The new Di Blasio team is off to a good start in education. The Bloomberg team is quietly exiting stage right. One of the key players, Marc Sternberg, has moved to the Walton Family Foundation to promote vouchers. Another, Shael Suransky, will be president of Bank Street College, which does not share his enthusiasm for test-based accountability.
The new chancellor, Carmen Farina, is assembling her own team, and unlike Bloomberg and Joel Klein, she is selecting veteran educators.
When she met with principals as a group for the first time, she was greeted with a standing ovation. She made clear that the days of derision were over and a new era of respect and collaboration. She also made the startling announcement that the city would require a minimum of seven years’ experience, in contrast to the Bloomberg policy of fast-tracking inexperienced newcomers to lead schools.
Her second in command, Dorita Gibson, has more than 30 years’ experience in the schol system.
The Deputy Chancellor for Teaching and Learning, Philip Weinberg, a high school principal in Brooklyn, has nearly thirty years in the system, and the Executive Director of Curriculum, Instruction, and Professional Development has 27 years in education.
This is quite a change from the early years of the Klein regime, when the inner circle consisted of fresh-faced MBA graduates, and 20-something’s with no classroom experience. As one insider told me later, “I would look around and realize that no one making decisions had ever worked in a school.”
Philip Weinberg, who takes charge of teaching and learning, was a signer of the New York principals’ letter opposing the New York State Annual Professional Performance Review, the evaluation system designed by John King that created enormous pushback.
In this article, he explains why more than 1,000 principals signed the letter and why it is wrong to remove the job of evaluating teachers from principals.
This is part of what Weinberg wrote:
“My concern about the agreement is that a large portion of a teacher’s evaluation is to be taken out of the hands of principals. I am disturbed by this, not just because I think this will lead to inaccurate ratings and will pressure teachers in unproductive ways (it will), but also because I believe it speaks to a growing distrust of or disrespect for principals. I am surprised that the teachers’ union would trade a principal’s rating for that of a student’s test score, especially given the recent teacher data report debacle. Are most principals less fair or trustworthy than reductive data? I think not. I think most principals feel exactly as Mr. Mulgrew does when they work with an ineffective teacher, and they communicate those concerns with the same intelligence, honesty and kindness Mr. Mulgrew expressed above.
“The desire to use multiple measures to rate teachers seems like a smart idea. However, New York City’s two experiments with value-added ratings in education, the teacher data reports and the school progress reports, have not produced reliable information. So far we have not discovered any measures which clearly correlate teacher performance to student learning. This new agreement will generate a teacher’s rating by using data which we know does not answer the question we are asking. Why? Are principals incapable of understanding data, incapable of interpreting it based upon what they see in their schools? I think not.
“I think we can review our schools’ data in a much more nuanced and accurate way than any measure designed to encapsulate and compare the work of thousands of teachers working with hundreds of thousands of students. No less a prominent voice in this discussion, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, was recently quoted as saying: “The principals’ job is to decide who’s good, who’s bad. It’s their judgment; that’s their job.” Who could disagree?”
“But we principals, too, are part of the problem. Not because we have promoted the use of bad data to rate teachers, but because we may have allowed our attention to stray from our chief job of promoting professional growth, training staff, documenting teacher performance, creating community and defining what quality teaching and learning look like in our schools. Newly necessary distractions like marketing and fund-raising and data analysis may have seemed more important than getting into classrooms and working with teachers on how to plan lessons and ask questions. But if we let our attention waiver from those things which we know should be our primary focus, if we asked “How can we help students earn more credits?” instead of “How can we help students learn more?” then some of the distrust we see driving this new agreement is our fault, even if we believe that is what the school system and the general public wanted us to do. We may have felt less incentive to concentrate on the quality of classroom instruction in our schools because we are rated on other things, but we know our jobs. If we chose to focus on tasks outside of instruction, it makes sense that the void such a choice created was filled by psychometricians.”
Imagine that: a deputy chancellor who believes that professional judgment is wiser than data!
This will be interesting.
