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Assembly will take up bill to separate student test scores from teacher evaluations

State Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie said the Assembly will take up a bill Wednesday to decouple the results of standardized student test scores from teacher evaluations.

There has been growing support in the state Legislature to reverse the controversial policy that eventually would have led to the test results being used to measure teacher performance.

There already is a moratorium on using the test results for teacher evaluations, after teachers and their unions objected to the idea.

Heastie said there are better ways to measure performance.

“We just believe that there’s other things that you can use to evaluate a teacher’s performance,” he said. “The test scores don’t always tell the true measure of a teacher’s efforts.”

There is growing support for the measure in the state Senate.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo initially supported a policy that would have required student test scores to count for 50 percent of a teacher’s performance evaluation.  But the governor has since backed off on that position.

Copyright 2018 WXXI News

Karen DeWitt is Capitol Bureau Chief for New York State Public Radio, a network of 10 public radio stations in New York State. She has covered state government and politics for the network since 1990.