HITS AND MISSUS: The teacher ratings, released by the city and published in Saturday’s Post, reveal that 14 of the public-school system’s top 15 scorerd were women, including Janice Porter, who garnered an enviable 99 percent grade. (
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The city’s top-performing teachers have one thing in common: They’re almost all women.
Ratings released by the Department of Education of more than 12,000 fourth- through eighth-grade teachers show just one of the 15 instructors who notched the top score is a man.
That distinction belongs to Barry Price, an eighth-grade math teacher at James McKieran JHS in The Bronx who has five years on the job.
Price, a New York City Teaching Fellow and 2011 Award for Classroom Excellence winner who is also his school’s basketball coach, has a 99 percent ranking.
Every single one of his students passed the algebra Regents exam, according to the DOE.
DATABASE: PERFORMANCE GRADES FOR NYC PUBLIC SCHOOL TEACHERS (ORGANIZED BY SCHOOL)
Men make up just 23.7 percent of the city’s 70,998 teachers. The majority of them teach in high school.
“When we do math-teacher studies, we found that the three main reasons men don’t enter or stay in the field is because of stereotypes that men can’t do the work, because of fears of false accusations of harming children and, lastly, low pay,” said Bryan Nelson, of the national group MenTeach.
He described it as a “self-perpetuating cycle” — boys hardly ever see men teaching, so they never consider it themselves.
The DOE declined to comment, but academics and parents said men need to step up, especially in lower-income neighborhoods.
“There should be more male teachers because boys need more male role models in their lives,” said Maria Batista, 46, a Staten Island mother of six.
“There’s already a lack of fathers in households to begin with.”
Vasilika Mastrocola, who teaches eighth-grade English at PS 122 in Queens and scored a 99 percent rating, said, “I don’t think gender plays a role [in the ability to teach], but there are a lot less male teachers, especially in elementary school.”
Statewide, the percent of men teaching in elementary schools dropped from 19 percent in 1980 to about 9 percent in 2007.
Meanwhile, women are more than carrying their share of the load.
Janice Porter, one of the city’s top teachers, teaches fourth grade at PS 5 in Bedford-Stuyvesant and scored a 99 percent ranking.
After the figures were released, she told The Post, “Some of my students have perfect scores across the board on their exams, and I’m so proud of them.”
Some experts attribute the decline in male teachers to the elimination of the military draft.
Many who became teachers in the 1960s to avoid going to Vietnam have been retiring en masse.
One other significant fact revealed by the ratings is that a teacher’s salary has little to do with his or her competence.
For example, Price and Porter both earned $75,796 in 2010.
Mastrocola makes $72,194.
Neither came anywhere close to the $100,049 paid to Andrew Petrez, who got a zero rating.
The salary figures are from 2010.
Petrez said he was “shocked” by his pathetic rating.
“My students, the parents, my supervisors always all said good things about me,” said Petrez, who retired in 2010.
The DOE last week released the ratings following a Freedom of Information request by The Post and a bitter, 17-month legal battle waged by the teachers union to keep them secret.
Additional reporting by Bill Sanderson and Amy Rotondo