we have the power within the district to implement whatever evaluation tool we want. so, we ve got a lot of pushback. we still get tremendous pushback from the unions. so, for example, we just identified about 241 educators of this last summer who were not effective or did not have the certificate, et cetera, and when we did that, we said for the ineffective teachers, people who got that on the evaluation, a robust evaluation, looking at multiple things, you are now being terminated, then we get slapped with this, you know, huge class action grievance, basically, saying, we re grieving the way that you did this. but the bottom line is that if these people are ineffective and if as president weingarten said no one wants ineffective teachers in the classroom, you can t fight us every step of the way when we re moving in that direction. what do you see in the sense of the overall here, because this is really the core? it is the core. let s take a step back. the status quo isn t work
perennial issues that have plagued school districts to date in collective bargaining agree agreements. those are tenure, lockstep pay and seniority. this contract addresses all of those by ensuring that we do not have a system that has teaching as a job for life regardless of performance, that teachers are recognized and rewarded for the incredible work that they re doing, and that we look at the quality of the teachers and not just how long they ve been in the system. but how are you going to judge the quality? what is a fair and accurate way of assessing who are the star teachers who should deserve this very big pay increase? right. so one of the things that we have put into our new evaluation system is student performance. and i know that sounds obvious to most people, but it s something that has actually never been in the evaluation tool we ve used for teachers here in washington, d.c. so moving forward, 50% of the teacher s evaluation will be based on how aggressively they mov
year to improve their practice and if they don t, then they will also be subject to termination. so i think one of the sort of flags along the wake the mile post people are looking at is what is going to happen to the 750 educators. now, another thing for parents and citizens here in d.c. to look at is the expanded use of standardized tests in evaluating teachers. initially you in the lower grades, you wanted to expand them to other fields and to all the grades eventually from k to 12. that s right. we have as part of our evaluation tool, we have a metric where we look at how much the students have actually learned in a given academic year and in order to do that effectively, you have to have testing at more grade levels and in more subject areas so one of the things that we have planned beginning this year and on through the next few years is expanding the testing coverage. the third thing we were focused on is expanding the use of chart expublic charters.