This does not compute.
More than 90 percent of the city’s public school teachers were rated as successful instructors under a new and supposedly more rigorous evaluation system mandated by the state, it was reported Tuesday.
But the sky-high scores released by the state Education Department came as two-thirds of elementary and middle-school students taught by the same instructors flunked standardized math and English exams last year.
Perplexed parents accused educrats of grade inflation for teachers and claimed the results lacked credibility considering the number of students failing to meet academic standards.
“New York state’s teacher-evaluation law is a joke,” said Mona Davids, head of the NYC Parents Union, who has filed suit to overhaul the state’s tenure law.
“Teachers are great, it’s the kids that are just not educable, right?! Outrageous.”
Under the first mandated ratings for city teachers, 82.5 percent were graded as effective and 9.2 percent were rated highly effective under criteria set by the state.
Another 7 percent were rated as “developing,” meaning they needed to improve, and only 1.2 percent were considered ineffective, or failures.
Students, meanwhile, were struggling — only 34.5 percent passed the Common Core math exam and 28.4 percent the English Language Arts test last year.
Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch admitted the chasm between the teachers’ grades and the students’ doesn’t make sense.
“The ratings show there’s much more work to do to strengthen the evaluation system,” Tisch said.
“There’s a real contrast between how our students are performing and how their teachers and principals are evaluated.”
Hard as it is to believe, New York City’s ratings were actually more rigorous than the rest of the state.
More than 58 percent of teachers outside the five boroughs were rated “highly effective.”
Advocates noted that Gov. Cuomo and state Education Commissioner John King imposed a more rigorous system on the city after the teachers union failed to reach an agreement on evaluations with the prior Bloomberg administration.
Jenny Sedlis, director of StudentsFirstNY, said it was “absurd” that so many teachers statewide were rated highly effective.
The new, four-level evaluation replaces the old system that rated instructors as either “satisfactory” or “unsatisfactory.”
Under the revised system, classroom observations account for 60 percent of evaluations, results on state standardized exams account for 20 percent and local assessments account for 20 percent.
United Federation of Teachers President Mike Mulgrew called the new rating system “a step in the right direction.”