Facing tremendous pressure from the teacher unions, lawmakers are pushing to insert a provision in the state budget that would ban the public from seeing new teacher report cards, sources said tonight.
The effort to keep the public from viewing evaluations of public school teachers across New York State is being spearheaded by Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver (D-Manhattan), an Albany insider said.
Sources said that Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos (R-Nassau), trying to maintain the Republican Party’s slim majority in the upper legislative house, may go along with the controversial prohibition.
It’s unclear where Gov. Cuomo stands on the issue.
“This is real serious. They mean it,” said one state official.
“What does the governor do if the Legislature passes this? It puts him in a tough spot.”
Albany insiders view the proposed ban as a sneak attack.
Both houses of the Legislature recently introduced spending bills that didn’t include any restrictions on disclosing teacher ratings.
Cuomo and the Legislature are now in negotiations to approve a new state budget by April 1 – and 11th hour proposals are being put on the table.
The union leaders were infuriated when the Post and other media outlets recently published the ratings of 12,000 teachers. The Post won the right to disclosed the numerical grades after filing a Freedom of Information Law request with the city Department of Education.
The United Federation of Teachers filed a lawsuit to block the release, but the courts sided with the Post.
Meanwhile the unions are ticked off at Cuomo and the Legislature for approving another law scaling back pensions for newly hired government workers.
“This sneak attack on teacher evaluations is also an attempt by lawmakers to make up to the teachers’ unions for the new Tier VI pension law,” one capital source said.
Cuomo and the Legislature earlier this month approved a new law governing teacher evaluations, which was endorsed by the UFT and its statewide affiliate, the New York State United Teachers.
Under the law, 40 percent of a teacher’s grade will be based on how their students perform on statewide standardized tests and local assessments, with the remainder based on classroom observations and other measures.
Under the law, teachers will be rated as highly effective, effective, developing or ineffective.
The same law also makes it easier for the city to get rid of bad teachers.
The new evaluations do not take effect until school districts reach final agreement with their local teacher unions. But school districts will be penalized with cut in state funding if the evaluations are not in place by January of next year.
Key state lawmakers tonight said they were not privy to the bid to keep teacher ratings private.
Assembly Education Committee Chairwoman Cathy Nolan (D-Queens), who had been critical of the release of the city teacher ratings, said she did not know about any such ban being put on the table.
Senate Education Chairman John Flanagan (R-Suffolk) said, “We have not discussed it in [the Senate Republican] conference.”
Cuomo’s people late tonight said they also had not be warned about the effort.
It won’t be the first time — or the last — that that Legislature pulled a fast one on school districts.
The Legislature – at the behest of the UFT – slipped an amendment in the budget in 2008 that barred the use of student test data to determine whether a teacher deserves tenure.
The measure was opposed by Mayor Bloomberg and then-Schools Chancellor Joel Klein.
Additional reporting by Frederick U. Dicker and Erik Kriss