City parents gave The Post an A-plus yesterday for publishing teacher-evaluation data that revealed valuable information about the educators who are leading their children.
“You never know what’s going on inside the schools, so I can’t tell you how important these lists are to me as a parent,” said Scott Rogers, 37, of Manhattan.
“I have three kids going through the system right now. I want to make sure they are in the best schools with the best teachers. This should have been done years ago.”
The Post received the data after fighting a protracted legal battle with the teachers union, which filed a lawsuit in a desperate bid to block the 2010 Freedom of Information Law request.
DATABASE: PERFORMANCE GRADES FOR NYC PUBLIC SCHOOL TEACHERS (ORGANIZED BY SCHOOL)
QUEENS MOM PRAISES RELEASE OF TEACHER DATA
The performance data for 12,170 math and English teachers in fourth through eighth grade exposed hundreds who linger in the lowest percentile.
“It surprises me how the union fought so hard to keep jobs for teachers who aren’t worth it when they are supposed to be teaching kids who are the future,” said Dominic Martorana, 40, of Staten Island.
“The union is holding the future back by not allowing the teachers to be terminated,” said the retailer, whose daughter is a student at PS 41.
Tyesha Witt, 39, whose fourth-grade daughter attends PS 44 Thomas C. Brown on Staten Island, said, “It’s embarrassing for the teachers, but it’s good for us parents.”
“We get to know it’s just not our kids — they [teachers] make it seem like everything is our kids’ fault — but also that the teachers aren’t teaching our kids.”
Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott said that since the data’s release, he has received “some positive [and] negative e-mails” from teachers.
“We knew when we published it there was going to be reactions,” he said. “I even have mixed reactions myself.”
He still tried to paint the explosive nature of the rankings in the best light possible.
“I think the discussion taking place today after the rankings is healthy,” Walcott said before a Black History Month event on Staten Island.
“To me, the goal is to make sure people understand this is old data and limited data.”
NEARBY BX. SCHOOLS MILES APART
QUEENS PARENTS TRYING TO MOVE CHILDREN OUT OF LOW-RATED TEACHER’S CLASS
POLS GIVE GRADE RELEASE AN ‘A’
The release of the rankings infuriated teachers who fume that the data is out of date and riddled with inaccuracies.
One even tried to blame some of the low ratings on parents.
“After teaching for 20 years, I have witnessed a large percentage of parents who do not check homework, attend parent teacher conferences or except [sic] that their child is not working up to their potential,” the teacher wrote in a letter to The Post.
But the parents fired right back, led by a Queens mom named Christina — who wrote to The Post yesterday about problems with her son’s third-grade teacher.
“It is high time the educators are put on the spot,” she railed.
Alice Smith, 42, a mother of three who lives near 79th Street on the Upper West Side said she became so infuriated with her children’s teachers she sent her kids to private school this year.
“I think the public school system stinks,” Smith said. “I think publishing the teachers’ grades is a fantastic idea. Kids don’t have much of a choice if they get stuck with an awful teacher. Now that I can see the grades, I could have made complaints or asked questions if I needed to. I definitely would have appreciated this over the last few years.”
She said that thanks to The Post’s efforts, “maybe we will start to see improvements in the public schools. If they’re smart, they [teachers] will get their act together.”
Walcott said he understands parents’ concerns.
“A parent has a right to raise these questions,” Walcott said.
“They don’t have a right to say, ‘I don’t want that teacher for my student’ . . . I want the parents engaged in terms of what’s happening.
“I just don’t want parents to view this as a be all and end all.”
Catherine Jordan, 35, mother of a 5-year-old in Park Slope, Brooklyn, agrees with Walcott that the rankings are a great way to get educators and parents talking.
“This isn’t a perfect system, but it’s a good way to start,” she said. “People generally know which schools are good or not from word of mouth. But I see there are so many teachers with bad grades here on this list, especially in Brooklyn, and it is frightening.”
Additional reporting by Susan Edelman and Sabrina Ford