Cuomo: Governor Goofus or Gallant?

Governor Cuomo takes the insanely radical step of... appointing a commission!*

Gov. Cuomo, in his second state-of-state address Wednesday, will accuse New York’s schools of being unaccountable and announce a commission to come up with reforms, the Daily News has learned.

Cuomo’s announcement will come just days after he was critical of the city and other districts that failed to reach agreement with their unions on a new teacher evaluation system by an end-of-year deadline.

“The failure to pass the teacher evaluation system is an example that not only is the system broken, but the ability to monitor the system and come up with a method to ensure kids are educated properly is broken,” said a source close to Cuomo.

The education commission he will announce will be designed to look at education from a “student perspective,” the source said.

“What are the performance indicators? How do you judge performance in the education system? How are the services being provided?” the source said. “No one has really looked at it without a particular perspective on what’s going on in education.”

The makeup of the commission, which as of Sunday was still undetermined, will likely include outside experts. [emphasis mine]

Yeah, I'd say that's more than a little likely. Let's set aside the fact that Cuomo apparently doesn't want to look at Albany's own culpability in failing to serve New York's students.

The real question is whether this commission - which undoubtedly will come up with recommendations for evaluating educators - will include any actual, working teachers. Or will we once again be locked out of the process by people who don't know the first thing about what we do?

Governor Cuomo, you have a choice here, and you have two role models for your choice:

Governor Goofus of New Jersey only had ONE working teacher on his task force. Worse, he included people who had no training, experience, knowledge, or even a stake in teacher evaluation systems design.

Governor Gallant of California, however, took advantage of a scandal within the Commission on Teacher Credentialing to clean house and appoint actual teachers. Who do you think is going to get better buy-in from the teachers of his state?

Governor Cuomo, would you rather be known as Governor Goofus or Gallant?

(* h/t Lisa Fleischer on the Twitter machine. Doesn't the boss get mad when you link to the NY Daily News?)