GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

The teachers union is threatening to curb its efforts toward new teacher evaluations if the Department of Education doesn’t remind principals again that the old evaluation system is still in place.

The threat comes at the end of an angry letter sent by UFT Secretary Michael Mendel sent to the DOE yesterday. In the letter, Mendel says that UFT members report some principals are preparing to use the Danielson Framework, an evaluation model that the DOE favors, to rate teachers — even though the union hasn’t agreed to the change.

City officials dispute the charge, saying that Danielson is being used only in ways that the union has approved: in most schools, to give teachers information to help them improve. The model is being used to rate teachers only in 33 “persistently low-achieving” schools where the city and UFT agreed to new evaluations in order to land federal school improvement funds, the officials say.

But despite a joint reminder from the UFT, DOE, and principals union last month, the union is charging that some principals still haven’t gotten the message that the Danielson rubric shouldn’t be used to rate teachers. At a meeting for members of the UFT’s governing body last night, UFT officials said they had obtained documents showing that some networks, the groups that support principals, had devised evaluation checklists based on Danielson’s criteria, according to a union member who was there. The officials did not share the documents, the union member said.

Mendel told GothamSchools that teachers have reported getting official reprimands based on Danielson-influenced observations and that many administrators do not seem to have had adequate training before starting to test the new model.

Mendel said the union won’t break state law and pull out of negotiations altogether. But he said confusion and the sense that some principals are pushing Danielson prematurely have made the union less willing to collaborate with the DOE. (more…)