Bob McManus
So now it’s up to state Education Commissioner John King and his band of Albany bureaucrats to chum up an effective New York City teacher-evaluation system?
With all due respect to the commissioner: Not bloody likely.
And Gov. Cuomo, the architect of this latest scheme to coerce the United Federation of Teachers into doing something fundamentally contrary to its best interests, certainly knows it.
Sure, he says his plan will guarantee meaningful evaluations into “perpetuity.”
He says he means for King to develop and impose an evaluation regimen on the city and the UFT if no agreement is reached by June 1.
AP
Surprise: The real power in state education is Speaker Sheldon Silver, not Gov. Cuomo.
Mind you, the need for meaningful evaluations is obvious.
Mayor Bloomberg’s Department of Education has been hamstrung by its inability to fire incompetent, lazy or otherwise unfit teachers ever since he took control of the schools a decade ago.
And the governor himself has been promising a system for eliminating bad teachers since he declared himself to be a “lobbyist” for public-school pupils more than a year ago.
So, taken at face value, the governor has handed King a real challenge. Which is interesting, because he lacks the authority — constitutional or otherwise — to tell King what time to come to work in the morning.
Thus two questions:
* Is Cuomo sincerely attempting to redeem his pledge to look out for the kids?
* Or is this latest initiative just a thinly disguised surrender to the UFT?
It certainly takes a massive leap of faith to assume that anything meaningful will emerge from the legislation Cuomo has proposed.
This, again, is because Commissioner King doesn’t work for Cuomo. He works for the state Board of Regents and, specifically, for Regents Chancellor Merryl H. Tisch.
And Tisch owes her position solely to Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver — plus to the state Constitution, which severely restricts the direct control governors have over education policy.
The Constitution requires that regents, and the chancellor, be elected by the entire Legislature — sitting as a single body. And since Silver’s Democratic conference outnumbers all other lawmakers combined, he has the whip hand.
Which he exercised with his elevation of Tisch to what is nominally one of the most powerful public-education jobs in America. But while puppet may be too strong a word to describe Tisch’s actual role, she’s not remotely likely to buck him on matters of this magnitude.
So what is Silver’s interest?
Well, let’s just say that the influence the public employee unions enjoy over the speaker and his Assembly Democrats is profound. And that none of those unions are more influential than the UFT and its parent organization, New York State United Teachers.
So it’s not hard to see where all this is heading.
Without reference to King’s good faith, Tisch’s independence or Cuomo’s sincerity, it remains that that the state Education Department itself has been in near-total thrall to Silver and the teachers for years — indeed, decades.
Thus it’s simply not reasonable to expect that the three could force the department to exercise real independence on teacher evaluations, even if they wanted to.
Not in the immediate case, and certainly not over time.
So much for Cuomo’s “perpetuity.”
So much, in fact, for the notion that there is anything fundamentally different in this approach than from what has come before.
The UFT has had an effective veto over meaningful evaluations all along. While it may allow Silver to engineer a fig-leaf accommodation this time around — the union, after all, stands to regain effective control of city schools once Bloomberg leaves office — there’s no reason to believe that significant numbers of bad teachers will wind up losing their jobs.
Ever.
rmcmanus8@gmail.com
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Schools Fix Is In
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Schools Fix Is In
