New York State Teacher Evaluations Will Be Published In Media

Even Tennessee, not exactly a paragon of progressive thinking, is looking to shield teacher evaluations from the newspapers.

But not New York State.

Neither Governor Cuomo nor the Senate Republicans want to shield teachers from having their names, pictures and eval ratings in the papers:

State Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos said Monday there will be no restrictions on the public release of teacher evaluations.

The Daily News reported today that the issue of whether to limit public access to the teacher evaluations popped up in the last-minute budget negotiations over the weekend.

“There were discussions in terms of seeing if there was a way you could balance the parents’ right to know and some sort of [teacher] privacy rights, but there’s no resolution of that, so it will stay as it is,” Skelos just said outside the Senate chamber.

The information will be required to be made available under state Freedom of Information laws, he said.

He also doesn’t expect the matter to be revisited.

“I don’t see it in the budget; I don’t see it down the road,” Skelos said.

What do these politicians think is going to happen when the evaluations based upon a flawed VAM get published every year in the media?

Do they think this is going to improve teaching and learning?

Do they think this is going to improve schools?

Do they think this is going to bring an influx of quality people looking to be teachers?

Do they care about any of that?

Or do they simply want to scapegoat as many teachers as possible, fire as many as possible, and finish off privatizing the system?