New York’s Board of Regents meets Monday and Tuesday to finalize controversial new teacher evaluation laws ahead of a June 30 deadline.
When legislators mandated the evaluation system in the state budget, they left out some details. Now the state Education Department is writing those rules, and the Regents will vote on them.
At stake is how to weigh each part of the new evaluation. The parts include student test scores and classroom observations. One big question is how much will ride on what the law calls “independent” observations, from someone who isn’t the teacher’s own principal. The Regents will also decide how strictly they’ll enforce the November deadline for schools to adopt the new system.