In a little-noticed legal action Wednesday, the state teachers union is once again attempting to toss out the teacher tenure lawsuit launched last July, which argues that New York’s laws protecting educators from termination violate children’s constitutional right to a “sound basic education.”
The grounds for the union’s new motion, filed with Supreme Court Justice Philip Minardo, are that the recently passed teacher legislation is a radical game-changer that renders the lawsuit moot.
The new teacher laws have indeed been billed by both supporters and opponents as momentous. Gov. Cuomo boasts that he’s pushed through a “dramatic shift” in teacher evaluation and accountability that’s “one of the greatest legacies” he’ll leave for New York. New York State United Teachers is slamming the laws as a “punishing anti-public education agenda that attacks teachers and hurts students.”
Political grandstanding aside, all the to-do is just tinkering with a broken system. While the new laws are kicking up a lot of dust, they’ll probably do very little to improve teacher evaluation in New York.
And most importantly, the legislation gets nowhere close to the essential issue: ensuring that New York’s children receive the “minimally adequate teaching” they’re guaranteed under the state Constitution.
We’ve been down this road to nowhere before. Five years ago, the Legislature passed a law mandating a new teacher evaluation system, hailed at the time by The Wall Street Journal as a “sweeping overhaul of the way teachers are evaluated.” That new system required that teachers receive one of four ratings — ineffective, developing, effective or highly effective — based on a “rigorous” combination of classroom observation and student performance.
What happened? Last year, 96% of teachers were rated effective or highly effective (while barely three out of 10 students reached proficiency in math and reading). Why? As I found in a comprehensive analysis of the 2010 evaluation law, it’s because the outcome targets and scoring ranges for the new rating categories — set by the state Education Department and local school districts in negotiation with the teachers union — were rigged accordingly from the outset.
The new legislation maintains those same rating categories, while increasing the weight of student performance on state tests and adding requirements for one “unannounced” observation and one by an “independent evaluator.”
These changes won’t matter much in practice, though. Just as in 2010, virtually the whole game lies in the specific system used to calculate teachers’ scores. Defining those crucial details is again delegated to the state Education Department and localities in negotiation with the teachers union .
What’s really noteworthy about the new legislation is that it now explicitly violates children’s constitutionally guaranteed right to minimally adequate teaching.
First, the new law prohibits children from being assigned an ineffective teacher for two years in a row. But how can state law prohibit that children have two ineffective teachers in a row when the state Constitution prohibits that children have even one ineffective teacher, ever? In practice, the law actually now condones sticking a child with up to seven ineffective teachers over 13 years — so long as they’re alternated with effective ones.
Second, the new law requires that an ineffective teacher remain in the classroom for two years before a school can attempt dismissal. Which children can legally be assigned to that ineffective teacher when all kids have a right to minimally adequate teaching?
Third, under the new law, teachers with two proven years of ineffective teaching may keep their job under “extraordinary circumstances.” What extraordinary circumstances do lawmakers believe justify the violation of children’s constitutionally guaranteed rights?
Finally, the law essentially bans the dismissal of tenured teachers who are rated “developing.” Teachers can get that rating for years on end without any negative employment consequences. Again, which children can be put in their classrooms? The state Constitution mandates that all children have effective teachers, not “developing” ones.
The union’s claim that children’s rights are now adequately protected is absurd. The new laws in no way ensure that children have the minimally adequate teaching they’re supposedly guaranteed under the state Constitution.
Ultimately, the union’s attempt to throw the tenure lawsuit out will fail. And in the meantime, the delay just wastes more taxpayer dollars while trapping thousands of children with bad teachers for even longer.
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