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City education officials yesterday released rankings for thousands of fourth- through eighth-grade teachers based on whether they boosted their students’ math and reading scores — giving parents an unprecedented glimpse into how the instructors perform in the classroom.
The release follows a bitter 17-month legal bid by the teachers union to block the city from providing the controversial information to The Post.
The unsuccessful lawsuit came after The Post filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Department of Education in August 2010 seeking the performance rankings.
Three courts sided with The Post and the city in the legal fight.
DATABASE: PERFORMANCE GRADES FOR NYC PUBLIC SCHOOL TEACHERS (ORGANIZED BY SCHOOL)
BROOKLYN PUBLIC SCHOOL HAS GOOD, BAD MATH CLASSES A FEW DOORS APART
ONLY 32 TEACHERS SCORED A 99 PERCENT RANKING
EDITORIAL: WHY TEACHER GRADES MATTER
Teachers were ranked on a scale of zero to 99 as compared with colleagues with similar experience levels and who work in the same grade and subject.
The data show:
* Brooklyn had the most schools with four or more teachers rated in the 90th percentile or above — 42 — followed by The Bronx at 21 and Queens at 16. Manhattan had no schools with that many top-tier teachers, and Staten Island had 1.
* Brooklyn also had the most schools with four or more teachers in the bottom 10 percent — 25 — followed by Queens with 21, The Bronx with 11 and Staten Island with 9. Manhattan had no schools with at least four bottom-tier teachers.
* The A-rated PS 86 in Fordham Manor in The Bronx had 13 teachers rank in the top 10 percent — the most of any school.
* The C-rated PS 89 in Bronxdale in The Bronx had 10 teachers land in the bottom 10 percent — the worst in town.
Overall, DOE officials said they found 521 teachers who were consistently in the bottom 5 percent of teachers — the lowest performance category — for either math or reading.
SOME TEACHERS RECEIVE SCORES OF ZERO
FEW ESCAPES FOR KIDS STUCK WITH FAILING TEACHERS
LOW-RANKING TEACHER INSPIRED ‘SIMPSONS’ BULLY
METHODOLOGY BEHIND TEACHER RANKINGS
On the opposite end, they said 696 teachers were consistently rated in the top 5 percent — the highest of the five rating categories.
“The reports will create a new level of accountability that will pressure principals to help bad teachers improve or get rid of them,” said B. Jason Brooks, of the Foundation for Education Reform & Accountability in Albany.
“[They] will enable New York families to be better consumers of the education being provided to their children.”
Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott said he’s “not necessarily supportive of the names being attached” to the ratings, but he hoped it would spur conversations between parents and principals.
“That type of discussion is extremely important,” he said. “To me, that allows that parent to be an involved stakeholder as far as what’s happening in their child’s or children’s classroom.”
DOE analysis found that schools ranked with “A’s” and “B’s” by the city tended to have more highly ranked teachers.
In 2010, 79 percent of the highest-rated math teachers — those in the top quarter — were in “A” or “B” schools. In English, 77 percent of those at or near the top were in “A” or “B” schools.
UFT President Michael Mulgrew and a host of other critics charge that the data are based on state tests that have proven to be unreliable and are derived from a formula that would stump Albert Einstein.
The margin of error for the average teacher’s ranking was a spread of 35 in math and 53 in English, with error margins as high as 75 in math and 87 in reading.
This means, for example, that an English teacher who ranked 50th in reading could actually deserve to be placed anywhere from the 25th to 78th percentile.
“It’s so unreliable. It’s so corrupted,” Mulgrew said. “When we’re arguing about whether the margin of error is 54 or 34, we’re in a surrealistic world.”
Education researchers told The Post the city’s formula for calculating the rankings is among the best — if not the best — in the nation.
They say the data are particularly telling at the highest and lowest ends of the spectrum, and when used in combination with other factors like a principal’s observations.
“For most of the teachers, we won’t be far off. The data is usually right,” said Rob Meyer, director of the University of Wisconsin Center for Education Research, which helped design the city’s reports.
He was concerned only with the reliability of the state tests that form the basis of the rankings — and the data being made public with teachers’ names.
“I’m uncomfortable with the release of the data. It turns the data into a nasty thing,” he said. “Parents need to be careful and not overreact.”
Some teachers told The Post their individual data reports were rife with errors.
A number said that when they were given the opportunity to review the list of students whose test scores they were held responsible for, they didn’t recognize a host of the names.
Some also said they were given rankings for subjects they didn’t teach.
“If this were something that was true, I wouldn’t have a problem with it,” said Doreen Crinigan, a fifth-grade teacher at PS 48 in Brooklyn who was ranked in the 14th percentile in math in 2007 — even though she teaches English.
“It leaves me with no good feelings toward the DOE — which I’ve worked for for 26 years.”
Additional reporting by Jeane MacIntosh and Don Kaplan