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The city can release teacher ratings data to news organizations, the state’s second-highest court ruled today in another serious blow to the union’s effort to keep individual teachers’ scores out of the press.

The release won’t happen right away while the legal fight continues, Department of Education officials said.

But the union is running out of chances to stop the ratings from being published. In December, a State Supreme Court judge ruled that the city could release Teacher Data Reports for at least 12,000 teachers who have them. After the Appellate Court ruling today, the union’s last hope is the state’s highest court, the Court of Appeals.

The union is already working on its appeal, UFT President Michael Mulgrew announced moments after the Appellate Court ruling.

Because the four judges on the Appellate Court ruled unanimously against the union, there’s no guarantee that the Court of Appeals will hear the case. Instead, the Appellate Court has to give permission. Within days, the union will ask the appellate court for permission to have the case heard in the Court of Appeals. If permission isn’t granted, the union can also ask the Court of Appeals itself. If the Court of Appeals declines to hear the case, then the Appellate Court’s decision would stand and the union would be out of options. (more…)

The fight over the state’s new teacher evaluations has focused on the 40 percent to be based on student test scores. But the other 60 percent, based on subjective measures like principal observations, could be just as tough.

That’s according to one teacher reporting from a school piloting the city’s stricter guidelines for classroom observations.

Commenting in our Community section yesterday, a reader posting as HS Biology Teacher said that system “seems to be designed to make it extremely easy to rate any teacher ineffective if the principal wants to.”

The DOE has drafted a rubric for rating classroom observations, but it is very tough. To be rated effective (3), you need to really hit every competency on the rubric during each full-period observation… and that is extremely difficult given the language of the rubric. (more…)

The nation’s second-largest school district, Los Angeles Unified, opposed press efforts to publish teacher evaluations, according to a letter from the school district (PDF) to the Los Angeles Times that was obtained by the writer Alexander Russo.

The letter urges the Los Angeles Times not to publish a second batch of teacher evaluations that the newspaper calculated and published anyway on Sunday. It was signed by LA superintendent John Deasy as well as the president of the city’s school board and two civic leaders, the president of the city’s chamber of commerce and its United Way chapter.

“The individual evaluations, in our opinion, should be private conversations that are intended to help professionals improve their performance in the classroom,” the letter argues.

Deasy’s position stands in sharp contrast to the one New York City school officials are taking in a court battle with the teachers union. School officials here argue that teacher evaluations calculated with value-added formulas are statistics that are subject to public information laws and therefore can be released to the public. (more…)

The teachers union and the city are heading back to court today, for the second round in an ongoing battle over the public release of teacher ratings.

Last December, a state judge ruled that that the city could release controversial teacher evaluations. Today, the union seeks to reverse that decision in Appellate Court.

The stakes are high for the city, which could use the release of teacher ratings as a key engine for galvanizing public support in favor of doing away with seniority layoffs. But the union, which wants to maintain “last in, first out” layoff rules, says that the evaluations are too inaccurate to be used for such high-stakes decisions.

The “value-added” evaluations, which grade teachers by comparing their students’ test scores to forecasted scores, were created as an internal assessment, designed to help teachers gauge their own performance. But the Department of Education announced it would release the ratings publicly after several news organizations filed Freedom of Information Law requests for them. This decision prompted a UFT lawsuit. (more…)

New York City’s teachers union lost its suit to block the city from releasing 12,000 teachers’ ratings and names that, for years, have been kept confidential.

State Supreme Court Justice Cynthia Kern ruled today to deny the United Federation of Teachers’ request that the city redact teachers’ names from the Teacher Data Reports. The reports measure a teacher’s effectiveness based on how good she is at improving her students’ test scores from the beginning of the year to the end.

Underpinning the union’s lawsuit was the claim that releasing teachers’ ratings with their names included constituted an unlawful invasion of privacy.

A spokesman for the union said that the union’s lawyers are reviewing the decision.

