In Albany today, Chancellor Dennis Walcott suggested that the city would prefer the consequences — widely assumed to be an effort by Cuomo to use his budgeting process to impose new evaluations without the consent of local teachers unions

“I think the law, and the governor is so right about this, is broken,” Walcott said. “It’s not going to work as constructed.”

Walcott would not comment on the status of negotiations with the United Federation of Teachers but said that the issue dividing them — the appeals process for teachers rated ineffective — had not been solved.

Cuomo, who has said the 2010 evaluation law was “destined to fail,” seemed willing but not eager to expend political capital on changing the law when he delivered his budget address. He said he preferred districts and their unions to agree on a “protocol” for new evaluations within 30 days.

But, Cuomo said, “If they can’t do that then we’ll do it for them.”

Walcott’s comments reflect pessimism about the state of negotiations in the city just days after UFT President Michael Mulgrew praised Cuomo for his “intervention” to induce the city back to the table. Walcott said he was in Albany to lobby them about changing the law.

Meanwhile, there has been no news about the status of negotiations between the state teachers union, NYSUT, and the hundreds of other school districts required to put new evaluations in place. Ten days ago, the union and the state had seemed to be on the verge of settling their differences.

The study measured teachers against the criteria in Charlotte Danielson's Framework for Effective Teaching rubric, which is used in New York as a tool for observing teachers. Teachers scored better at classroom management than they did on measures of higher-order instructional challenges, such as asking productive questions.

A historic look inside the nation’s classrooms, including some in New York City, painted a bleak picture, according to a report released by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation today.

The second installment of the foundation’s ambitious Measures of Effective Teaching study, the report focuses on the picture of teaching yielded by five different classroom observation tools. It also scrutinizes those tools themselves, concluding that they are valuable as a way to help teachers improve but only useful as evaluation tools when combined with measures of student learning known as value-added scores.

The conclusion is a strong endorsement of the Obama administration’s approach to improving teaching by implementing new evaluations of teachers that draw on both observations and value-added measures. New York State took this approach to overhauling its evaluation system when it applied for federal Race to the Top funding.

Among the group of five observation tools the foundation studied is the rubric now being piloted in New York City classrooms as part of stalled efforts to implement the changes to teacher evaluation, Charlotte Danielson’s Framework for Effective Teaching.

Through all five lenses, instruction looked mediocre in an overwhelming majority of more than 1,000 classrooms studied, the report concludes. There were some bright spots. Many teachers were scored relatively well for the aspect of teaching known as “classroom management” — keeping students well-behaved, making sure they are engaged.

But teachers often fell short when it came to other elements of teaching, such as facilitating discussions, speaking precisely about concepts, and carefully modeling skills that students need to master. These higher-order skill sets, the report notes, are crucial in order for students to meet the raised standards outlined in the Common Core.

The study is the most expansive known examination of instruction in the U.S., reviewing more than 1,000 teachers for this report and nearly 3,000 for the study. Its lead authors are the economists Thomas Kane, of Harvard, and Douglas Staiger of Dartmouth, although more than a dozens researchers contributed to the study.

The evaluations were conducted by trained evaluators, who watched clips from videotape of more than 1,000 teachers around the country and then judged whether the teaching exhibited certain traits outlined in the observation tools.

One complicated aspect of the study is that it doesn’t just ask what the observation tools have to say about teaching; it also asks whether those observation tools are good ways to measure teaching at all. The question is crucial to the contentious teacher quality debate.

Motivated by the Obama administration’s focus on improving teaching by improving the way teachers are evaluated, the teacher quality debate has been dominated by a search for a better evaluation tool. The idea is that if school districts could have a better way to sort teachers, then they could increase quality by rewarding those who are most effective and improving or removing those who are less effective.

The study offers a qualified endorsement of the five observation tools it studied, saying that they should be one of multiple evaluation measures but that no one observation tool should be a sole measure. While the study found that all five observation tools had a positive association with student achievement as measured by value-added scores, the associations were not perfect.

And the tools’ reliability was relatively low — lower, in some cases, than the famously volatile judgments of value-added measures. When different observers used the same tool to evaluate the same teacher, they sometimes gave very different scores.

But the report does endorse using the observation tools in combination with value-added measures, as New York’s new evaluation system does. When researchers combined multiple observation tools’ judgments of teachers together — and then combined those with the teachers’ value-added scores, the result was a view of a teacher that was more able to predict future student achievement, the report says.

A final complication worth noting is that the study’s ultimate arbiter of what makes a good evaluation tool is itself under heavy scrutiny. That arbiter is a teacher’s value-added score, an estimate that attempts to extrapolate the amount of student learning for which a teacher can be held responsible, excluding other factors such as a student’s family income level.

A study that was the subject of a story in today’s New York Times found that value-added scores indeed are useful predictors not only of student achievement, but other measures of life success. Researchers have cast doubts on value-added measures’ validity, citing a host of concerns from the measures’ volatility to whether a high value-added score reflects true student learning or simply effective test prep.

Though an overhaul of teacher evaluation in New York has been stalled by the failure of teachers unions and school districts to agree on how to conduct it, both the New York City teachers union and the Department of Education agreed to participate in the Gates Foundation study when it launched in 2009. The union helped recruit teachers to join, and ultimately, teachers from about 100 schools signed up to have their lessons videotaped and analyzed.

“It takes the politics out of what’s being measured,” UFT president Michael Mulgrew said when the union first agreed to participate. “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.”

Since then, the politics over teacher quality has grown even more heated.

Last summer, a GothamSchools reader who had worked in a school piloting the Danielson evaluation said it was very hard for teachers to be rated “effective.”

Danielson’s “Framework for Teaching” has been adopted for evaluation purposes at 33 struggling schools. But the union was receiving reports from chapter leaders that principals in at least one other network of schools were using a checklist based on the model to evaluate teachers.

