Teacher Assessments Extending to Art and Gym

By JAVIER C. HERNÁNDEZ

New York City students have grown accustomed to the restless routine of state tests in math and reading every year. But soon they will face assessments in subjects typically spared from standardized testing, including art, gym and foreign languages.

A new system for evaluating educators, announced by the state on Saturday, will reshape how teachers are hired and fired in the city. It will also have a profound effect on students, who will take part in a series of new exams designed to help administrators grade teachers in specialized subjects.

Under the new evaluation system, which was imposed by the state after months of feuding between the city and the teachers’ union, teachers will be graded next school year on a variety of measures. Student test scores will make up 20 percent of their rating, while classroom observations will account for 60 percent. Principals and teachers will work together to decide how to evaluate the remaining 20 percent.

But many educators teach subjects for which there are no widely used tests. In response, the city is developing assessments in a range of subjects, including English as a second language, special education and music. City officials are also working on assessments for kindergarten, first grade and second grade, where exams are less common.

Shael Polakow-Suransky, chief academic officer of the city’s Department of Education, said the assessments were designed to be more rigorous and wide-ranging than traditional standardized tests.

“We don’t want to just invent hundreds of new bubble tests in order to satisfy these requirements for teacher evaluation,” Dr. Polakow-Suransky said on Sunday. He said the exams would instead focus on challenging students to think critically and creatively.

An English class, for instance, might require students to complete a long-form research paper, and ask them to repeat the task in the spring to gauge how much students had learned.

Still, some critics of standardized testing question the use of more exams, especially for younger children.

“What’s the test for kindergarten teachers or gym teachers?” said Bob Schaeffer, director of public education for FairTest, a national advocacy group. “Those tests don’t exist, and they’re being cobbled together very rapidly.”

The assessments used in teacher evaluations will be put into place over the next three years, Dr. Polakow-Suransky said, and will eventually expand to include all subjects and grade levels. They will be given in the fall and spring to measure how much students learn over the course of a school year.

Across the country, school systems are grappling with the challenges of fine-tuning complex teacher evaluation systems after decades of relying on simple satisfactory-or-unsatisfactory ratings. As the ratings alter school culture, they have also thrust difficult questions upon school administrators. What should an exam on vocational education include? How should learning in kindergarten be measured? Should teachers who handle students with behavioral problems be judged the same way as their peers?

In Tennessee, the state recently released guidelines on how teachers would be graded on art instruction. They will be graded on a scale of one through five depending on how well students perform in portfolios of work. A visual arts student, for instance, is expected to be able to describe symbols in artwork and make connections to other disciplines.

In New York, questions about the evaluation system are widespread, given that state guidelines grant significant authority to principals and teachers to decide how student learning should be measured.

“It’s hard to move away from a system where everybody’s getting a ‘we’re-all-O.K.’ rating,” said Sandi Jacobs, vice president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, a research and policy organization. “It’s a cultural shift.”

Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers, said he had heard complaints from teachers that the new system would be confusing and burdensome.

“This is going to be a very, very difficult path,” he said.

The city said that it would begin offering training on Thursday to allay concerns among teachers, and that workshops would be held throughout the summer.

Some principals are also uneasy about the new guidelines. Their role in schools is expected to change significantly as they begin observing teachers more frequently — as much as six times a year.

Ernest Logan, president of the union that represents principals, said he hoped the city would offer adequate training. “The burden falls on principals to implement something we really had no input in,” he said.

On Sunday, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg hailed the evaluation system as a landmark in the effort to reform education in the city.

“It gives New York confidence that our schools will be able to give the kids the education they will need going forward,” he said.