Almost two months ago, the New York Post filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Department of Education seeking the ratings the department had given to 12,000 city public-school teachers.
In its Aug. 23 request, The Post also asked that teachers’ names be included alongside their performance ratings, to make it possible for parents to identify which teachers are boosting student achievement — and which aren’t.
On Aug. 30, the DOE acknowledged that it received the request and said it would make every effort to comply — and a month later, it sent The Post a notice seeking more time to gather such a massive and complex set of data.
EDITORIAL: MULGREW’S 12,000 SECRETS
This week, the DOE said it was finally prepared to hand over the immense spreadsheet that would contain data on the ratings of fourth- through eighth-grade teachers for the 2008-09 school year.
Teachers’ rating scores were calculated by comparing the 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 factors such as class size, poverty levels and student test scores in prior years — accounts for a teacher’s contributions, or “value added,” to their students achievements.
Teacher rankings, which range from 0 to 100 and would have appeared beside their names, were determined by comparing their “value-added” results to others with similar levels of experience.
The rankings put teachers in one of five performance categories relative to their peers — with 5 percent rated “high” in the 95th to 100th percentile and 20 percent rated “above average” in the 75th to 95th percentile.
Fifty percent of the teachers were considered “average” by falling into the 25th to 75th percentile; 20 percent were rated “below average” in the fifth to 25th percentile; and 5 percent were rated as “low” performers, scoring below the 5th percentile.
The DOE promised to deliver the spreadsheet at around noon yesterday — but before then, everything ground to halt.
Despite knowing about the planned data release for at least a week, the United Federation of Teachers, at the last minute, said it would seek an injunction from the state Supreme Court today to block the city from handing over the teacher ratings.
UFT President Michael Mulgrew argued that since the ratings were based largely on state tests whose reliability has been questioned in recent years, the rankings they produced were inaccurate and misleading. He also said that attempts to control for external factors were imperfect at best.
More strikingly, UFT officials said they participated in the so-called “Teacher Data Initiative” because they were promised in 2008 that the ratings would be used only internally.
They gave The Post documents signed by top-ranking DOE officials that year saying the city also believed the data shouldn’t be made public, and that it would help fight any potential FOIA requests.
A DOE spokeswoman said yesterday that officials do not believe teacher names and ratings are exempt from FOIA mandates — and that if a court law doesn’t prevent them from doing so, they intend to provide the full set of data tomorrow afternoon.
The Post sought to make this information public for a host of reasons, including the fact that:
* Despite more than $21 billion in taxpayer funds being spent on the city’s public schools in the past school year, only 54 percent of third- through eighth-graders passed state math tests and only 42 percent passed state reading tests.
* The report would provide parents with easy access to information about which teachers are moving their classes in the right and wrong directions.
* The data would show taxpayers what they’re getting in return for spending $100 million for the salaries of 1,400 teachers who currently work solely as day-to-day substitutes because they can’t find permanent gigs.
* The data provides evidence for why a small percentage of poorly performing teachers should be removed from the classroom — without protracted legal hearings that take years to resolve.
* A report issued last week said that overly generous teacher and other public service pensions could lead the city’s pension system to insolvency in just 10 years.
City Law Department chief Michael Cardozo told The Post yesterday that the power of the FOIA is likely to trump any of the nondisclosure agreements signed between the DOE and the UFT.