Bill to Preserve Teacher Tenure Criteria Moves

By MEREDITH KOLODNER

The State Assembly has passed a bill that would prevent the Bloomberg administration from linking Teacher tenure to students' standardized test scores.

RANDI WEINGARTEN: Union backing bill.

The provision would apply to all school districts statewide and was tucked into the Assembly's budget bill passed March 12. United Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said the union had not pushed for the measure but supported it.

Leaves It to Regents

The legislation would mandate that tenure decisions follow standards set last spring by the state Board of Regents. That would mean that local districts, including the city, could not add their own requirements when judging Teachers, including student performance and progress.

The Bloomberg administration has repeatedly sought to link Teacher evaluations to performance data, such as test scores, and opposes the bill.

"To make sure kids have the best possible Teachers, we need to look at all available data," DOE officials said in a statement. "Teachers should be accurately evaluated with information about how well they're helping students learn. We cannot afford to restrict the city's ability to set high standards."

In January, the revelation that the Department of Education had embarked on a pilot program tracking the test-score performance of Teachers' students at 240 city schools caused an uproar after DOE officials said they believed they could use the data in the future to help make decisions about Teacher tenure without negotiating the change with the UFT.

Former Governor Spitzer initially introduced legislation linking student performance to tenure that could have provided an opening for the Bloomberg administration, but later backed down. In a victory for the UFT and other state Teacher unions, the language finally agreed to in the Regents standards allows Teachers to be measured by how well they use student performance data during instruction, but it does not directly link test-score results to Teacher evaluations.