When the UFT obtained a copy of one of the checklists, it shared it with Danielson herself to get her thoughts.

Danielson was troubled by the checklists and disapproved of them, union officials said. With that endorsement, UFT Secretary Michael Mendel wrote a letter to the DOE and demanded an immediate end to the practice. He even threatened to cut off negotiations toward a larger evaluation deal that is required by the end of the school year.

In a follow-up phone interview last week, I asked Danielson about the checklists in question while she was out on the road pitching her framework to teachers and administrators in Oregon and Washington. (This week, Danielson is in Chile, where schools are using a model based on her framework.)

Danielson was hesitant to insert herself into an union-district battle, but did confirm that she disapproved of the checklist shown to her. The checklist she saw, Danielson said, was inappropriate because of the way it was filled out. It indicated that the observer had already begun evaluating a teacher while in the classroom observation. She said that’s a fundamental no-no.

“When we train principals to observe classrooms, we urge them to take notes about what they see,” Danielson said. “Only later, when they have time to look at their notes and the different components, could they decide which level of performance is represented for each of the components.”

So far the UFT has provided one example of the alleged abuses, but it has declined to share even a redacted version of document with the public. “We’ve decided it would be inappropriate to share particular instances,” said UFT’s Dick Riley. The DOE also declined to provide its version of the document.

As we documented on the day before school started, all principals, not just in the 33 schools, are being encouraged to use the Danielson Framework as a way to conduct more classroom observations, a DOE spokesman said. But they won’t be allowed to evaluate teachers according to the framework until a deal approving it is in place.

In a new post in our Community section, John Galvin, the assistant principal at I.S. 318 in Brooklyn, targets the group’s requirement that people who attend certain E4E events sign the group’s “Declaration of Principles and Beliefs.” Galvin writes:

If you want to sponsor events that are closed to the public and only open to your members, that is your right. However, if you want to engage the public in debate and to test your ideas to the widest audience possible, then it makes no sense. It raises questions about the motives of your group and the commitment of your group to engage in honest debate with those that agree and disagree with you.

Galvin describes attempting to sign up to attend the group’s panel last week on teacher evaluation, and then being disappointed to find out that, in order to RSVP, he had to click a button indicating that he signed on to the declaration. (Many of our commenters logged similar complaints.)

In an e-mail, Educators 4 Excellence founder Sydney Morris explained that teachers become members of the group by signing the statement. She defended the group’s right to hold private members-only meetings.

Her full statement:

E4E is, and has always been, a membership organization and some of our events are for members only. A teacher can become a member by signing our Declaration of Principles and Beliefs, which we believe unites teachers with many perspectives around a common starting point for a dialogue. In order to provide a conversational atmosphere at our events and ensure that as many voices as possible are heard, we sometimes have to limit the numbers of attendees we have and we offer those seats as a benefit to our members. As I’m sure you noticed, this particular event was standing room only.

“Okay, I’m going to cut it off,” said moderator Evan Stone, following a crescendo of interruptions that built up for nearly five minutes. Stone is a founder of Educators 4 Excellence, which hosted the event. “Clearly, we’ve broken a lot of norms of respectability.”

The interruptions came from at least three people in an audience of more than 100, most of them teachers. They began in response to Stone’s handling of the panel and then escalated into an airing of grievances that targeted Educators 4 Excellence and its teacher evaluation recommendations, released yesterday, which the protesters said did not reflect their views.

“I am a teacher and I have never been asked what I thought,” yelled out Stuart Kramer Kaplan, one of the protesters.

(Click here for video of the exchange.)

Educators 4 Excellence is an advocacy group of teachers who hold shared views on education policy, many of which — like the group’s position against seniority-based layoffs — challenge traditional teachers union orthodoxy. Led by Teach For America alumni who are no longer in the classroom, the group has quickly gained a high profile with the support of national philanthropists, including the Gates Foundation.

The group organized the panel as part of its efforts to influence the teacher evaluation debate. Panelists included Shael Polakow-Suransky,  the senior deputy chancellor at the Department of Education, and Leo Casey, the vice president of the United Federation of Teachers. Their respective organizations have not been able to hammer out an agreement on details of a teacher evaluation system. The panel also included a teacher, principal, and education consultant.

Earlier in the day, E4E released its own set of recommendations, which served as a major talking point for much of the evening.

For at least the first 90 minutes, those efforts created a productive dialogue. Polakow-Suransky and Casey engaged in a polite and wide-ranging conversation about best practices for improving instructional performance.

They reached consensus on the urgency for establishing new evaluation guidelines as well as the importance of more frequent classroom observations by school leaders and colleagues.

Polakow-Suransky stopped short of endorsing a recommendation by Educators 4 Excellence that teachers should be observed by outside consultants. He said that the estimated costs would reach upwards of $75 million annually. The cost of consulting contracts is a major target of City Council members pushing to avoid teacher layoffs by suggesting other cuts.

Towards the end of the evening, a brief dispute between Polakow-Suransky and Casey seemed to trigger the outbursts.

After Casey argued for keeping lawyers out of negotiations, Polakow-Suransky swiped back, reminding him that hours earlier the UFT filed a temporary restraining order to prevent the DOE from moving forward with any closure or co-location plans. (We’ll have more on the restraining order later today.)

“One arrives at litigation when the education process breaks down,” replied Casey.

Kramer and Michael Friedman, a union chapter leader, then intervened and went on to criticize the research methods of E4E.

“They didn’t ask us for our opinions. The leadership just came up with a position without any other teachers,” Friedman said.

Two research surveys were sent to E4E members by the policy team, according to Stone.

With the floor now unintentionally open to public comment, many audience members jumped to the defense of E4E and the panel.

