By Anna M. Phillips
(From The New York Times, April 9th, 2012)
Ever since New York City’s Education Department released 18,000 public-school teachers’ performance rankings, generating news coverage about the lowest and highest scorers, there has been talk in Albany of preventing a repeat.
Increasingly, lawmakers say they are open to the idea of changing state law to allow parents to see the evaluations of their own children’s teachers but to block the general public from having access to those reports. With the Legislature preparing to go into session next week, the question of how much privacy teachers are granted could soon be resolved.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said Monday that he believed in preserving the public access guaranteed by current law. The city released its teachers rankings in February after defeating a teachers’ union lawsuit to keep the reports private.
“We should have all of the data out there,” the mayor said when asked about the issue at a news conference on solar energy production. “I think the courts have ruled that way, and I think the public, when you survey them, thinks that people have a right to the data.”
A poll released in March by the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute found that 58 percent of New York City voters approved of the release of the ratings, while 38 percent disapproved.
But the issue is still a tangled one. Widely consumed by parents and widely criticized by teachers and their union, the reports released in February ranked fourth- through eighth-grade teachers based on their students’ test score gains. The rankings, which were constructed from only a few years of scores, had wide margins of error, and the formula the city used to create them is no longer in use.
The city has stopped forming its own rankings because a new statewide teacher evaluation system will incorporate test-score performance into teachers’ overall grades. Those grades will also incorporate classroom observations by principals and other measures of teacher quality.