GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

The parent of a Queens public school student is accusing the New York Post of fabricating his support for publicly releasing teachers’ effectiveness scores.

Queens Community Education Council member Brian Rafferty said that an op/ed published in the New York Post last week bore his byline, but not his views. Rafferty, who is also the executive editor of the Queens Tribune, made the accusation at a council meeting in Ridgewood, Queens last night. The piece, titled “Dad: Union putting my child last,” criticized the city’s teachers union for going to court to block the city from releasing teachers’ ratings.

Last night, Rafferty told a room packed with parents and teachers that he does not support releasing 12,000 teachers’ ratings with their names included.

“I might be skeptical of the union sometimes, no offense guys, but there is absolutely no way that these opinions are mine,” he said.

Rafferty said that an assistant to a Post reporter called him last Wednesday night and asked to transcribe his comments for an op/ed piece, yet his actual views never ended up in print. “I feel duped and used,” he wrote in a letter to the Post’s editors, that he said the newspaper refused to publish. Rafferty explained his opinion of teacher ratings in detail:

“First of all, what I know that I said is that I assume the teacher ratings are as reliable a measure of the performance of a teacher, as an ELA is reliable as a measure of performance of a student. Testing, microscopic pieces of data, do not provide valid results for rating anything or anyone. And I made it very clear that the position that I hold is that these teacher ratings could be a very useful part in training and assisting the teachers to be better, assisting the department of education to better serve the children of this city and that if data were to come out relative to the schools, that could be useful for the parents in making decisions about schools and school choice. But that the private information and the names of teachers associated with those ratings, to release that, would be just as harmful as it would be to release the names of poor performing students. That somehow, got left out.”

GothamSchools contributor Ruben Brosbe, who wrote about his data report for the Post, had his piece edited so that it was more supportive of the city releasing ratings.

Last August, the Post was one of several city newspapers to submit a Freedom of Information Request for teachers’ effectiveness ratings. Since the city announced its intention to release the ratings last week, the newspaper’s editorial board has lambasted teachers union president Michael Mulgrew for barring the release.

Rubenstein Associates, which handles public relations for the Post, did not return calls for comment.