Teachers are protesting a city proposal to use standardized test scores to determine which public school educators will earn tenure this year. Based on improvements in state test scores, the Department of Education wants to classify educators as either "tenure likely" or "tenure in doubt" — a plan the teachers union might sue to stop.
According to the Daily News, educators from schools with similar demographics will be bumped up against each other to see whose students show the biggest uptick. Department of Education officials say it's a fair way to assess educators. "It's hard to imagine how anyone could object to looking at a teacher's impact on student progress as a part of a comprehensive evaluation."
But the teacher's union is considering going to court to halt the plan. "It is clearly bad educational policy to evaluate teachers through the use of state test scores that the state itself has deemed unreliable," said union president Michael Mulgrew.
