ALBANY, NY — Gov. Andrew Cuomo said, “The good news is we have teacher evaluation systems for every district in the system. The bad news is they are baloney.” The remark came as he addressed education in the state at his State of the Union and Budget Address on January 21. He went on to say, “38% of high school seniors are prepared for college—38%; 98.7% of high school teachers are rated effective. How can that be?”

He then went on to explain his proposal to change the teacher evaluation system, which would result in more measurement requirements coming from the state. A “local growth measurement” would be eliminated.

The proposed system would make it more difficult for a teacher to achieve a rating of Effective or Highly Effective.

Many in the teaching profession were not pleased. New York State United Teachers (NYSUT) President Karen E. Magee said Cuomo’s agenda “is driven by the governor’s billionaire hedge-fund friends. The truth is, there’s no epidemic of failing schools or bad teachers. There is an epidemic of poverty and under-funding that Albany has failed to adequately address for decades. Nearly one million New York schoolchildren—including more than one-third of African-American and Latino students—live in poverty. The state’s systemic failure to provide enough resources for all of its students and to do so equitably, while giving all teachers the tools and support they need, is the real crisis and the one our governor is trying to sweep under the rug.”

Sen. John Bonacic, who sent a video to constituents on the topic, essentially supported Cuomo’s position, but agreed that much of the education deficiency in the state is related to New York City. He said, “In upstate, in our senate district, we have great teachers. In the city it’s a lot of substitute teachers. In some instances I’ve read, as many as 40% to 50% substitute teachers are coming in and educating our children.”

Another reform the governor proposes would make it easier for school districts “to remove a teacher that has been rated ineffective two years in a row.” The reform includes: “Elimination of the current legal requirement that administrators must attempt to ‘rehabilitate’ teachers who are incompetent or engage in misconduct; removal of the requirement that children must testify in person and will allow them to testify via sworn written or video statements; a clarification to existing law that a non-tenured teacher may be dismissed at any time for any reason; new legislation that prevents a student from being assigned two ineffective teachers in consecutive school years.”

Cuomo’s proposals also include raising the number of charter schools allowed to function in the state. Public school officials have argued against charter schools for years, saying they siphon funds away from public school, and charter school officials are not accountable to voters in the way public school officials are.

Cuomo’s proposals also call for closing failing schools which are in the bottom 5% statewide in terms of test scores, have graduation rates below 60% for three consecutive years, and are not showing progress in grades.

Cuomo’s office wrote, “To ensure that the most chronically underperforming schools in the state improve at a faster rate, the governor proposes legislation modeled after the Massachusetts education receivership model. When a school fails for three years, a nonprofit, another school district, or a turnaround expert must take over the school. That entity will have the authority to: overhaul the curriculum; override agreements to terminate underperforming staff; and provide salary incentives to recruit high-performing educators.”