Skugg turns thumbs down on Gov’s proposal
Superintendent Leonard Skuggevik objects to Governor Cuomo’s strengthening the link between student performance on standardized tests and teacher evaluations.
How would Governor Andrew Cuomo like to be told federal officials are assessing the performance of governors and state legislators to decide who’s doing an exemplary job and who deserves to be fired?
That’s Shelter Island School Superintendent Leonard Skuggevik’s question for the governor in response to Mr. Cuomo’s attempted intervention into teacher evaluations.
The governor has called for increasing the measurement of student performances on standardized tests from 20 to 50 percent of the total evaluation.
That takes away local control of who should or shouldn’t be teaching in local districts, Mr. Skuggevik said.
“I like decisions to be made as locally as possible,” he said.
As a former history teacher, he wouldn’t want 50 percent of the assessment of his performance to have been based on student test results, he added.
The reason districts have school boards is to enable locally elected people to select those who will teach their children and to take actions necessary to improving performance when necessary, the superintendent said.
Because all students are required to take tests, including those who may have weak English language skills or learning disabilities, their scores could lower an excellent teacher’s evaluation, Mr. Skuggevik said.
“You will never see me walk into a classroom and tell a teacher how to teach,” Mr. Skuggevik said. His role is to listen and to discover how a teacher is handling a class. What looks for is effective learning taking place, not methodology.
Mr. Cuomo’s call to increase the importance of state tests in assessing teacher performance is based on his observation that fewer than 1 percent of teachers are rated as ineffective while too many students continue to miss performance goals.
The governor also called for increasing from three to five years the time it would take for a teacher to be granted tenure.
“I don’t have an issue with five years,” Mr. Skuggevik said, but said he thinks if a teacher has demonstrated capabilities over a three year period, that’s not likely to change in the next two years.
Then there’s Mr. Cuomo’s call for more charter schools.
Charter schools aren’t negative in and of themselves, Mr. Skuggevik said. But they aren’t currently held to the same standards as public schools. What many people fail to realize is that charter schools are largely funded from money taken out of public school budgets, Mr. Skuggevik said.
At a time when every penny is vital to school districts, that can be crippling if there are several students moving to a charter school from a single district, he added.
“We need a better way to fund charter schools,” Mr. Skuggevik said.
It will be up to the New York State Legislature to act on the various proposals Governor Cuomo has advocated.
Count Mr. Skuggevik in with Riverhead, Southold, Greenport and Mattituck-Cutchogue superintendents who aren’t ready to get on board with the governor.
