GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

A new report by the advocacy group StudentsFirstNY found that low-rated teachers work more often in high-poverty schools. The group presented its findings outside City Hall.

The poorer a school’s students are, the more likely they are to be taught by low-rated teachers.

That’s the conclusion of a new report by the education advocacy group StudentsFirstNY. The group, which is critical of the city’s current teacher evaluation system, looked at ratings given to 65,527 teachers during the 2011-2012 school year and found that the low-rated teachers disproportionately worked in schools with high concentrations of poor students.

At schools with relatively few poor students, 1.14 percent of teachers received low ratings last year, according to the report. But at schools where more than 85 percent of students are considered poor, 3.9 percent did.

The inequities were even more pronounced when comparing schools with different demographics. At schools where fewer than a quarter of students are black or Hispanic, just 1.06 percent of teachers got low ratings. At schools where almost all students are black or Hispanic, that figure was 4.13 percent.

The report says the findings support StudentsFirstNY’s position that new teacher evaluations are needed in New York State. (more…)

Three months into the start of the school year, the Department of Education is just figuring out how to rate more than a thousand itinerant teachers.

Under the current teacher evaluation system in place in nearly all schools, principals rate teachers once a year as either “satisfactory,” or “unsatisfactory.” They are also supposed to offer advice to help teachers improve.

But when the city and UFT struck a deal this summer to avert layoffs, they agreed to move members of the  Absent Teacher Reserve, the pool of teachers who do not have permanent positions, to a different school—with a different principal—each week. The agreement left open the question of who would observe and rate those teachers.

In a year when the city and union are fighting fiercely over the particulars of new teacher evaluations, officials from the United Federation of Teachers told me they have left the decision of how ATRs will be rated up to the DOE.

Now the city has decided that ATRs will receiving ratings from their district superintendent, officials said, with input from the principals of schools where they were sent to work over the course of the year. The city is also testing out other options. (more…)