That’s deliberate, too. Last year, the Legislature — with Assembly Speaker Shelly Silver in the lead — sided with teachers unions over Mayor Mike Bloomberg when it passed a law limiting the disclosure of teacher performance data.
To his great credit, the mayor favored full disclosure.
While parents can see the ratings for the teachers their children have now, they cannot see information for other teachers. So there’s no way, for example, to try to avoid a bad teacher your son or daughter might have the following year.
For the taxpaying public, the information is more limited still: You can get the data but without the names of the teachers.
The reigning political assumption in New York seems to be that taxpayers whose dollars go to pay costs that now add up to an average $19,076 per student in this state — the highest in the land — cannot be trusted with information that tells them who is performing and who is not.
So we are left with a highly perverse dynamic: The more you, the New York taxpayer, are required to fork over for public education, the less you will know about what you are getting for your money. Hardly a way to run an enterprise that now adds up to $25 billion in the New York City budget alone.
New York’s decision to keep evaluation information confidential followed the disclosure of teacher evaluations in California. Teachers unions there howled when the information was published in the Los Angeles Times.
But instead of following California’s example of holding public workers accountable, New York lawmakers opted to keep the people who pay their salaries and fund their programs in the dark.
This is particularly comical given the restaurant ratings in this city, which require food establishments to prominently display their letter grades on their front doors and windows for all the world to see.
That’s New York.
You’ll find more accountability for what goes into the cheeseburger you eat in our public restaurants than what goes into the classroom in our public schools.