Schools Chancellor Joel Klein wants the world to believe his attempt to make public more than 12,000 Teacher Data Reports was merely a response to an information request from the press.
Don't buy it.
Klein couldn't wait to release the names, along with his arcane rating system that claims to show how much "value" each teacher added to the reading and math scores of their pupils.
He didn't seem to care about unfairly tarnishing the reputations of city teachers like Doreen Crinnigan, a 25-year veteran of the school system who teaches at Public School 48 in Bensonhurst.
"We don't blame anyone for wanting to look at how they (teachers) are performing, and value-added data is a window into that," Klein spokeswoman Natalie Ravitz said.
This was before the teachers' union sued in Manhattan Supreme Court and Klein agreed to halt the release of the data, pending a Nov. 24 hearing.
Such a hearing will undoubtedly reveal that the very consultants who designed Klein's rating system warned it should not be used to judge teacher performance.
Their support of the "value added model," those consultants said in an Aug. 29, 2008, report, was "limited to the technical quality of the work" and to its potential to assist "in teaching and learning."
They specifically refused to endorse "any particular use \[of the method\] for accountability, promotion or tenure" of teachers.
"Test scores," they warned, "capture only one dimension of teacher effectiveness, and . . . are not intended as a summary measure of teacher performance."
The consultants' report was supplied to the Daily News by Leonie Haimson, director of Class Size Matters, who obtained it under a Freedom of Information Request that Klein's people took 15 months to answer.
The leader of the original design team, Columbia University Prof. Jonah Rockoff, told News reporter Rachel Monahan the union was right to challenge the data release.
"We do need someone with expertise in the right to privacy of public employees to make a careful decision about whether this should be released," Rockoff said.
Records of classroom observations of teachers by principals also go into a performance review, Rockoff noted, but they are not made public.
A half dozen teachers told The News yesterday they discovered errors in the raw student data used to calculate their scores, but were not allowed to see which students they were being judged on.
For example, Crinnigan got low ratings for the reading and math scores of her fifth-grade class.
"I didn't teach math that year," she said. "We had a departmental structure in the school, so I taught reading to all three fifth-grade classes. Another teacher taught all the students math, and a third taught them all writing."
One of the other classes Crinnigan taught had a 97% rating, but that score was assigned to another teacher.
Some general teachers say they taught joint classes with a special education teacher, known as a collaborative team teaching class, but only the general education teacher received a rating.
The value-added system, in short, is one dimensional, the raw data is unverified, and even the people who designed it warned against using it as a sole barometer of teacher performance.
Klein and Bloomberg, rotten to the core, do not have a problem releasing misleading data that slanders thousands of people in order to manipulate the public into supporting the firing of teachers.
And the sole reason they want to fire teachers is so that they can save labor costs.
Get rid of vets, bring in newbies.
That's it - that's what this is about.
And the op-ed pages of the NY papers and reporters at the corporate-owned media are all aiding and abetting this.
Make no mistake, if these scores are released and published in the papers, teachers should hold not only Klein and Bloomberg accountable for them, they should hold the writers of each and every article that uses the scores to slander teachers accountable, as well as the editors who signed off on those articles.
Same goes for the reporters at NY1 and other stations.
I just watched Absence of Malice last weekend.
I have to say, on Klein's and Bloomberg's part, there is an awful lot of malice for teachers.
And the same can be said for some of these writers in the papers, some of these editors there as well.
Especially at the Post and the Journal.
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