Education Week - March 25, 2015 - 17

GOVERnMEnT & POLITIcS
Gov. Cuomo's
Budget Sparks
Backlash in N.Y.
Proposal aims to toughen
teacher evaluations
By Stephen Sawchuk
Do schools need more money or
greater accountability?
That age-old education debate,
currently playing out between New
York Governor Andrew Cuomo and
the state's teachers' union, is becoming
a powder-keg thanks to the
fallout from the governor's budget
proposals.
At issue is Gov. Cuomo's 2015-16
budget request for education, which
would predicate some $733 million
in new aid on lawmakers' acceptance
of provisions to increase the
weight placed on standardized test
scores in teachers' evaluations and
to make it harder for teachers to
earn tenure.
Although so far there seems to be
a mixed appetite among lawmakers
to approve those changes, the
state's teachers' unions are taking
no chances, supporting protests
by parents and others against the
proposals.
And they are using those newfound
alliances to hammer home a longstanding
complaint that the governor
has refused to meet the requirements
of a 2006 court ruling demanding
more money for the schools.
Evaluation Debate
Gov. Cuomo's focus on teacher
evaluation escalates long-standing
tension in the state over revisions
to how teachers are graded.
New York won $700 million in the
federal Race to the Top competition
in 2010, largely on the strength of
a law, supported by both union and
state officials, linking teacher evaluations
to student achievement.
But almost since the ink dried on
that legislation, the two sides have
disagreed about how to implement
the law, especially over the question
of how much of each teacher's rating
should depend on student test scores.
Mr. Cuomo has put the technique of
conditioning education aid on policy
changes to effective use before. In
2012, he required districts to settle
with their unions on a final teacherevaluation
system in order to receive
a portion of their total funding.
But beginning last year, Mr. Cuomo
began to express dissatisfaction with
the results of the new rating systems,
noting that nearly all teachers are
being given good scores-just as they
had under the former evaluations.
Gov. Cuomo's 2015-16 budget proposal
attempts to tighten the evaluation
rules and throws in a host of
other policy alterations, many opposed
by the unions.
Among other actions, he wants
the budget deal to:
* Increase students' standardizedtest
scores to 50 percent of a teacher's
evaluation, and require at least
one observation to be conducted by
someone outside a school.
* Require teachers to earn five
evaluations of "effective" or better
before being eligible for tenure.
* Make it easier to dismiss teachers
who have received poor evaluations.
* Use $8 million to appoint receivers
to oversee failing schools or districts.
* Increase the state charter school
cap by 100 schools, bringing it to 560.
* Use $100 million to support tax
breaks to donors who help provide
scholarships for parents to send
their children to private schools.
In all, Mr. Cuomo's tactic "positions
him where the leverage
is-with the budget process. He
is a great tactician," said Derrell
Bradford, the executive director of
nycan, an education advocacy organization
that supports the governor's
plan. "The challenge is that,
because there is so much in it, it has
PAGE 19 >
A protestor outside the
New York state Capitol in
Albany marches this month
with supporters of public
education. Hundreds of
public school students
and parents rallied at the
Capitol to urge lawmakers
to reject Gov. Andrew
Cuomo's education
reforms.
Special Education Task Force Urges Overhaul for California
By Christina A. Samuels
Members of a task force that spent two years
studying special education in California used
their final report to recommend sweeping
changes to the state's entire pre-K-12 system
in hopes of improving achievement for students
with disabilities.
Virtually every major element of education
policy-including early-childhood education,
special education finance, teacher training,
and accountability-was wrapped into the
final report from California's statewide task
force on special education. The report was
presented to the state board of education
March 11.
The next question, now that the report is
done: Are those recommendations achievable
in a state that accounts for about 1 in 10 students
with disabilities nationally?
"This is the time for a major leap forward,
and I think a lot of people feel strongly that
this is a better time than some false starts in
the past," said Carl A. Cohn, a former superintendent
for the Long Beach Unified district and
the chairman of the task force.
The proposals, if all implemented, would require
action from classroom teachers all the
way up to the federal government. But members
of the panel say that the opportunity for
major change is possible.
Mr. Cohn said the state can take advantage of
the changes wrought by an improving financial
picture for the state, as well as the shift to Common
Core State Standards.
Alice Parker, the state director of special education
in California from 1997 to 2005, testified
before the task force when it was seeking community
comment.
"What I'm so excited about from the task force
is that people came together and thought, 'It's
not good enough in California,' " Ms. Parker said.
An education consultant, she and others helped
write the report, but did not contribute to the
final proposal. "We've got to stop the practice of
saying, 'This is a child with a disability, so send
them to Alice because she's a special educator.'
We need to work collaboratively."
Heavy Hitters
The task force was the brainchild of Stanford
University colleagues and education heavyhitters
Michael W. Kirst and Linda DarlingHammond.
Mr. Kirst, the president of the state
board of education, is a professor emeritus of
education and business education at Stanford;
Ms. Darling-Hammond, an education professor,
is the chairwoman of the California Commission
on Teacher Credentialing.
In an interview, Mr. Kirst said that special
education was caught up in managing legal
requirements.
"All that ever came before the [state] board
were compliance documents to send in to
Washington," Mr. Kirst said. "And yet we kept
hearing very difficult things about how the
students were doing."
Mr. Kirst and Ms. Darling-Hammond pitched
their idea for a statewide task force in the fall
of 2013, eventually getting four foundations-
the Charles and Helen Schwab Foundation, the
Stuart Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard
Foundation, and the Dirk and Charlene
Kabcenell Foundation-to support its work.
The task force found statistics that supported
its impression that California lags
other states in serving its 600,000 students in
special education.
For the class of 2012, the passing rate for students
with disabilities on the California High
School Exit Examination was 56 percent by the
end of their senior year, compared with 95 percent
for students without disabilities.
To make matters worse, California is below
national averages when it comes to including
students with disabilities in general educaPAGE
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EDUCATION WEEK | March 25, 2015 | www.edweek.org | 17
Mike Groll/AP
http://www.edweek.org
Education Week - March 25, 2015

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