they are taken off payroll).  

3. Finally, the concept that school management should be discouraged from considering the cost of the teachers makes little sense from the standpoint of creating the best schools possible.  I understand the desire to pay all experienced teachers more, but it can potentially have a huge cost for school quality.  If we want to pay all experienced teachers more, we should handle this outside of school budgets and let principals focus decisions as to what is best for the overall effectiveness of the school.   

This reminds me of more UFT misdirection. They argued that teaching is collective, so no individual teacher should be rewarded or dismissed.  If the school as a whole is a bad, close the school.  Until the city started closing schools.  Then suddenly that was unfair to individual teachers.

 
Basically, the UFT has never provided a consistent principle other than this.  We get paid, take our dollars, and go shopping, and if you workers don’t satisfy us we’ll go elsewhere and you’ll lose your job.  So worker hard, and accept lower pay and benefits.  But we take your dollar, so you have no choice, and shouldn’t lose our jobs, no matter what.  No matter how much people hear carp about “bankers,” the UFT has also managed to really tick off the serfs, by treating them as such.