School officials to guv: We need standards

School superintendents to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo: Don't just give us deadlines. Give us standards.

Long Island's school leaders are pressing Cuomo to spell out detailed, uniform statewide standards for evaluating teachers' job performance, rather than leaving the task to individual districts and their teacher unions.

Otherwise, those leaders say, districts might be pressured into granting unions overly generous pay raises or other concessions, simply to win their agreement to new evaluation rules. Cuomo this week threatened to withhold hundreds of millions of dollars in state aid to districts if they don't come up with evaluation plans by January 2013. More than $700 million in federal assistance to the state also will be at stake.

"Cuomo has the ability to do a lot, if he chooses to," said Alan Groveman, the Connetquot schools chief and president of the Suffolk County School Superintendents Association. "If the governor leaves it to 700 districts [statewide] to negotiate, we're going to continue to face the problem we always have, and that is that it's difficult to get something without giving something in return."

The point was underlined Thursday, when organizations representing school chiefs in all 124 districts in Nassau and Suffolk counties issued a joint statement, urging new legislation to establish "common working standards" for teachers statewide.

Under a state law passed in 2010, all districts and unions must negotiate new plans for rating teachers as current contracts expire, with at least 20 percent of those ratings based on students' scores on state tests. Initial ratings would affect about 52,000 teachers in grades 4-8 statewide, including 7,000 on the Island. The effort, however, is tied up in state courts as state and union officials argue over whether the portion of ratings based on state tests can legally be raised beyond 20 percent.

Cuomo contends that New York's emerging evaluation system falls short of what is required in other states such as Colorado and Tennessee.

In his budget message this week, the governor threatened to introduce legislation with an evaluation system of his own unless the school employee unions and the state Education Department agree on an effective system and settle their court dispute within 30 days.

"If we're serious about education, we have to do this," Cuomo told his Albany audience of lawmakers and others.

But the governor has not spelled out details of what his version of an evaluation system might contain, and whether it would go as far as the Long Island superintendents want in laying out fully defined standards and procedures.

A spokesman declined to elaborate on Cuomo's vision Thursday. "It's premature for that," said Morris Peters, a representative of the governor's Division of the Budget.

New York State United Teachers, the umbrella labor group representing 600,000 school workers statewide, points out that current law calls for districts and local unions to hammer out details of evaluation plans on their own. Unlike the Long Island superintendents, the statewide organization wants to stick with that arrangement, and some bitterly resent the threat of Albany's intervention.

"I think a lot of this is political posturing," said Anthony Felicio Jr., president of Connetquot's 600-member teacher union. "Politicians need a scapegoat. And all the public unions, teachers included, have become convenient scapegoats."

In the dozens of Long Island districts that have failed to reach agreement, school officials cite two major sticking points. One is whether superintendents or outside arbitrators will decide appeals by teachers whose work is rated unsatisfactory. The other is exactly what percentage of teachers' ratings will be based on classroom observations.

A handful of Island districts have managed to work out and post evaluation plans on their websites: In East Williston and Hampton Bays superintendents will decide appeals, and classroom observations will play a pivotal role in evaluations.