Parents just won’t understand!
That’s one of the main arguments in a lawsuit the teachers union filed yesterday seeking to block the Department of Education from going public with its ratings of 12,000 teachers.
The United Federation of Teachers’ filing in Manhattan Supreme Court yesterday, prompted by a Freedom of Information Act request filed by The Post in August, argues the data is inaccurate and misleading — but moreover too complicated for parents to grasp.
The DOE was ready to provide the data Wednesday — including names and percentile rankings of teachers on a scale of 0 to 100 — but agreed to hold off until the court hearings are conducted on Nov. 24.
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“We continue to believe that it is our obligation under the law to provide this data but will await the court’s ruling after a full briefing,” said DOE spokeswoman Natalie Ravitz.
The union argued that the basis for the ratings — the recently rejiggered annual state math and readings tests combined with a complex formula that determines how much “value” teachers add to their students — was flawed math.
“We have invalid test scores going into an unreliable formula, which equals a bad result,” said UFT President Michael Mulgrew.
But the union’s court papers also suggested that UFT honchos worry about the ability of parents to interpret the ratings.
“This ‘added value’ determination has great potential for misunderstanding and misuse by untrained members of the public,” the filing said.
Teacher rating scores are determined by comparing the estimated predicted gains of their students on state math and reading tests with students’ actual performance on the tests.
The theory is that the difference — which controls for a host of fac tors such as class size and student poverty levels — accounts for teachers’ contributions, or “value added,” to their students’ scores.
Teachers’ percentile rankings are determined by comparing their value- added results to others who have similar levels of experience.
“We hope that no one misuses the data,” said Ravitz. “But we disagree with anyone who thinks the public or the press is too stupid to consume this information.”
And while the UFT argued that no one has created a “value-added” system that works, backers of the formula — even with its Greek letters, sub- and superscript, brackets and algebraic symbols — say there’s currently no better way of determining which teachers are good or bad at their jobs.
“It measures something useful in the same way a batting average measures something in baseball,” said Columbia University finance and economics professor Jonah Rockoff, who has worked on the city’s rating system.
“Just like any performance measure, it’s one piece of the pie,” Rockoff cautioned. “It’s a useful piece, but it’s not the whole thing.”
Parents said they understood that the evaluations weren’t an be-all and end-all, but some bristled at the suggestion that they were too dense to digest it.
“I think it’s horrible that they think the parents couldn’t understand teacher evaluations,” said Upper East Sider George Katsiaris, whose son is a fifth-grader. “I don’t think I’m that stupid that I wouldn’t understand . . . I have to be involved in my son’s education.”
Avery Clark, another Upper East Side elementary-school dad, agreed that the evaluations should be released publicly.
“My son has been at this school six years [and] he has had a couple of teachers I was not happy with,” said Clark. “They must have gotten lousy evaluations — I would liked to have seen them.”
Even US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan entered the schoolyard scuffle, siding with the push for greater transparency.
“Parents and community members have the right to know how their districts, schools, principals and teachers are doing,” he said. “It’s up to local communities to set the context for these courageous conversations but silence is not an option.”
Additional reporting by Edmund DeMarche