“You have to leave. You have to go,” said one man, to applause.

After the panel broke, organizers downplayed it as an isolated incident. Others said they were shocked.

“I thought it was totally inappropriate,” said Emily Bisso, a teacher at Ocean Hill Collegiate, a Brooklyn school within the Uncommon Schools network.

A group of young charter school teachers said that they had mixed feelings about the panel, but agreed that it ended on a low note.

“I guarantee that was just pent-up frustration,” said Miatta Massaley, a teacher at  Harlem Success Academy 5 charter school. “It was inappropriate how they went about it, but they had legitimate concerns.”

“That’s exactly the opposite of what we teach our kids,” said Jarell Lee, a teacher at the Excellence Boys Charter School in Bedford Stuyvesant. “We teach them that there are better strategies to handle situations where they feel frustrated.”

Correction: The originally published version of this article characterized the majority of the audience as being charter school teachers. The report was based on interviews with teachers who identified as charter school teachers. According to a survey conducted by people who RSVP’d for the event, the characterization is not accurate. Ten charter school teachers attended the event, according to the survey, out of a total of 117 people.

John King (left), the new state education commissioner, meeting with a teacher in February.

John King is New York’s new state education commissioner, after a unanimous vote by the state Board of Regents this morning.

King, the deputy state education commissioner, replaces David Steiner, who announced he was planning to leave at the end of the academic year in April. The announcement was a surprise, but concerns that Steiner might leave the state in the lurch were tampered by the expectation that King, his close partner, would likely succeed Steiner as commissioner.

King and Steiner’s ambitious agenda has included changing the way teachers are prepared and certified, overhauling the state’s standards, curriculum, and assessments, and implementing a slew of other innovations laid out in New York’s winning Race to the Top application.

Part of that plan was an effort to change the way teachers are evaluated. Members of the Regents vote today on whether to approve the plan that state education officials are proposing. Under urging from Governor Cuomo, the plan increases the portion of a teacher’s evaluation that would depend on student test scores to 40%. Any actual teacher evaluation system, though, will have to be bargained in each local district by school officials and local teachers unions.

Regents members are expected to approve the new regulations later today. (You can watch the vote via webcast here.)

King previously served as a managing director at Uncommon Schools, a network of charter schools, and founded the high-performing Roxbury Preparatory Charter School in Boston. He is widely respected inside the community of education activists who support charter schools, but he has a calmer style than hard-charging reformers like Joel Klein, the former city schools chancellor.

And King’s experience as a teacher and principal — in addition to a law degree from Yale, he also holds a Master’s and education leadership degree from Teachers College at Columbia University — mean he speaks about education less as a political effort and more as a teaching and learning enterprise.

In September, King turned down an offer to take on another high-profile education job as superintendent in Newark, New Jersey.

UPDATE: The New York Times story on King’s appointment is up. It includes an interview with him about his background — both of his parents had died of illness by the time he was 12 — and describes him as the “details person” who complemented Steiner’s vision.

His comments are a critique of a set of regulations put out by the Board of Regents that they will vote on next week. The regulations are to be used by New York City and other districts as a guide to implementing the state’s new teacher evaluation system.

In a statement today, Tisch vowed to support Cuomo’s recommendations at the meeting next week, saying that they “will lead to an even stronger teacher and principal evaluation system for New York.” It’s not clear if the other members of the board will agree with Tisch. A recent appointee to the board, the former city school official Kathleen Cashin, is a quiet critic of Bloomberg’s.

Another hurdle involves getting the teacher evaluations implemented in school districts. The new state law revising the evaluation system granted final power to local collective bargaining talks between districts and unions. That means that no evaluation system will become final without local unions’ approval.

United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew responded to Cuomo’s letter obliquely, saying only: “We look forward to discussing the Governor’s recommendations with the Regents.”

Bloomberg’s reaction was more effusive:

“The thoughtful recommendations made today by Governor Cuomo will greatly improve the rigor of these new evaluations, and I am heartened that the Regents agreed to adopt them. But it will take the sustained commitment of all invested parties – and perhaps most importantly, the cooperation of the teachers union – if we are to make this evaluation system a reality.”

Here’s Cuomo’s complete letter:

Introduced late last week by State Senator John Flanagan, a Long Island Republican, the bill rules out seniority as the sole factor in determining who gets laid off. Instead, the bill offers eight pages of an extraordinarily complicated, prioritized list of which teachers and school supervisors would be first in line to be laid off.

The bill passed the Senate 33-27, with support from Republicans and two Democratic Senators — Jeff Klein and David Valesky.

Following the vote, Governor Andrew Cuomo put out a statement saying he plans to introduce a bill that would “expedite and expand ongoing plans to implement a statewide, objective teacher evaluation system.”

Rather than replacing “last in, first out” with other measures, which Flanagan’s bill does, Cuomo’s bill would put New York’s new teacher evaluation system in place sooner than was previously planned. The original law had it covering math and English teachers who teach grades 4-8 next year and expanding to all teachers and all subjects by 2012-13. Under Cuomo’s bill, the evaluation would cover all teachers beginning next year.

But that can only happen if school districts successfully negotiate with the teachers union. In New York City, the Department of Education and United Federation of Teachers have yet to reach an agreement on what the local assessments, which form a substantial part of the evaluation, will be.

In his release, Cuomo says that the new evaluation system will replace last in, first out, though he doesn’t explain how.

A Department of Education official called Cuomo’s bill a “sham,” and accused the governor of making a deal with the teachers union to not support ending LIFO in exchange for the union not protesting his budget cuts.

“This is not a layoff bill — it’s a way to get around LIFO without changing the law,” the official said.

Assembly Speaker Shelly Silver did not take a position on the bill that passed today, but said today that he does support ending seniority based layoffs. Echoing Cuomo’s language, he said he was looking for an “objective evaluation system,” to replace last in, first out.

