TEN QUESTIONS FOR PRESIDENT MULGREW ABOUT THE EVALUATION DEAL
1. When will the text of the evaluation agreement reached on February 16 be released?
2. Unlike the February 16 deal, will the final evaluation deal with the city get put to a vote?
3. Why weren’t the turnaround schools part of the deal? What organizing is happening to protect those schools?
4. How will we prevent the State evaluations from being published in the New York Times? Why wasn’t a special exception to FOIA for teachers part of the deal?
5. Given the inordinately high error rate in TDRs, how is the UFT going to prevent similarly inaccurate measures from being used to rate teachers under the new system?
6. Why are only 13% of observations subject to the appeals process? How will the UFT decide who is part of the 13% who get a fair appeals process?
7. Who hires the “validators”? Will they be hired in a way similar to the PIP+ evaluators, which have found against teachers in a vast majority of cases?
8. Why did the UFT agree to allow teachers rather than the DOE to bear the burden of proof when they have been deemed ineffective under ANY circumstances? Isn’t this like saying that sometimes one can be considered guilty until proven innocent? How is due process possible when this is the case?
9. Given the deal mandates one unannounced observation a year, what happens to our contractually protected right for a lesson-specific pre-observation conference for teachers in danger of an adverse rating?
10. If your goal in negotiating the local 20% is performance based assessment rather than standardized testing, how will you get this approved by State Education Department? Especially since the state can threaten to withhold the 4% increase in budgeting if an agreement isn’t reached.
