Bumpy Start for Teacher Evaluation Program in New York Schools
Ángel Franco/The New York Times
Nina Phillips, upper right, being evaluated last month as she taught at P.S. 295 in Brooklyn.
By AL BAKER
Published: December 22, 2013
Connect With NYTMetroOver the 24 years Lily Din Woo has been the principal of Public School 130 in Lower Manhattan, her typical day changed very little: sick or misbehaving students, budgets, curriculum woes and meetings with parents, many of whom do not speak English.
This year, however, she and the assistant principal are spending parts of each day darting in and out of classrooms, clipboards and iPads in hand, as they go over checklists for good teaching. Is the lesson clear? Is the classroom organized?
All told, they will spend over two of the 40 weeks of the school year on such visits. The hours spent sitting with teachers to discuss each encounter and entering their marks into the school system’s temperamental teacher-grading database easily stretch to more than a month.
“At some point, something is just going to give,” Ms. Woo, 62, said. “The observations are important, but so is counseling a troubled child or a family struggling to help their