For Immediate Release: Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Contact: B. Jason Brooks, Director of Research and Communications

(518) 383-2598

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Legal action today by the state’s teachers union to minimize the role student test results play in teacher evaluations is just the latest move in a long pattern of union actions opposing the use of meaningful, objective data to help determine how well teachers are performing. In fact, one only has to go to the union’s website to read the self-congratulations of its “leading role in securing language that bars the use of student test scores as a yardstick for tenure” and New York State United Teachers union president Richard Iannuzzi claiming that “student assessments are designed to assess students, not teachers” (www.nysut.org/newyorkteacher_10002.htm).

According to B. Jason Brooks, director of research at the Foundation for Education Reform & Accountability, “While the Board of Regents is moving the state in the right direction to institute a system that makes objective measures of student academic performance a significant portion of teacher evaluations, NYSUT continues to shield teachers that do a poor job from public view. The obsession by the union to water-down any significant form of teacher accountability has led only to greater costs, stagnant academic achievement, and greater dysfunction of our public education system.”

In May 2010, the Chancellor of the Board of Regents, Merryl Tisch, successfully got teacher union leaders to concede that 20 percent of a teacher’s evaluation should be based on the performance of students on annual state exams, and an additional 20 percent to be based on locally-chosen assessments. Working collaboratively with the Board of Regents, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo pushed to ensure that the locally-chosen half of the outcome-based measurement be rigorous, encouraging that student performance on the annual state exams could be used for up to the entire 40 percent share of teacher evaluations (see: www.governor.ny.gov/press/lettertoBoardofRegents). Gov. Cuomo said: “This change would ensure that greater balance is struck between using objective teacher evaluation measures…and subjective teacher evaluation measures.”

Brooks said that today’s lawsuit “is an act of desperation” in response to the union’s failure to score any major legislative victory in 2011: “The state legislative session has ended and NYSUT doesn’t have anything it can boast of to its members. It lost on preventing school funding cuts, it lost on increasing state taxes, it lost when its member teachers showed a compassionate willingness to make contract concessions to save the jobs of their peers and programs for their students, and it lost on its attempts to defeat the long-awaited and desperately needed property tax cap. Now Gov. Cuomo has indicated that he plans to veto the NYSUT-pushed bill that would allow school districts to bond out the costs of pension payments, a prudent move and one that preserves the integrity of his property tax cap. Evidently, NYSUT believes that the last place it can look for friends is behind the judge’s bench.”

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The Foundation for Education Reform & Accountability (FERA) is an independent, nonprofit, research organization dedicated to improving education in New York State by promoting accountability, stimulating innovation, and supporting school-choice efforts across the state