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Schools Chancellor Joel Klein wants teachers to sign up to be guinea pigs in a national study on teacher evaluations–and the UFT is backing him up.

In an email sent tonight, Klein and UFT president Michael Mulgrew asked city teachers to volunteer for a new Gates Foundation study that will test methods of evaluating teachers.

The study comes at a time when policymakers are calling for changes in the way teachers are evaluated. The Obama administration is pushing states to judge teachers based on student test scores. But the city teachers’ union last year lobbied the state to ban that practice, at least in teacher tenure decisions.

This study, however, has the union’s wholehearted support because it will begin with measures rooted in classroom practices. Mulgrew told GothamSchools he thought the project was a “fantastic endeavor” that could convince teachers to accept new forms of evaluations.

“It takes the politics out of what’s being measured,” UFT president Michael Mulgrew said. “Teachers are very frustrated with the political debate. They are always saying, ‘why don’t you just come into the classroom?’ That’s what this is doing.” (more…)

City principals rated more teachers unsatisfactory this year than they have since at least 2005, suggesting that the Bloomberg administration’s efforts to escort more struggling teachers out of the system may be bearing some fruit.

Principals gave the scarlet-letter rating to 1,554 teachers this year, up from 981 in the 2005-2006 school year, data provided by the city Department of Education show. Both the number and percentage of teachers rated unsatisfactory rose during that period, and the rise occurred for both tenured and non-tenured teachers, city figures show.

Even with the rise, the percentage of teachers rated unsatisfactory remains low. About 2% of teachers, both tenured and without tenure, received what teachers call “U” ratings this year.

Ann Forte, a schools spokeswoman, sent us the figures this afternoon.

The rise follows a concerted effort by school officials to make it easier for principals to terminate poorly performing teachers, including a new group of lawyers assigned to targeting struggling teachers, called the Teacher Performance Unit. Rating a teacher unsatisfactory is often the first step toward removing him from the school system. (more…)

Will Obama officials succeed in their mission to use the Race to the Top fund to re-write state education laws? The state of Indiana, where a recent down-to-the-wire budget session featured a teacher-evaluation mini drama, offers some clues.

The drama began with pressure from the Obama administration to repeal a law banning the use of student test scores in teacher evaluations. Alarmed, state education officials lobbied the state legislature, and lawmakers acted, inserting a repeal of the law into the state’s budget.

But mere hours before the new budget passed, lawmakers at the state House removed the repeal at the request of the teachers’ union. The final budget includes a roundabout compromise allowing districts to use student data to assess teachers — but only in cases where federal grant money requires it.

“We had a clear message from the secretary [Arne Duncan] that we were putting our ability to compete for the Race to the Top Funds at risk,” a spokesman for the Indiana Department of Education, Cam Savage, said. State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett has communicated frequently with the federal education department about Indiana’s strengths in the competition for grant funds, Savage said.

Bans on using student test scores to assess teachers seem to be the next group of laws on the Department of Education’s watch list. States and districts already took note after Obama administration officials used the threat of denying Race to the Top funds to push against state laws limiting the spread of charter schools. Lawmakers in at least eight states have passed or introduced legislation since the end of May to lift their charter caps. (more…)

A group of 28 teachers, administrators, and policymakers have taken on a lofty summer assignment: They plan to come up with an ideal teacher evaluation system, or at least a report explaining the “essential elements” of one, and to do it by the fall.

The effort is the latest in a string of reports and announcements focusing on the way teachers are evaluated, a process that has been called broken by everyone from teachers union officials to The New Teacher Project, a nonprofit created by Michelle Rhee. A report by The New Teacher Project called evaluation systems “largely meaningless,” and the American Federation of Teachers union has launched an internal working group to build its own recommendations for what comprises a fair evaluation system.

A novel nonprofit called Hope Street Group is behind the effort to involve educators in the debate. Created in 2003 as a volunteer-only experiment, Hope Street Group now has a full-time staff that works to build “coalitions of the reasonable” around domestic policy questions by gathering diverse groups of people to solve them together. (more…)

A new report is urging school districts across the country to beef up their methods of evaluating teachers, which the report describes as so slipshod as to be “largely meaningless.” The report, by a nonprofit group that has clashed with teachers unions in the past, describes the poor evaluations as “just one symptom of a larger, more fundamental crisis—the inability of our schools to assess instructional performance accurately or to act on this information in meaningful ways.”

The report goes on:

This inability not only keeps schools from dismissing consistently poor performers, but also prevents them from recognizing excellence among top-performers or supporting growth among the broad plurality of hardworking teachers who operate in the middle of the performance spectrum. Instead, school districts default to treating all teachers as essentially the same, both in terms of effectiveness and need for development.

The report, conducted by The New Teacher Project, a nonprofit founded by the lightning-rod D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, calls on districts to develop more robust teacher evaluation systems that reward successful teachers and easily identify less successful teachers.

The report comes amid a growing push to improve teaching quality across the country. President Obama has said that teachers who are not helping students learn should be removed from classrooms, and even the national American Federation of Teachers union is working internally to build a new method of evaluating teacher quality.

The report bases its findings on surveys of thousands of teachers and administrators across four states and 12 school districts, plus a scouring of the districts’ evaluation records. New York City was not one of the districts studied. (more…)

It’s one thing for Randi Weingarten, the teachers union president, to say she’s behind President Obama’s reform mission to track teacher performance — as long as he gets the details right. It’s another for her to lay out what those details are.

That’s what her national union, the American Federation of Teachers, did today, by way of a press release from Anderson, Indiana. Yeah, I’ve never heard of Anderson either, but apparently teachers there passed a program that will mentor struggling teachers — and give evaluations that point out their strengths and weaknesses.

“PAR is an example of an innovative, successful union-led education reform,” said Dal Lawrence. “It shows just how inaccurate the stereotype is that teacher unions are anti-reform or anti-accountability.”

Here’s the full release, which is from the Anderson union but was sent to me by the national press shop: (more…)