No sooner had the city released evaluation grades for some 12,000 teachers Friday than the usual suspects — the United Federation of Teachers and its mouthpieces — launched a major campaign to discredit the data.
Yet as The Post reports again today, those grades are already proving themselves beyond useful.
Beyond valuable.
Beyond essential.
As this page noted Saturday, union resistance to the city’s release of its Teacher Data Reports is no surprise. Indeed, the UFT has fought tooth and nail to block efforts to boost transparency and accountability since long before The Post first filed a Freedom of Information request in 2010 to make those teacher report cards public.
So pay its pooh-pooh campaign no mind at all.
Instead, consider today’s stories in The Post. After the scores (for more than 12,000 teachers) ran in the paper Saturday, for example, parents at PS 89 in The Bronx — which had more low-scoring teachers than any other school in the city in 2010 — vowed to fight to send their kids elsewhere. Parents at other schools likewise expressed fresh concern.
We’re pleased to have been of service.
But it is precisely this kind of blowback that has gotten the union in a funk.
“The Department of Education should be ashamed of itself,” UFT boss Michael Mulgrew whines. “It has combined bad tests, a flawed formula and incorrect data to mislead tens of thousands of parents about their children’s tests.”
Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, the union-puppet mayoral wannabe, similarly dissed a parent’s right to know how effective his or her kid’s teacher is. Instead, he went to bat for greater teacher secrecy.
“The mayor’s persistence in denigrating teachers is completely at odds with our need to move New York City forward,” de Blasio huffed. (Should he become mayor, he’d no doubt ban parents from contact with the school system altogether.)
No one claims the grades are a perfect measure of a teacher’s value.
Many of the scores are subject to wide margins of error. They’re based on state tests that have yet to prove themselves reliable. And no doubt, among 18,000 teachers, many individual mistakes were made.
But experts say this is one of the best attempts ever to give school brass — and parents — a more objective look at how effective a teacher is. And that kind of information is priceless to parents, administrators and even teachers themselves.
Start with the fact that the grades are said to correlate strongly with other evaluations — such as those made in a classroom by principals or other observers.
Remember how hard it is to bump ineffective teachers?
With such “value-added” scoring — to be part of a new future evaluation system — those given bad marks by principals will have a harder time refuting them.
Likewise, if a teacher unfairlygets a low mark based on classroom observances, the new grades could serve as vindication.
Meanwhile, teachers who score badly can be identified — and given help.
Most important, as The Post stories vividly show, parents are becoming involved.
And no wonder: When your kid’s teachers all score poorly, you get worried. You act.
Schools act, too. Teachers improve — or face dismissal.
That’s what accountability and transparency are all about.
And it’s why the new grading should make a huge difference for future students.
Which, after all, is what counts most.