It’s painfully clear that New York will never push schools to fire lousy teachers, no matter how bad for kids. Yet the Regents pretend otherwise. It’s a tragic farce.
On Monday, the Regents board called for an extension, supposedly for just another year, of its four-year ban on linking student test scores to teacher evaluations.
Under a 2015 law, teachers whose kids repeatedly score low on the tests are to face consequences, but the moratorium delayed that until next year. The Regents now say they want more time to “review” the system before they end the delay. That’s pure bull.
Fact is, Democrats, who’ll control the Legislature come January, are moving to scrap the law entirely. The only reason to extend the ban is to give them the time to do that.
Yes, state Education Commissioner MaryEllen Elia says “meaningful evaluations” are “a foundational element of ensuring” students “have access to quality educators.” Right: so “foundational” that they haven’t existed for decades, and likely never will.
Gov. Cuomo was the one who pushed that 2015 law, but gave up on having it actually take effect after the unions pushed back by fueling the testing-opt-out movement.
True, test scores aren’t a perfect measure of teacher performance. But Cuomo was right to once ask how the teacher-evaluation system can be “credible when only 1 percent of teachers are rated ineffective” — even as more than half the kids fail state tests.
The tragedy isn’t that New York won’t link teacher ratings to test scores but that it won’t tie them to any meaningful measure of teacher performance. And kids will keep getting stuck with bad teachers while the Regents mouth their devotion to making things better.
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