Mayor Bloomberg’s statement:

“Today, the New York State Senate passed a landmark proposal that puts the needs of our children first. Putting great teachers in front of every classroom – regardless of how long they have been on the job – is the most important thing a school system can do to help its students. Enormous credit is due to Senate Education Committee Chair John Flanagan, who has established himself as a statewide leader on education reform, to Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos, and to the Republican Conference – particularly New York City’s champions, Marty Golden and Andrew Lanza – for taking a stand on behalf of our 1.1 million schoolchildren. I also want to thank Senators Jeff Klein and David Valeskyof the Independent Democratic Conference for putting the needs of public school children ahead of special interest politics. Now, we urge the Governor to include this critically important reform in his budget proposal on Thursday and for the Assembly to support it.”

PS 58 special education teacher Mark Anderson (right) talks to State Deputy Education Commissioner John King and Regents Research Fellow Amy McIntosh about teacher evaluations.

Teachers often complain that politicians and bureaucrats rarely craft education policy with an eye towards their experiences inside the classroom.

Hoping to help fix that problem, a new project has vaulted the conversations and insights of one group of New York teachers from online message boards onto the desks of the state’s top education officials.

Last October, a group of about 60 teachers began logging onto a website called the VIVA Project. On the site, they began discussing a question: What measures should considered as part of the state’s new system for evaluating teachers?

In January, four of those teachers delivered lessons from that conversation to State Deputy Education Commissioner John King, one of the officials charged with creating the regulations that the new evaluations will follow.

The program (VIVA stands for “Vision Idea Voice Action”) is a pilot designed to help teachers brainstorm ideas with each other, and then connect the teachers to public officials to share the results of those brainstorms. Another group of teachers brought together by the program — more than 150 teachers from 27 states — presented U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan with a report on the biggest challenges facing classroom teachers.

From the 60 who participated in the New York online forums, project organizers asked four teachers who had been especially active in the discussion to gather the group’s recommendations into a report to be presented to state education officials.

The teachers’ goal was to devise recommendations based on teachers’ own experience for what measures districts should consider when evaluating teachers, and how heavily each of those measures should be weighted.

The group was focused on breaking down “the culture of ‘closed doors’” where teachers rarely see what happens outside of their own classrooms, said Mark Anderson, who teaches a self-contained special education class at P.S. 58 in the Bronx and who was one of the four teachers who put together the final report.

“It’s a very isolating profession, just based on your everyday interactions,” Anderson said. ”We should be collaborating across those boundaries.”

The online forums and the smaller task force are one way to start breaking down those walls between teachers, Anderson said. But the group also tried to think about how new forms of evaluation could also help teachers connect across classrooms and learn from one another within a school.

Under the state’s teacher evaluation deal passed last May, teachers will be given a score on a new 100-point scale, with 40 of those points determined by student achievement data.

The remaining 60 points will be determined through “local assessments,” which will take forms that must be negotiated by school districts and their local unions. The law leaves open what those assessments could look like. Newly-developed tests or portfolio demonstrations of student work are two ideas that state officials have mentioned as possibilities.

One aspect of the local assessments is clear: they all must meet new regulations that are currently being developed by a state task force led by Deputy Education Commissioner John King. The group of teachers presented their report to King in hopes of influencing the final regulations laid out by his task force.

The group ended up recommending that the 60 points be spread across five different evaluation measures, giving the most weight to observations by school administrators and other teachers in the school. A sixth measure — student portfolio work — was considered but abandoned, because the increase in paperwork for teachers seemed too high for the value the portfolios would provide for the evaluations, Anderson said.

Underscoring their recommendations was the belief that using principal and peer observations as the core of teacher evaluations will also help open schools up and give teachers and school staff the opportunity to learn from one another, with an effect that would travel up the policy chain:

Teacher evaluations provide an opportunity to open doors to the process of ongoing communication and collaboration. Teachers can receive feedback needed to improve their instructional delivery and also gain recognition for their successes. Principals can acquire insight into the talents of the teachers and other professional staff in their school and make organizational and professional development decisions accordingly. District leaders and policy makers can readjust resources, programs and policies according to assessed need.

Here is how the group of teachers recommending distributing their five measures of teacher evaluation:

Read the group’s full report (in pdf form), which offers more detail on how they recommend teachers be evaluated and why, here.

The Danielson Group — run by Charlotte Danielson, the creator of a widely-used taxonomy of teaching called the Framework for Teaching — is consulting with the Department of Education to create measures of good teaching tailored for the city.

Sources said the new evaluation system will be used for probationary teachers — those who typically have fewer than three years experience — and will guide principals in making tenure decisions. The new evaluation system has yet to be unveiled to teachers and principals, but DOE officials have shown it to network leaders, who will be charged with training principals in its use.

Meant to be in place by the time tenure decisions are made this spring, the new framework is part of Mayor Bloomberg’s push to make tenure more difficult to attain. In a speech delivered on NBC in September, the mayor said that tenure should not be a “formality” for teachers and vowed that this year, principals would use a new evaluation system.

The evaluations for probationary teachers will be distinct from the teacher rating system agreed upon by the State Education Department and the teachers union last spring. Both will rank teachers in one of four categories, but the new framework will be specifically used to guide tenure decisions.

DOE officials said Danielson’s framework will be part of the new evaluation system, but would not say how it will be weighed against other factors, such as students’ test scores.

Danielson’s rubric is incredibly detailed. It breaks teaching down into 22 components that fall within four areas of responsibility for a teacher: planning and preparation, the classroom environment, instruction, and professional responsibilities. Teachers are then evaluated on each of these components and placed in one of four categories: unsatisfactory, basic, proficient, and distinguished.

