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The city’s plan to release teachers’ rating data to news organizations threatens public employees across the state.

That’s one argument the United Federation of Teachers is making as it moves toward its final attempt to prevent teachers’ individual ratings from going to press. Last week, the state’s Appellate Court echoed a low-level judge in ruling that the ratings, known as Teacher Data Reports, are public information and should be released.

Today, the union asked the Appellate Court for permission to take the case to the Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court. If the Appellate Court doesn’t grant permission, the union can also ask the Court of Appeals itself. The Court of Appeals doesn’t accept every case brought before it, and if it declines to hear this one, the Appellate Court’s decision would stand and the union would be out of options.

The Court of Appeals is more likely to take on cases that are potentially precedent-setting. Today’s filing stresses the “considerable violence to the limited but real privacy protections public employees possess” that the release of Teacher Data Reports could inflict, in addition to noting, as the union has done repeatedly, flaws in the reports themselves.

“In finding that the subjective, evaluative, and pre-decisional information contained in the inaptly named Teacher Data Reports, or ‘TDRs,’ is not exempt from public disclosure under FOIL, this Court has significantly narrowed the rights not only of new York City teachers but of all public employees in the State of New York,” the filing begins.

The UFT’s complete filing is below. (more…)

The website InsideSchools, which for years has provided independent information about schools for parents and teachers, has found a new home at The New School.

Founded in 2002 by Pamela Wheaton and Clara Hemphill, the site and its staff will be based out of the Center for New York City Affairs at the university, where Hemphill currently works. And as part of the move, the co-founders are retooling the site — updating its look and writing reviews that cater to parents who don’t have perfect English.

“The idea is that we want to make the site more accessible to people who don’t read very well and who might not speak English, so we’re going to try to have videos and pictures and try to have less text,” said Hemphill, the site’s senior editor, in a phone interview today.

“Of the schools the chancellor has opened, most of them are really geared for at-risk kids, so we wanted to make it easier for kids who have kind of limited reading levels to navigate,” she said. (more…)

Merryl Tisch, sitting next to teachers union vice president Carmen Alvarez at the Manhattan Assembly hearing on mayoral control. (GothamSchools)

Merryl Tisch, a former first-grade teacher and member of one of the city’s most philanthropic families, will head the committee that oversees the state public schools, the Board of Regents, state officials just announced.

The other Regents elected Tisch to the title today at a critical moment for state education efforts. The Education Department in Albany is launching an internal restructuring, and the Regents are searching for a new commissioner to run the department.

Commissioner Richard Mills, who had served 14 years in the job, presiding over an ambitious raising of graduation standards, announced his plans to retire last year. The current Regents chancellor, Robert Bennett, of Buffalo, said he would step down from the position 10 days ago. Tisch has been vice chancellor of the board since 2007 and served on the board since 1996. Her term as chancellor begins April 1.

Though Tisch has been a strong supporter of Mayor Bloomberg, she has also occasionally criticized him and his schools chancellor, Joel Klein. She told the Times last year that she disagreed with Klein’s request for looser regulations on state funds. “Nobody appointed him czar,” she said. She also testified to a committee that mayoral control of the schools, which Bloomberg strongly supports, should be curtailed. I reported her testimony, which was originally secret, at the New York Sun

Yet Tisch’s plans for the state’s public schools, which she laid out in a long statement accepting the new position, sound many similar notes to the Bloomberg administration’s work in New York City. It also echoes the Obama administration’s plans for education. (more…)