Most recently, there has been great commotion in the educational sector of our communities due to the disclosure of controversial “ratings” of nearly 18,000 New York City teachers. This was brought on due to a movement that started in 2010, in which The Times and other news organizations requested this information under the Freedom of Information Law. The United Federation of Teachers then sued to block their release and the case made its way to the state’s highest court. There, it was determined that this information could in fact be released – one of the judges who ruled on it said imperfection was no reason to hide the data. The ratings, known as teacher data reports, cover three school years ending in 2010, and are intended to show how much value individual teachers add to a school by measuring how much their students’ test scores exceeded or fell short of expectations based on demographics and previous performance. These “value-added assessments” are increasingly being used in teacher-evaluation systems, but they are an imprecise science. “In simple terms, value-added models use mathematical formulas to predict how a group of students will do on each year’s tests based on their scores from the previous year, while accounting for factors that include race, gender, income level and other test results. If the students surpass expectations, their teacher is rated well — “above average” or “high” under New York’s models. If they fall short, the teacher is rated “below average” or “low.” What many teachers point out is that the scores cannot account for many other factors: distractions on test day; supportive parents or tutors; allergies; a dog continually barking near the test site. There are also schools where students are taught by more than one teacher, making it hard to discern individual contributions. (The reports released by the city gave the same rankings to those teachers.)” The ratings released on Friday are also more than a year old and are based on test results that have been somewhat discredited, since the state later readjusted the scoring. For these and many other reasons, the margin of error in these ratings varies greatly. In some cases, it is as low as 35% (for math teachers) but in others, the margin of error is as great as 75%. Still, they offer a peek at the state’s future evaluation system, which will use value-added measures for at least 20 percent of teachers’ evaluations. “The ratings, which began as a pilot program four years ago to improve instruction in 140 city schools, have become the most controversial set of statistics released by the Bloomberg administration. They came out after a long legal battle and amid anguish and protest among educators; on Twitter posts, some compared their release to a modern-day witch hunt.”
Another recent occurrence has been the arrest of three teaching staff members who were accused of sexual crimes involving students. On the 16th, Wilbert Cortez, 49, a computer teacher at P.S. 174, was charged with sexually abusing two male students by touching their genitals and buttocks over their clothes. He was released on $50,000 bail. “A lawyer for Mr. Cortez, Donald H. Vogelman, said his client — who, he said, had no criminal record — intended to fight the case in court. “In my experience,” Mr. Vogelman said, “if the Department of Education has credible evidence that a teacher is a danger to students, they remove that teacher from the classroom. In the year 2000, Mr. Cortez’s case was fully investigated, and a determination was made to put him back in the classroom.””With this, the chancellor of New York City’s schools, Mr. Dennis M. Walcott, has ordered a review of all demonstrated cases of misconduct that date back to 2000 and has promised to remove any teachers who had engaged in sexually inappropriate behavior. These developments came about when angry parents at Public School 174 in Rego Park, Queens, where the most recently arrested teacher worked, confronted Mr. Walcott during a tense two-hour meeting. “And while Mr. Walcott tried to assure parents that the safety of their children was of paramount concern, the city’s public advocate, Bill de Blasio, said in a letter to the chancellor that the city’s overall response had been lacking. “I do not understand how the existence of previous inappropriate conduct does not trigger automatic, ongoing oversight; the absence of such actions by the Department of Education suggests negligent oversight and a failure of accountability,” he wrote.” The special commissioner of investigation for the school system, Richard J. Condon, said that there were 66 substantiated cases involving a sexual allegation in 2011 but this includes a broad range of cases, including sexual harassment of employees, and the Education Department could not immediately say how many had involved inappropriate behavior with students.
And yet another controversy with our educational system, the New York City Department of Education recently released the findings of a year-long audit. “At some city high schools, red flags popped up as soon as the Department of Education started looking at data used to calculate whether students should get a diploma. When auditors looked closely at 53 schools, they found almost 300 students who graduated in 2010 that shouldn't have.” These findings serve to suggest that claims made by Mayor Michael Bloomberg which indicated that improvements in the city’s graduation rate were being made due to his school reforms, may not be entirely reliable. Aaron Dallas of Teachers College stated that: “The big suspicion is schools are making mistakes that are a result of the pressures of this field, in order to boost their graduation rates and their credit accumulation rates, and what this audit is claiming is that most of the time these mistakes are in fact inadvertent. Now that doesn't really absolve the department of making sure that people know the rules.” The DOE is not going to go back and revoke diplomas from the several hundred graduated students who the audit identified as short on requirements but it is making several major policy changes. The biggest shift may arrive starting the next school year, where high schools will no longer grade their own students' Regents exams. Officials are also tightening requirements for something called "Credit Recovery," a policy that lets students quickly make up credits for classes they failed. For the first time, the DOE is also giving schools a written guide spelling out exactly what students need to earn a diploma.
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