Cities like Chicago and Cincinnati have incorporated Danielson’s framework into their evaluations of some teachers.

Currently, New York City principals fill out a brief online form when recommending a teacher for tenure. If they want to deny tenure or give a teacher another year in which to improve, they must justify their recommendations to the superintendent. However, granting a teacher tenure requires little explanation.

Sources said the new system will reverse this so that principals will have to justify giving a teacher tenure through evidence drawn from observations, reviews of students’ work, and analysis of students’ test scores.

“Is this a much more rigorous process for principals? I do think it is,” said Michael Mendel, secretary of the teachers union. Mendel said that city officials briefly showed the new rubric to the union before taking it back.

Danielson said she was not personally involved in consulting the city on its new evaluation system, but she had words of advice: ”One of the things we discovered in the training of evaluators, which in this case mostly means principals, is it’s not only essential to do well, it’s really hard to do well,” Danielson said.

“I just hope New York will budget enough time and resources for that because the system hinges on that, especially for making high stakes decision,” she said.

Teachers union president Michael Mulgrew echoed Danielson’s words.

“Charlotte Danielson’s work is very good but it requires real professional development and training before it is used, both by administrators and teachers,” he said.

The Danielson Group consultant working with the city did not return calls for comment.

A sample rubric for one of the components (the questioning and discussion one) is below:

In an interview with John Gambling on WOR-AM (710) this morning, Deputy Chancellor John White said the union’s concerns about how parents and the public would use the data were legitimate. But, he said, those concerns should not be an obstacle to improving how teachers are evaluated. He told Gambling:

And these data show that, actually, there are plenty of teachers who every year, year after year after year, are performing at the top of their game. We need to honor those teachers. This is not just about failing teachers.

But there are cases where we see every year, teachers in the bottom. And you can sit there and say, “Oh there’s this exception, this teacher’s is not a perfect score, it doesn’t reflect this,” but at the end of the day when you have teachers who are performing way at the top year after year after year, way at the bottom year after year after year, you have to say: are we doing the right thing for kids? We’ve got to keep that teacher at the top, we’ve got to pay that teacher right, at the top, and that teacher at the bottom, they’ve got to get better or we’ve got to get a better teacher.

It’s unclear how making teachers’ ratings public would improve their performance, as principals and teachers already have access to the ratings. This year, principals are supposed to use the ratings as a factor in tenure decisions and by 2012 they will be a significant part of all teachers’ evaluations.

Yesterday, union officials claimed that releasing the scores with teachers’ names would lead to harassment and would mislead parents. But White said the city trusted parents to make sense of the data. He said:

I think parents are making judgments all the time. No one is more invested in the education of children than their parents and I think parents are always talking with schools about what’s going on in classrooms. This is just another source of information. We think that they’ll understand it. We think they should use it.

Mayor Bloomberg on NBC today, announcing a crackdown on seniority-based layoffs and a new tenure policy.

In his first major education policy announcement for the new school year, Mayor Michael Bloomberg this morning vowed a renewed attack on seniority laws that protect veteran teachers and a change in how teachers are awarded tenure.

He made the remarks on NBC, which is dedicating this week to school reporting in a project called “Education Nation.”

The attack on seniority laws came as city officials made a dire budget prediction for next year, saying that they will likely have to lay off public school teachers as federal stimulus funding runs out. Under the current state law, teachers with the least seniority would be the first to lose their jobs — a policy known as “last in, first out.” The mayor and Chancellor Joel Klein oppose this policy, but their effort to change the law, which the teachers union does support, went nowhere last year.

Today, the mayor said he would try dismantling the policy again before the city confronts an expected $700 million budget hole and possible layoffs next year.

“It’s time for us to end the ‘last-in, first out’ layoff policy that puts children at risk here in New York — and across our wonderful country,” Bloomberg said on NBC. ”How could anyone argue that this is good for children? The law is nothing more than special interest politics, and we’re going to get rid of it before it hurts our kids,” he added.

Teachers union officials immediately squashed any possibility that they might partner with the mayor.

“The seniority layoff process is part of state law and a critical guarantee against discrimination,” United Federation of Teachers president Michael Mulgrew said in an e-mailed statement. ”If the Mayor wants to change seniority, he will need to talk to the Legislature,” Mulgrew said. “Given that body’s lack of enthusiasm for many of the Mayor’s plans — like congestion pricing — we expect an appropriate amount of skepticism.”

Assemblyman Jonathan Bing, who introduced the bill to end seniority-based layoffs last year, is running for reelection this November and is likely to hold onto his seat. He has said that he will continue to push for the law’s repeal if he is re-elected.

Bloomberg also announced plans to change how teachers are given tenure.

Last year, Bloomberg had announced a first major shift in the tenure-granting process. For the first time, students’ test scores became a formal factor, as the city ranked teachers eligible for tenure by their value-added scores, a complex and sometimes-unstable measurement of effectiveness. Principals were then advised to deny tenure to the lowest-scoring teachers, though they could override the city’s recommendations.

This year, Bloomberg said the city will add more information to the decision process by way of a new teacher evaluation system passed by the state legislature this year. The evaluation system uses a combination of information, including principal evaluations and value-added scores, to rank teachers in one of four categories — highly effective, effective, developing, and ineffective.

All 6,300 teachers who are eligible for tenure this year will be placed in one of these categories. Principals will be instructed to deny tenure to “developing” and “ineffective” teachers, said DOE spokeswoman Ann Forte.

Mulgrew swiped at this set of comments, too, taking issue with Bloomberg’s description of tenure as “automatic.” But the teachers union president said that teachers would likely prefer the new evaluation system — which was passed with the union’s support — as a more “objective” alternative to the current model.

