The Union Should Prepare Their Own Survey Of Principal Effectiveness & Grades If They Really Care About Their Members.

One of he most overlooked issues that has been under the media radar is the decreasing quality of the Administration at schools. Until the Bloomberg/Klein era most principals came up through the ranks with ten or more years of teaching experience and five years as an Assistant Principal. However, now we have the infamous "Leadership Academy Principals" with little or in some cases no teaching experience in the New York City Schools! The result is a reduction in the quality of the Administration when it comes to leadership of the school.

Now that it is becoming increasingly clear that Administration observations will become a very important part of the "teacher effectiveness evaluations". It is time to put the people who will be doing these evaluations, which could be 60% of the teacher grade, under review. My proposal would be that unions will issue an Administrator evaluation survey to all UFT represented staff at each and every school. These surveys will be comprehensive and include, but not limited to, the following items:

• Leadership
• Competency
• Fairness
• Budget Allocation
  
• Accessibility
• Respect
• Unreported Violence
  

While these are just some general areas that the staff can rate the administrators on, I believe if the union leadership put their collective minds and our dues money to it, they can come up with a more detailed Administrative evaluation system.

The Principal evaluation report would be a counterbalance against vindictive and incompetent Principal observations in any teacher termination process under State law 3020-a. This could greatly help "level the playing field" at the teacher termination hearings. Moreover, by rating principals the union can identify those principals that should not be school leaders and publish a list to the media of these terrible principals. Furthermore, the list of "bad principals" will be given to all teachers who wish to transfer and bypass those schools. blogger jd2718 had the right idea in making a "do not apply" list of schools that teachers should stay clear of. The union should expand that list to all schools in the City and put the DOE on notice that the union will not tolerate bad administrators, especially principals. If the union really cares about its members, they must be pro active and put out a list of "bad principals" who received a "D" or "F" based upon their staff's evaluations. Anything less is a disservice to us all.