Gothamschools has some good figures and graphs showing trends in the distribution of "unsatisfactory" ratings in New York City. It's worth checking out the full story, but here's the jist:

City principals rated more teachers unsatisfactory this year than they have since at least 2005, suggesting that the Bloomberg administration’s efforts to escort more struggling teachers out of the system may be bearing some fruit.

Principals gave the scarlet-letter rating to 1,554 teachers this year, up from 981 in the 2005-2006 school year, data provided by the city Department of Education show. Both the number and percentage of teachers rated unsatisfactory rose during that period, and the rise occurred for both tenured and non-tenured teachers, city figures show.

Even with the rise, the percentage of teachers rated unsatisfactory remains low. About 2% of teachers, both tenured and without tenure, received what teachers call “U” ratings this year.

Joanne Weiss, the ED official in charge of doling out the nearly $5 billion Race to the Top fund (part of ARRA), talked teacher evaluation at a recent panel in New York City (Gothamschools.org has the story). She said ED would favor states where student achievement was a "predominant" part of teacher evaluations, language that sounds straight out of the National Council on Teacher Quality's State Policy Yearbook. New York's laws prevent the use of student achievement data in tenure decisions, but there are lots of other barriers, like the practice of testing students in the middle of the year and the problem of untested grades and subjects, that make it hard to meet the "predominant" standard at the state level. In fact, only four states passed NCTQ's muster. Working through the details of using student achievement data is the next big challenge in the fast growing teacher effectiveness field. Here's hoping that ED leverages the stimulus money to figure out the how.

The Washington Post editorial board is frustrated that the DC teacher contract negotiations remain stalled. Yet the linchpin of the proposed contract, the teacher evaluation system, remains in development. For more on this angle, see Tom Toch's testimony before the DC Council.