Why New York refuses to identify rotten teachers

The biggest irony of Albany’s push to delink student test scores from teacher evaluations — as a bill passed Thursday by the Senate Education Committee would do — isn’t that Gov. Andrew Cuomo now wants credit for the effort, after having championed the linkage for years. It’s that Cuomo’s war to make the scores count was lost long ago, so why bother to make it official?

From the start, the 2010 state law calling for test results to figure into teacher ratings was a sham. Cuomo himself later called it “unworkable by design.” Its real goal was to snag $700 million in federal “Race to the Top” money, and moving toward evaluations based on test scores was required for that.

Since then, the mandate has been delayed, revised, superseded and suspended so often it might as well never have existed. United Federation of Teachers boss Mike Mulgrew even admitted he deliberately “gummed up” talks with Team Bloomberg to stop it from taking effect in the city.

New York’s teachers unions were simply never going to allow their members to be graded in any serious, objective way, let alone fired on the basis of their performance. Indeed, to this day, poor student scores on state tests haven’t led to a single teacher being terminated under that 2010 law or any of its updates.

The latest “moratorium” isn’t even set to expire until next year. And if the test score-eval linkage were to take hold (no chance of that), the unions would still have another two years to delay it again, before any teacher could face consequences.

Meanwhile, in every year since 2012, unreformed evaluations have deemed no more than 1 percent of teachers to be “ineffective.” That’s not because 99 percent of teachers are stellar or kids are so high-performing: Last year, 60 percent of students flunked state exams.

More