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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…)

United Federation of Teachers president Michael Mulgrew held up a sign at a press conference today showing the formula used to calculated teachers' ratings.

The city’s teachers union filed suit this morning, asking the State Supreme Court to bar the city from releasing 12,000 teachers’ effectiveness scores with their names included.

Department of Education officials said yesterday that they planned to send the teacher ratings to reporters as soon as this Friday, unless the union’s suit stops them. Several news organizations filed Freedom of Information Law requests for the data, and city officials said they were responding to these requests.

Union officials are currently in court and expect a judge to rule on their suit later today.

Underpinning the United Federation of Teachers’ lawsuit is the claim that releasing teachers’ ratings with their names included is an unlawful invasion of privacy.

“Teachers will be exposed to harassment on a personal and professional level from parents unhappy with the contents of the TDRs,” the suit states. “Such harassment could include demands for termination, discipline, and transfer of children out of teachers’ classrooms, as well as threats to the persons of individual teachers.” (more…)

The city’s decision to release teacher evaluation data this week represents a departure from an agreement officials made with the teachers union two years ago.

In a deal made in 2008 between then-president of the United Federation of Teachers Randi Weingarten and Department of Education Deputy Chancellor Christopher Cerf, the city and union agreed to keep the reports private. The reports assign scores to teachers based on how much they improve their students’ test scores.

“It is the DOEs’ [sic] firm position and expectation that Teacher Data reports will not and should not be disclosed or shared outside of the school community, defined to include administrators, coaches, mentors and other professional colleagues authorized by the teacher in question,” Cerf wrote.

“In the event a FOIL request for such documents is made, we will work with the UFT to craft the best legal arguments available to the effect that such documents fall within an exemption,” he wrote.

DOE spokeswoman Natalie Ravitz said the city’s decision to release the scores doesn’t violate the agreement.

“We do not believe that any of the exemptions under FOIL apply in this matter, which is what we told the UFT.  But that will be for a judge to decide,” she wrote in an email. (more…)

Mayor Bloomberg on NBC today, announcing a crackdown on seniority-based layoffs and a new tenure policy.

In his first major education policy announcement for the new school year, Mayor Michael Bloomberg this morning vowed a renewed attack on seniority laws that protect veteran teachers and a change in how teachers are awarded tenure.

He made the remarks on NBC, which is dedicating this week to school reporting in a project called “Education Nation.”

The attack on seniority laws came as city officials made a dire budget prediction for next year, saying that they will likely have to lay off public school teachers as federal stimulus funding runs out. Under the current state law, teachers with the least seniority would be the first to lose their jobs — a policy known as “last in, first out.” The mayor and Chancellor Joel Klein oppose this policy, but their effort to change the law, which the teachers union does support, went nowhere last year.

Today, the mayor said he would try dismantling the policy again before the city confronts an expected $700 million budget hole and possible layoffs next year.

“It’s time for us to end the ‘last-in, first out’ layoff policy that puts children at risk here in New York — and across our wonderful country,” Bloomberg said on NBC. ”How could anyone argue that this is good for children? The law is nothing more than special interest politics, and we’re going to get rid of it before it hurts our kids,” he added.

Teachers union officials immediately squashed any possibility that they might partner with the mayor. (more…)

The value-added reports meant to measure city teachers’ effectiveness have wide margins of error and give judgments that fluctuate — sometimes wildly — from one year to the next, a new analysis finds.

Schools Chancellor Joel Klein has instructed principals to use the Teacher Data Reports as one way to decide which teachers should receive tenure. Teachers who teach English or math to students in grades three through eight receive the reports.

The NYU economist Sean Corcoran found that 31 percent of English teachers who ranked in the bottom quintile of teachers in 2007 had jumped to one of the top two quintile by 2008. About 23 percent of math teachers made the same jump.

There was an overall correlation between how a teacher scored from one year to the next, and for some teachers, the measurement was more stable. Of the math teachers who ranked in the top quintile in 2007, 40 percent retained that crown in 2008. (more…)