Cuomo To Impose Teacher Evaluation System On City - And It's Mulgrew's Fault

When did the governor of NY get to write laws?

I thought the Assembly and the State Senate wrote the laws.

But not anymore, not when Andrew "I Am The State" Cuomo can write his own teacher evaluation system law giving the NYSED the power to impose any system it wants on NYC teachers and the Assmebly and State Senate will just pass it.

And that's exactly what we have happening:

Gov. Cuomo has abandoned any hope that Mayor Bloomberg and the teachers union can agree on a new teacher-evaluation system, and he will submit legislation this week authorizing the state Education Department to impose such a system on the city, The Post has learned.

...


Cuomo’s proposal will be part of a series of “30-day amendments” that are planned to modify the state budget he proposed to the Legislature last month.

The proposal, which is expected to win easy approval from the Legislature, would still give the city and the United Federation of Teachers until Sept. 17 to reach an agreement, but if they fail to do so, an evaluation system drafted by the state would take effect.

Late last month, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver (D-Manhattan), a strong union ally, and the leaders of the Senate made it clear they were ready to back Cuomo on imposing a teacher-evaluation deadline on the city.

As NYC Educator writes here, who knows how egregious this evaluation system is going to be?

I suspect since NYSED Commissioner King is getting to impose whatever the hell he wants, and King is a staunch education deformer, this system will be very bad.

What's most upsetting is that the system will be imposed just a little over three months before a new mayor takes office.

For a while now, the UFT has been saying "Just wait until Bloomberg goes, everything will get better!"

No, it won't - even with a new mayor in office, we will have an evaluation system imposed upon us by the state for God knows how long.

Perhaps John King will decide Bloomberg's "The Evaluation System Must Stand In Perpetuity" decree is the one to go with?

Who knows?

And with Shelly not willing to fight this - most likely because the UFT is NOT willing to fight this - we could have this system in place for a very, very long time.

Maybe Mulgrew and Company think they can skirt responsibility for this mess by placing the blame squarely on Cuomo and King - "Hey, we didn't impose this on you, they did!"

But that won't work with me.

The reason why we have a authoritarian governor about to write his own law imposing his own teacher evaluation system on NYC is because the UFT has collaborated in developing the Race to the Top law and the APPR evaluation system based upon test scores.

They should have been fighting a law that imposes junk science on us in the form of VAM and growth models.

They should have been fighting a law that imposes the Danielson rubric - a 57 page checklist for observations that turns teaching into a "Danielson's Way Or The Highway" profession.

Instead they helped impose these on us and they, along with Cuomo, Tisch, King and Ianuzzi, bear the responsibility for it.

Make no mistake, the system King imposes will be a bad one and the UFT leadership will NOT be able to squirm out of the responsibility they bear for that.

More and more UFT members want MORE out of their union and they're beginning to see that the entrenched and corrupt leadership we currently have cannot protect members from the ravages of the politicians or the education deform movement any longer.

Teachers are starting to look elsewhere for their leadership.

Mulgrew and Company will win re-election this time around, but after a few years of the APPR mess, voodoo VAM, growth models and Danielson, I would be willing to bet the hundreds of hours of Common Core PD that John King is going to force me to go to that we have a real election on our hands.

I'm sure Mulgrew and his entrenched leadership think they can bluster and b.s. their way out of this the way they have blustered and b.s.'ed their way out of every other collaboration and concession they have made in the last 12 years.

They cannot.

APPR will be their Waterloo.

I have seen so many apolitical teachers get politicized during this past year over the Common Core mess and all the garbage that has been imposed as a result of that.

People are pissed at the system, they're pissed at Bloomberg and Cuomo, but they're pissed at Mulgrew and the UFT too.

They know the UFT has been doing nothing to protect students and teachers from the insanity of the Common Core imposition, which now has kindergartners learning permutations instead of playing and no more art in art class, just argumentative essay writing.

Many more teachers will become politicized after APPR is imposed, with its 57 page observation rubric, its six observations a year, the Student Learning Objectives with the growth models, the high stakes standardized tests with voodoo VAM attached.

Mulgrew and Company bear ultimate responsibility for this mess and no matter how many Unity hacks they send out to leave comments on the MORE blog or sling jive at teachers in individual schools, teachers in NYC are beginning to  recognize this.