In a step toward reshaping how all teachers in New York City’s 1,700 public schools are judged, the Department of Education and the city teachers’ union agreed on Friday to a pilot teacher-evaluation system that will take effect next year in 33 struggling schools.
The deal, which ended months of disagreement, was needed for the city’s continued participation in a federal grant program that could bring up to $65 million in grants — up to $6 million for some schools — over the next three years.
City officials announced months ago that they had applied for the grants for the 33 schools. But the application was stalled by the state, which had to approve it and which said it was dissatisfied with proposals for how the money would be used and how teachers would be evaluated.
As of Friday, the city had not yet submitted its revised plans to Albany, state officials said, making it impossible to know for sure whether the schools would continue to receive the money.
Under the deal, announced by the city, all teachers in the struggling schools — schools with low graduation rates and low student test scores — will be rated annually as either ineffective, developing, effective or highly effective. In the current system, in place for decades, teachers have been rated simply satisfactory or unsatisfactory.
The revised system mirrors a recent state law that will require that four-tier evaluation scale to be used for all public school teachers statewide in the coming years. The troubled schools will be a testing ground for that system, union and city officials said.
”If we have an opportunity to look at this on a small scale, we might come to a better understanding of some of the issues inside of that legislation,” said Michael Mulgrew, the president of the United Federation of Teachers, the city teacher’s union.
But the city and the union remain a long way from a deal on reforming evaluations for all teachers, and many details of the evaluation system even within the pilot program have not been worked out.
Two of the most contentious unresolved issues are how much weight students’ standardized test scores will be given in a teacher’s evaluation alongside other measures of progress, and whether the union would agree to new standardized tests that the city is considering.
Several problems have beset the city’s effort to acquire the school improvement grants. Eleven schools were due to receive the grants starting last year, but delays in the application process meant that the money did not begin flowing until January, limiting its effectiveness. The city was also forced to reshape its plans for many of the remaining schools because of disagreements with the union.
Talks between the union and the city about the evaluation system foundered over whether a teacher would be allowed to ask for a meeting with a principal after a negative evaluation and whether the union could file a grievance on behalf of a teacher if such a meeting was not held, both parties said.
In the end, the city agreed to most of the union’s requests on that issue, in exchange for requiring that a record of a negative evaluation remain in a teacher’s file, said Matt Mittenthal, a Department of Education spokesman.
The federal grants were intended to help the city devise a plan for the struggling schools, most of which are high schools, to avoid having to close them. The grant can pay for additional training for teachers and would give principals the ability to hire “master teachers” who would be paid a 30 percent premium and would work extra hours.
Some of the schools will be taken over by a nonprofit organization under a plan called a “restart” in the federal government’s grant language.
The schools eligible for the grants include Cobble Hill School of American Studies, Boys & Girls High School and John Dewey High School in Brooklyn; Flushing High School and Long Island City High School in Queens; Herbert H. Lehman High School and Banana Kelly High School in the Bronx; and Washington Irving High School in Manhattan.
Brian Rosenbloom, the principal of Chelsea Career and Technical Education High School, one of the schools that had begun to receive grant funding this year, said news of the deal was not surprising in light of the budget accord last month that saved the jobs of 4,100 teachers.
“I figured they would come up with an agreement as soon as they decided they wouldn’t lay anyone off,” he said.
There was a sense of relief that after months of uncertainty, the grant money, particularly needed in a time of budget cuts, had been secured, even though the hard work lies ahead.
“It’s fantastic that there will be additional resources put into high-needs schools,” said Robert Hughes, the executive director of New Visions for Public Schools, a nonprofit organization that has applied to manage five struggling schools. “Now we have to make sure that those resources are effectively used.”
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