CEPR Faculty Director Thomas Kane shares the most promising opportunities in New York's new teacher evaluation policy in the following Brookings Institution paper.
Since 2009, more than 40 states have rewritten their teacher evaluation policies. Given that school systems have neglected to manage classroom instruction for decades, it was inevitable that many schools would struggle to implement them. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo re-ignited the controversy by including a second round of teacher evaluation reforms in his budget this year. Below, I describe the most promising opportunities in the new law. Hopefully, New York will provide a blueprint for other states as they tweak their own systems in the coming years.
A Higher Standard for Tenure
Traditionally, principals have used much too low a standard when granting tenure, viewing the probationary period merely as an opportunity to weed out the worst malpractice. Under the new law in New York, the length of the probationary period will be lengthened from three to four years and no teacher rated “ineffective” in their fourth year would be able to earn tenure.
Therefore, much depends on what it means to be designated “ineffective.” As New York learned last year when 96 percent of teachers were rated “effective” or “highly effective”, a vague standard is equivalent to no standard. The department should specify that a probationary teacher is “ineffective” during their fourth year of teaching if: (i) a teacher’s average student achievement gain during their second through fourth year of teaching falls below that of the average first-year teacher in their district or (ii) the classroom observations done by external observers during their second through fourth year of teaching falls below that of the average first-year teacher.
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