Legislators Agree to Turn Teacher Evaluation System Into Law - SchoolBook Legislative leaders agreed on Thursday morning to turn a new teacher evaluation system into law, bringing New York a step closer to ensuring that the state will hold on to $700 million in federal education aid. In an agreement brokered by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo in February, state education officials and the teachers" unions compromised on the framework of a system to evaluate teachers based on their classroom performance, their success at raising students" test scores, and other measures. The state must have such a system to receive federal Race to the Top money. For more than two years, the unions and the state had battled over how much weight to give students" test scores in the evaluation's 100-point scale. In the end, the two sides agreed that 40 percent of a teacher's evaluation would be based on student achievement measures and 60 percent on classroom observations. The agreement reached Thursday on the new evaluation system, which still must be considered in the Assembly and the State Senate, came days after principals from across New York State, including many from New York City, gathered on Long Island to plan a campaign against the agreed-upon process. Their chief concerns were that the system places too much emphasis on test scores by automatically rating teachers "ineffective" if their students" scores do not meet targets for improvement over the previous year. The principals, who have gathered about 1,400 signatures from principals statewide on a petition objecting to the system, also called on lawmakers to prevent the evaluation results from being released to the public, a response to the release and publication last month of 18,000 New York City teachers" rankings after a court ruling. The evaluation system was part of the negotiations Wednesday and Thursday among Governor Cuomo; the Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver; and the State Senate majority leader, Dean Skelos, over several other issues, including plans to reduce pensions for future public workers. Mr. Cuomo has given the state's approximately 700 school districts one year - until January 2013 - to negotiate the details of the evaluation system. Under the agreement reached last month, 20 percent of teachers" evaluations will be based on students" scores on state exams, but districts have to negotiate the other 20 percent of the student achievement piece, deciding whether to create their own local assessments, or use students" state exam results in a different way. "The new statewide evaluation law sets clear standards for measuring educators based on how our students are performing in the classroom, so we can make sure our children have (the) best possible opportunity for the future," Mr. Cuomo said in a statement released on Thursday. I commend the legislative leaders for taking this extraordinary step to create permanent and real evaluations in our schools. Under the new system, teachers will be ranked ineffective, developing, effective or highly effective. The current system has only two rankings, unsatisfactory and satisfactory.