Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie says the New York state Assembly will take up a bill Wednesday to decouple the results of standardized test scores from teacher evaluations. There’s been growing support in the state legislature to reverse the controversial policy that would eventually have led to the test results being used to measure teacher performance.
There's already a moratorium on using the test results for teacher evaluations, after teachers and their unions objected to the idea.
Assembly Heastie, a Democrat, says there are better ways to measure teacher performance.
“We just believe that there’s other things that you can use to evaluate a teacher’s performance,” Heastie said. “The test scores don’t always tell the true measure of a teacher’s efforts.”
There is growing support for the measure in the State Senate.
Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo initially supported a policy that would have required student test scores to count for 50 percent of a teacher’s performance evaluation. But the governor has since backed off on that position.