The Benson School bands together to fight Cuomo’s teacher evaluation system
Fee fi fo fum, Governor Cuomo, here we come!
Teachers, students and parents of Bensonhurst’s P.S. 200, the Benson School, took to the street surrounding their building on Thursday, March 12 to rally against Governor Andrew Cuomo’s new proposed guidelines for evaluating teachers – a system that would increase emphasis on standardized test scores and decrease the impact of local observation.
The backlash comes in response to the new 50-50 scale that would base 50 percent of a teacher’s rating on student’s standardized test scores and the remaining 50 percent on observation of the teachers in action. However, instead of school supervisory personnel doing the in-classroom evaluations, 35 percent of evaluations would be conducted by “independent” observers.