Dive Brief:
- Democratic legislators in the New York State Assembly have rejected Gov. Andrew Cuomo's aggressive 11-point reform plan, which would be tied to $800 million in school funding and the promise of an increased $1.1 billion in state aid if all 11-points were signed into law.
- The January proposal suggested reforms that included $20,000 rewards for effective teachers, an easier removal process for ineffective teachers, the expansion of the state's charter school cap, the expansion of mayoral control, the transformation of ineffective schools, the modification of the state's current teacher evaluation process, and the tying of teacher tenure to classroom performance.
- Speaker Carl E. Heastie explained the rejection, saying, “We must help our children to succeed, not punish them because they may live in poorer communities or deny their schools the funding they need to improve the learning environment.”
Dive Insight:
The push back indicated that this could be a tense budget negotiation for New York. While many of Cuomo's reform ideas are not so out of character for the governor, one of the more surprising point deals with teacher evaluations. Cuomo last year proposed a bill that would postpone the use of test scores in teacher evaluations as the state adjusts to the Common Core, but in December, he shot down his own suggestion when evals from the 2013-14 school year showed less than 1% of educators as "ineffective." Cuomo saw this as a sign that tougher evaluations were needed.
The rejection of Cuomo's proposal may also put the governor, once again, against New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. At the end of last month, de Blasio asked state lawmakers to give the city's schools more funding, and to give him permanent mayoral control of the city's schools — a detail that typically needs to be reauthorized every few years. The request for more power pushes against Cuomo's proposal that any school labeled as "failing" be placed under state control. In response to the request, Cuomo said he would rather keep mayoral power restricted to a temporary basis.