Tacked onto the mayor’s announcement was also news that the city is partnering with IBM and the City University of New York to open a new school. Serving students in grade 9-14, the school would graduate students with associates degrees in computer science and the promise of a job at IBM.

Department of Education officials said they want to hire three or four coaches to observe the city’s 11 “transformation” schools as they begin to pilot a new teacher evaluation system this year.

The job title “talent coach” is something of a misnomer. The coaches will hold principals and administrators’ hands as they try to judge which teachers are effective, but they will not be responsible for actually judging the teachers or helping them get better.”They’ll be silent observers,” said DOE spokesman Jack Zarin-Rosenfeld. “They’ll be providing feedback to the evaluators as opposed to feedback to the teachers.”

The new position is meant in part to lighten principals’ workload at a time when federal grant requirements are forcing them to overhaul how their schools operate. The city has already assigned new principals and “mentor principals” to the transformation schools. The coaches will provide an extra layer of support, overseeing several schools and focusing solely on teacher evaluation.

The new position is also an experiment that the DOE could replicate in other schools next year when the entire city adopts the new teacher evaluation system, Zarin-Rosenfeld said. That system — elements of which still have to be negotiated by the city and teachers union — factors in student test scores and places teachers in one of four categories: highly effective, effective, developing, and ineffective.

For now, the city plans to use federal School Improvement Grants to pay the coaches’ salaries. Recruitment for potential coaches hasn’t started yet, and the coaches won’t start working in schools until January, according to a department spokesman.

Below is the city’s outline of what officials currently imagine that talent coaches will do.

Specific responsibilities include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Create materials, agendas, and talking points to help principals have conversations with probationary and tenured teachers
• Provide written guidance to principals on using data to assess teacher effectiveness
• Create tools to help principals diagnose teacher needs and choose appropriate interventions
• Track teacher development needs and the delivery of interventions to establish school and project level patterns
• Work with principals to improve use of existing evaluation tool, provide logistical support to ensure principals follow the evaluation process

Principals gave unsatisfactory ratings to 1,813 teachers, 17 percent more than in 2009, according to data the city released today. They also denied tenure to 234 teachers this year, 80 percent more than last year. And principals nearly doubled the number of teachers given an extra year before their final tenure decision is made.

In total, 11 percent of the 6,386 teachers up for tenure this year were denied or delayed, compared to 6.6 percent last year. It’s an even more dramatic jump from 2006, when tenure was denied or delayed less than 1 percent of the time.

By far, the leading cause principals cited for giving a U-rating was quality of instruction and student care. Attendance problems were the second-leading cause of low ratings, followed closely by the nebulous “personal and professional qualities.”

Still, the vast majority of teachers were rated satisfactory and received tenure after three years in the classroom. Just 3.66 percent of teachers up for tenure did not receive it, and about 2.2 percent of tenured teachers received a “U-rating,” which can put teachers on the path to dismissal.

“What we see in the numbers today is that principals are making proactive decisions to retain teachers as well as to evaluate and deny some of them tenure,” said Deputy Chancellor John White. “Principals are basing these decisions on years’ worth of information.”

Most of the teachers who received U-ratings had received one in the past, White said, showing that principals are not assigning the damaging rating capriciously.

The new numbers come after nearly three years of a sustained push to usher more weak teachers out of the system. Principals are encouraged to give weak teachers low ratings before they earn tenure, and a team of lawyers helps principals assemble the evidence needed to enable the city to fire low-performing tenured teachers, although their efforts have netted only a handful of dismissals.

This past year, the city also started using student test scores to advise principals about how to make certain tenure decisions. Of the 6,386 teachers up for tenure this year, about 700 taught for two years in subjects where students take state tests. The city ranked those teachers according to how much their students advanced, then advised principals to give tenure to top teachers and to deny tenure to those on the bottom. In the end, only one of the 96 teachers in the top tier was denied tenure, compared to 14 of the 81 teachers in the bottom tier. Half of teachers in the bottom tier had their probation extended.

Using state test scores to drive teacher evaluations is a problem, considering that state officials now say the scores have been hugely inflated, said Michael Mendel, a teachers union vice president.

“The DOE should immediately review and reconsider the cases of those teachers denied tenure on the basis of the now-discredited state test results,” he said.

White said test scores were only one factor principals considered when making tenure decisions. Still, he said, the city remains committed to using test scores in teacher evaluations, especially because state law now requires it.

As the state’s and city’s data collection becomes more sophisticated, principals will have even more information about how successfully teachers are helping students learn.

“I think we will see more thoughtful decision-making because there will be greater evidence of growth,” White said. “If that level of rigor results in fewer teachers granted tenure, then good. But it will also result in better teachers retained and better quality of instruction in our classrooms.”

Of the 200 principals eligible for tenure last year, seven did not receive it. Nearly a quarter more had their probation extended.

Nearly a third of probationary teachers in the Absent Teacher Reserve, the pool of teachers who have been working as substitutes after their permanent positions were eliminated, were denied tenure. The city has said teachers should be fired after four months in the ATR pool.

Here’s the Apollo’s video of the winner, Darryl Jordan, a vocal music teacher at Harlem’s Urban Assembly School for the Performing Arts. Videos of the two teacher runners up are posted on the theater’s YouTube channel. The clips of some of the teachers who were booed off are cute, too.

A UFT chapter leader sent us this report from the monthly delegate assembly, comprised of representatives of the teachers at each school. The account offers a glimpse of how Mulgrew is pitching the deal to teachers, many of whom are skeptical of the plan:

The scene was surreal to start. The room was packed but the tone was hushed.  It felt like the crowd had come to listen to Mulgrew explain himself and the recent overhaul of the evaluation system.

Mulgrew disputed press accounts that test scores will make up 40 percent of a teacher’s evaluation, the chapter leader said. State test results will account for 20 percent, Mulgrew explained. Another 20 percent of the evaluations will come from students’ progress on local measures of student learning. The local assessments, which could be tests but don’t have to be, must be negotiated locally between the city and the union.