Kern’s ruling:

Five news organizations have joined the lawsuit over whether the city can release teachers’ effectiveness scores, arguing that they have a right to see the data.

Lawyers for the New York Times, Daily News, New York Post, the Wall Street Journal, and NY1 have decided to intervene in the case, according to a spokeswoman for the city’s law department. They will file their own papers, but are taking the same position as the city’s lawyers, arguing that the data is not protected under the Freedom of Information law.

Reporters at each of the news organizations submitted requests for the data and the city planned to release the reports until last month when the teachers union sued to stop them.

In its lawsuit, the union’s lawyers wrote that the Department of Education should have denied reporters’ FOIL requests because the teachers’ ratings are exempt from disclosure. The suit also said that making the scores public would amount to an invasion of teachers’ privacy. (more…)

Put the Department of Education’s Deputy Chancellor for Accountability Shael Polakow-Suransky in a room with Diane Ravitch, one of the city’s most outspoken critics, and you might reasonably expect sparks to fly.

But when NYU’s Wagner Education Policy Studies Association put them together on a panel earlier this week, where they agreed turned out to be notable.

The topic of the panel was how federal involvement shapes local education policy. (I moderated the panel; Evan Stone, the founder of Educators 4 Excellence, also spoke.)

Ravitch opened by sharply criticizing the move to hold teachers and schools accountable for their students’ scores on standardized tests. But when talk turned to how future standardized tests should be built, Ravitch and Suransky agreed with each other. Ravitch said:

I’m very supportive of the idea of developing new assessments, and I think it’s a very important thing. But it will take years.

Just as these common core standards were written in a little over a year — it took me three years working on the California history standards. I worked on history standards in other states, and it was never done in only a year. So I would like to think that it’s going to take a lot of time to do this well because anything that’s done hurriedly is not going to survive…. (more…)

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. (more…)

For parents of students in the “average” city teacher’s class, learning the teacher’s rating may not tell them very much, Chancellor Joel Klein wrote in a letter to principals today.

In his email, Klein explained the city’s decision to release teachers’ effectiveness ratings and the teachers union’s move to block this from happening. He noted that the ratings, which measure teachers against estimations of how much their students’ test scores ought to rise, would be most useful in identifying very high and low performing teachers. He wrote:

One indication will never tell the whole story, and sometimes it is hard to discern definitive evidence from data alone — such as with a teacher who is “average” according to these numbers, for example. But where teachers have performed consistently toward the top or the bottom, year after year, these data surely tell us something very important. Namely, we need to retain and reward the great teachers, and we need to develop the low-performing teachers. And those who don’t improve quickly need to be replaced with better-performing teachers.

Klein’s full letter: (more…)

City education officials are saying they want to release teachers’ ratings publicly as a way of helping bad teachers improve and reward those who are excelling.

In an interview with John Gambling on WOR-AM (710) this morning, Deputy Chancellor John White said the union’s concerns about how parents and the public would use the data were legitimate. But, he said, those concerns should not be an obstacle to improving how teachers are evaluated. He told Gambling:

And these data show that, actually, there are plenty of teachers who every year, year after year after year, are performing at the top of their game. We need to honor those teachers. This is not just about failing teachers.

But there are cases where we see every year, teachers in the bottom. And you can sit there and say, “Oh there’s this exception, this teacher’s is not a perfect score, it doesn’t reflect this,” but at the end of the day when you have teachers who are performing way at the top year after year after year, way at the bottom year after year after year, you have to say: are we doing the right thing for kids? We’ve got to keep that teacher at the top, we’ve got to pay that teacher right, at the top, and that teacher at the bottom, they’ve got to get better or we’ve got to get a better teacher.

It’s unclear how making teachers’ ratings public would improve their performance, as principals and teachers already have access to the ratings. This year, principals are supposed to use the ratings as a factor in tenure decisions and by 2012 they will be a significant part of all teachers’ evaluations. (more…)