City's evaluation rollout plan ignores state's latest requests

The city Department of Education delivered a plan for how it will implement new teacher and principal evaluations to the state ahead of schedule today — but without giving state officials much of the information they asked for.

According to a memo that Chancellor Dennis Walcott sent today to the state, the city plans to spend $23 million in the next six months preparing city educators for a new evaluation system. The memo is a response to State Education Commissioner John King’s demand, made last month after the city and teachers union failed to agree on a new teacher evaluation system, that the city detail its implementation plans or lose state funds.

The plan that Walcott delivered today is broader than the highlights that city officials released last week. In addition to dealing just with teacher and administrator training about the observation model the city is planning to use to assess teachers in action, the memo also explains how city educators will learn about some components of evaluations that must be based on student performance. It also delineates different training programs for teachers, principals, department officials and attaches a price tag to each one.

But for the most part, the plan contains only the bare minimum of what city officials were told on Friday should be included in their implementation plan. In response to requests for guidance from the city, the state official overseeing review and approval of all evaluation plans, Julia Rafal-Baer, sent a chart to Chancellor Dennis Walcott with dozens of “key questions” whose answers do not appear in the plan the city submitted today.

City officials said the key questions arrived more than three weeks after King’s original request and just a week before his deadline. “We expected feedback from SED and will provide more information as requested,” an official said.

The plan contains no details, for example, about whether a city evaluation system would contain subjective measures of teacher quality other than observations; how teachers and principals who fall short would get help to improve; or how local assessments would be selected.

And in some cases, the plan does not even include the bare minimum. For example, the chart that Walcott received said the city should specify a “plan for developing SLOs in non-tested subjects.” The acronym stands for “Student Learning Objectives,” the name of the state’s required tool for evaluating student progress for teachers in grades and subjects that do not have state tests. But SLOs do not appear in the city’s document at all.

And while the memo says the city will execute the plans in accordance with union contracts, it does not say that the city has the UFT’s sign-off on using the Danielson Framework, even though schools have been practicing with the observation model for years and the union itself has trained teachers to use it. The city has to show that the union supports the rubric, according to Rafal-Baer’s chart, although it gave the city until March 1 to offer proof.

No endorsement was forthcoming from the union today, immediately after the city released its implementation plan.

“We are reviewing the DOE’s submission,” said Peter Kadushin, a union spokesman.

The union briefly called off teacher evaluation talks in December over the issue of implementation in one of several moments that led the city to miss a state deadline to adopt new evaluations. UFT President Michael Mulgrew accused the city of not providing adequate training for principals who would observe teachers under the new evaluation system, and last week, he told union members that he was not impressed by the draft plan the city had shown him, according to a teacher who heard the presentation.

Teachers will receive, on average, nearly six hours of on-the-job training on the new evaluation system. Teachers who are particularly weak or strong will get even more training, according to the memo.

According to the plan, training for principals will launch on Friday, and teacher training would follow in March. Telephone and email “help desks” will launch later this year to answer educators’ questions about teacher evaluations, according to the memo.

The funding would come in large part from state grants that are contingent on having a new teacher evaluation system in place, according to the city’s memo. Some funds are allocated already, according to department officials, but the additional state funds are necessary.

The city’s full implementation memo is below, followed by the chart that Rafal-Baer sent to Walcott on Friday.

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