Chancellor Joel Klein has already expressed displeasure over how much of the plan is left to negotiation. Colorado and Louisiana, by contrast, are both pursuing evaluation overhauls that would base 50 percent or more of a teacher’s rating on student test score progress.

Here’s our rundown of the evaluation deal, and the chapter leader’s full account of the meeting is below the jump:

He began by going through what he called ”inaccurate” reporting by the NY Times.  He had prepared an FAQ sheet that answered some of the questions that members might have.

He mentioned that this new system only calls for 20 percent of overall score to come from tests. He also stated that there were parts that had yet to be negotiated by the Union — like the Value Added scores.  He stated directly that this did not change the tenure system.

As he went on, you could feel the tide of the delegates turning — he was starting to bring comfort to those who were anxious about this deal.

There were good questions and voices of dissent from the crowd. Some asked why this had been brokered secretly without teacher input.  According to Mulgrew they had done this to keep the DOE and Klein out of the negotiation.  This was a deal with the state, he said.

UPDATE: Norm Scott has posted several other accounts of the meeting, and delegate response to Mulgrew’s message, on his blog.

And here’s the FAQ document on the deal that union delegates received last night. The document insists that the new evaluation plan does not make it easier to fire teachers deemed ineffective. The deal allows for teachers who receive ratings of “ineffective” for two years in a row to go through expedited termination hearings.

But to do that, the state and school districts will have to track student work in more detail than they ever have before. And state and city teachers union officials sold the idea as a way to create better professional development for teachers and principals.

The agreement struck between the state education department and the teachers union today means that, in three years, all New York teachers will be evaluated according to a new 100-point scale, with 40 of those points determined by student achievement data. The agreement was ushered out just in time for the June 1 second round deadline for the Obama administration’s Race to the Top grant competition.

So far, the new teacher evaluation system exists only in concept. To flesh it out, school districts will have to create a new battery of customized tests or other ways to measure student learning.

If Albany passes the bill, evaluations would begin in two phases. Teachers in tested grades and subjects would start receiving rankings in the 2011-2012 school year, using next year’s test scores as the baseline for measuring growth, State Deputy Education Commissioner John King said today. All teachers will begin receiving the new form of ratings by the 2012-13 school year.

That means that in two years, the state and local school districts would need to use new methods to judge student growth in all subjects and grades, not just those currently tested. The proposed law leaves open several options for the state and district to measure students’ progress — new tests could be developed, or districts could use portfolios of student work or other performance evaluations.

In all cases, new local assessments would have to meet regulations set by State Education Commissioner David Steiner. An advisory committee that includes teachers, principals and superintendents will help Steiner develop the new rules, the proposal states.

Steiner argued today that the expansion of evaluated subjects would help boost the status of subjects like the arts that have historically been marginalized when schools focus resources on improving test scores.

“We feel very strongly that subjects are created equally,” Steiner said. “The fact that we have not yet had any collective effort to create meaningful and good evaluations [in non-tested subjects] has ironically put those subjects and teachers at a severe disadvantage.”

The heads of the city and state teachers unions, who enthusiastically endorsed the plan today, said that the new evaluations will also give teachers better feedback on how they can improve. United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew said the new four-category scale will allow principals and teachers to target professional development and coaching to areas where they need the most help.

“This now embeds that inside the evaluation process,” Mulgrew said.

Steiner, along with King and the teachers union presidents, urged legislators to pass the new bill by the June 1 deadline for the second round of the federal Race to the Top competition. The Race to the Top scoring rubric sets aside 58 points, the most heavily weighted single category, for how a state judges and improves teacher effectiveness based on their performance.

Both houses received the proposed legislation around 1 p.m. today, and Senate Democratic Conference Leader John Sampson has pledged to move quickly on the bill, union sources said.

Steiner acknowledged that significant work will be needed to launch the new evaluation system, especially as the state education department simultaneously overhauls its testing system, which critics deride as overly simplistic.

“We have an enormous amount of work to do,” Steiner said, “but we cannot be happy with where we are now.”

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.”

“I think you’ll have so many teachers volunteer,” he said.

Teachers who volunteer for the two-year study will open their classrooms to videotaped observations, student surveys, and test score scrutiny. Those results will then be analyzed, but they won’t be shared with principals.

“The idea is that at the end of the project we will have a better sense of what kinds of measures are accurate in evaluating what’s actually going on in the classroom,” said Christopher Williams, senior program officer at the Gates Foundation. The project will be led by the Gates Foundation’s Stephen Cantrell and by Tom Kane, a professor of economics and education at Harvard University.

Williams said that the study will be conducted in a variety of school districts across the country and would involve several thousand teachers. He declined to comment on how much funding the Gates Foundation is dedicating to the project. But he emphasized that it was an integral part of the foundation’s larger educational goals.

“This is one part of a broader effort that we’re undertaking to see if we can get more effective teachers in classrooms across the country, especially with the students who need them most,” Williams said.

The full letter that Klein and Mulgrew sent to UFT members is below:

September 1, 2009

Dear Colleagues,

The United Federation of Teachers (UFT) and the Department of Education (DOE) are looking for volunteers to participate in a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation study to help develop fair, accurate, and useful guides to what really makes effective teaching and learning. This two-year research study is premised on the principle that good teaching is multi-dimensional, and that teachers and their schools need consistent and reliable information in order to identify and support good teaching.

