Are teacher rankings coming to Culver City? (See related story, “Mielke Vigorously Rejects Going Public with Teacher Rankings”)
In a country in love with lists and ratings, going public with the ranking of your child’s teacher may have been inevitable — and the teachers, especially their unions, are pushing back.
But losing, so far.
Yesterday in the Manhattan Supreme Court, Justice Cynthia Kern ruled that the Dept. of Education in New York should reveal the names and ratings of 12,000 teachers, the New York Post, which brought the suit, reported.
The Post became curious about the city’s teacher rankings after the Los Angeles Times stunned the school community but won nationwide applause last summer for publishing the rankings of 6,000 elementary school teachers from 470 schools.
Although teachers and their union were angry, the rest of the world hailed the breakthrough. Here is the Times’s accompanying explanation.
A teacher's value-added rating is based on his or her students' progress on the California Standards Tests for English and math. The difference between a student's expected growth and actual performance is the “value” a teacher added or subtracted during the year. A school's value-added rating is based on the performance of all students tested there during that period.
“Although value-added measures do not capture everything that goes into making a good teacher or school, the Times decided to make the ratings available because they bear on the performance of public employees who provide an important service, and in the belief that parents and the public have a right to the information.”
There were some distinctions in the Post’s pursuit of ratings:
“The teacher ratings are based largely on the difference between students’ expected performance on state math and reading tests and their actual scores.
“The theory is that the difference — which factors in a host of factors such as class size, poverty levels and student test scores in prior years — measures a teacher’s contributions, or ‘value-added,’ to the achievements of the teacher’s students. Teachers’ performances are then ranked against one another to produce the reports.”
In the Manhattan case, the United Federation of Teachers had contended that the Teacher Data Reports should not be released because the evaluations/grades “are so flawed and unreliable as to be subjective.”
Justice Kern snapped back at that argument. “There is no requirement that data be reliable for it to be disclosed,” she said.
The union, which vowed to immediately appeal, told the court that the Dept. of Education had pledged to keep the grades confidential.
Said Justice Kern: Even if the agreement had been made, it should not have been.”