Both the United Federation of Teachers and the Department of Education will be collaborating with independent researchers on this project because we all recognize that the work of teachers must be measured in ways that are fair and valid.  Nationally, current measures of teaching rarely take into account the full range of what teachers do (no single measure really can), or the context in which they teach. The Measures of Effective Teaching project, on the other hand, begins right in the classroom and will explore a broad array of teacher measures: video observations, surveys, and student growth.  It will compare these measures to each other, and to nationally recognized standards, and it will look at their inter-relatedness.  It will be informed by actual teacher practice.

In other words, the real work of real teachers in real classrooms will be central to every aspect of this project.  That’s why both the UFT and the DOE have looked forward to working with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation: we want to support student achievement with solid research based on what our teachers do in class.

To that end, together, we are inviting eligible teachers to join us in this project.  Participation is completely voluntary, and those teachers who volunteer will be allowing Gates-funded researchers to collect information about their teaching from a broad variety of sources in order to answer two basic questions: what is our common understanding of the teaching learning process, and how do we measure it consistently?  To answer these questions, researchers will video classrooms; collect surveys from participating teachers and students; assess teacher knowledge of content and pedagogy though a brief test; and collect information on student academic growth through specially administered standardized tests.  Researchers will look at the videos through the lens of several different sets of nationally recognized teaching standards to see which work best. And, teachers will also provide their own reflections on the lessons that have been videotaped.

As you can see, Gates hopes to capture the full range of what teachers do by gathering multiple sources of information, including information on the context in which the teachers teach. The goal is to use this information to create multiple, reliable measures of good teaching.

And that is important to all of us.  We all know that teachers teach best when they know what the standards are for their teaching, have been supported in reaching those standards, and feel assured that no single, snapshot measure will determine the course of their career. If you volunteer, you will be joining us in a project that will help us understand what works when it comes to assessing teachers. We hope this will lead to fairer guides for all of us, and raise the level of achievement in our schools.

To acknowledge their contribution over the course of the two years, teachers will receive a $1500 stipend. And of course, they will also have access to their own videos as well as student test results.

Finally, let us say clearly at the outset: this is a research project, and it assures full confidentiality to the teachers who volunteer. That means that principals and other DOE employees will not receive copies of your videos, surveys, or assessments.  And, teachers will be able to opt out of the program at any time. This project it is not about the evaluation of the 1000 teachers we hope will join us, and it cannot be used by the DOE to evaluate them; rather it is about evaluating the multiple evaluation measures that are used across the country in order to ensure that they are fair, transparent, and consistent. Schools need a better understanding of these measures.  To that end, the researchers do hope to share aggregated data with the central DOE and the union, which could prove helpful in supporting teachers.

Schools and teachers will have opportunities to learn more about this study in the coming weeks through borough meetings and other communications.  More information, including important details about which schools and teachers are eligible and the requirements of the study can be found at: http://schools.nyc.gov/Teachers/Resources/Other/Grants/MET/default.htm

We hope you will join us in this project; it may turn out to be among the most meaningful projects of your career.  And, thank you, as always, for your work on behalf of our students.

Sincerely,

Joel I. Klein                                                                  Michael Mulgrew
Chancellor                                                                    UFT President

UPDATE: This post has been clarified to show that the study will examine multiple measures of teacher evaluation beyond just test scores.

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.

A recent bout of research argues that poor teaching is partly to blame for poorly performing schools, and a report by The New Teacher Project singled out poor teacher evaluation systems as part of the problem. The report specifically criticized evaluation systems that offer principals binary choices, either satisfactory or unsatisfactory, rather than encouraging more nuanced feedback. U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan endorsed the report, and his staff has urged school districts to improve their teacher evaluation systems.

New York City teachers receive either an “S” or “U” rating from their principals once a year.

Randi Weingarten, the president of the city teachers union and of the national American Federation of Teachers, has criticized the city’s efforts to target struggling teachers, decrying the Teacher Performance Unit as a “gotcha squad.”

Below is a chart showing the raw numbers of teachers receiving “U” ratings, and we’ve uploaded data from last year here.

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.

New York is among several high-profile states with bans on linking student and teacher evaluations that Obama administrators have singled out for criticism. New York’s law bans linking student achievement data to tenure decisions. The law in question in Indiana was more extreme, prohibiting the use of student test data in any teacher evaluations.

Supporters of linking student data to teacher evaluations declared victory even without wholesale repeal of the ban. Governor Mitch Daniels congratulated legislators for discarding the “ridiculous prohibition” and spoke to U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan about the changes the day after the budget was passed.

But the Indiana teachers’ union is warning everyone to slow down. “There has been no change in the status quo for now,” Dan Clark, deputy executive director of the Indiana State Teachers Association, told me in an interview.

Clark said the union objected to the last-minute repeal without any public discussion or debate. He emphasized that the exception only permits district to use test data if the federal Department of Education makes it a requirement of Race to the Top eligibility, and would apply only to districts receiving those funds.

Clark said the union intends to use the time before the Race to the Top Fund applications are due to stage a more robust debate on the Obama administration’s proposed reforms. “We’re trying to rekindle all of the discussion that should have happened before,” he said.

Speaking last week to a New York audience, Race to the Top Fund administrator Joanne Weiss praised Indiana for repealing the ban and for being responsive to the Obama administration’s calls for reform. Weiss also indicated that use of student data as part of teacher performance evaluations would almost certainly be among the requirements for eligibility to the stimulus fund when criteria are released later this month.

Indiana education department spokesman Savage said that even though the revised provision is “a watered-down version” of what the state needed, the state is still in a strong position for the grant competition. “It’s a minor step forward,” he said. “But it is progress.”

Clark, of the Indiana teachers union, said that it’s too early for federal education officials to push so hard on teacher evaluation laws. Too many questions remain about which student tests could be used to evaluate teacher performance and how the assessments could be used in making personnel decisions, he said.

“Arne Duncan needs to figure this out,” Clark said. “If he’s making strong statements to influence policy, he needs to be able to answer these questions.”