Into The Fray I Go

On May 3, without the hooplah of January, the NYC teachers union went back to court to argue against the release of the so-called value-added teacher ratings. Last fall, at least 12 media outlets, including the venerable New York Times, made a request for the ratings through the state's Freedom of Information Law, and NPR has said that if the ratings are released, they too will publish them. Proponents cite a right to know. The union calls the data rankings flawed, and indeed the stated margin of error is more than 60 percent.

The union's lawyer, Charles Moerdler, cited previous cases to argue that no public employee entirely surrenders her right to privacy, and New York's version of FOIA makes an exception for documents that aren't based solely on facts, such as performance evaluations and opinions.

While I am not a lawyer or a journalist, a school teacher or a administrator of any sort, and my understanding of the issue is limited to information gleaned from news articles and the text of the lower court's decision in January, I kind of feel like maybe the union's lawyers are taking the wrong approach on this one.

Privacy is extremely fraught at this cultural moment, for a variety of reasons that are too varied to spend time on here, so I'll just say that in this case I don't think that privacy is a very strong argument.

That's because what happens in the classroom isn't really private, and the teacher rankings, which are probably so flawed as to be useless, aren't about teachers' private lives. When teachers leave school at the end of the day, they deserve all the privacy in the world. When they're not teaching I don't care if they smoke pot or practice polygamy (or even believe that the world is going to end on May 21). But when teachers are on the job I want to know that they're effective.

Actually, I shouldn't generalize here. I am not so interested in the effectiveness of teachers in general. Rather, I am interested in the teachers who teach my children. And for ordinary people like myself, I think that is the crux of the issue.

In fact, the school my children attend () does everything in its power to be transparent. There are open school days when parents can sit in the classroom and observe teachers in action. We have monthly Parents as Learning Partners events. There are publishing parties in which students present their writing to an audience of parents. More than 100 parents volunteer in the cafeteria during lunch. Parents are asked to lead enrichment clusters and brown bag lunch discussions. We receive weekly emails from the parent coordinator and long form report cards that address our children's social and emotional growth, as well as their academic progress.

To say I feel welcome at my children's school would be a gross understatement. Sometimes, in fact, I feel like I suffer from welcome-fatigue. But the openness at the school enables me to feel as though I have a good grasp of methodologies and approaches, of the effectiveness of my children's teachers, and the relationship between teachers and administrators. Moreover, the openness engenders in me a sense that if something were amiss, the principal would be amenable to a productive discussion with me. These are things that are not captured by comparing students' test scores from one year to the next and then having Zoltan the Magificent spit out a ranking.

I have no reason to believe that every school is as open as the school where I send my children. In fact, that's one reason I send them there. It's why we live where we do. And I understand the need for accountability when a school isn't as open as P.S. 29.

That's why, finally, I am really turned off by the union's arguments for privacy, and by the DOE's ineptitude at actually evaluating teachers at a systemic level.

I think the teacher rankings will eventually be released somewhere in some form. I don't think the release will benefit teachers, students, parents or parents of prospective students, but I do think there is a public benefit to the availability of information.

And that's why I believe that teachers should release their own rankings preemptively. When they do so, they should write passionately about why they got the ranking. If a teacher whose high performing students did equally well two years in a row is ranked as average as a result, she is her own best advocate, and can discuss her educational goals and approach, the support she receives (or doesn't) and the extracurricular challenges of her students.

I have a friend who teaches high school in the Bronx. Some of her students have high absenteeism, don't complete homework, work full-time after school or contend with violence and relentless chaos and disorganization in their personal lives. She is a passionate, dedicated teacher, and yet at some point, her resources to reach students is exhausted and despite her passion and dedication her capacity to show improvements on test scores is limited by factors beyond her control. I don't know what her teacher ranking is, or if she even received one. But she has, in a moment of frustration, said that the system is stacked against teachers, and that's not good. That feeling is why so many promising teachers leave in the first five years.

If every teacher who received a so-called rank had a forum in which to divulge the rank and then to discuss the process by which that rank was awarded, we would learn more substantive information about teachers, schools and the learning environment than we would if we wait for the New York Times to publish the so-called ranks without the kind of narrative that creates meaning. It's only a matter of time before these preposterous rankings are released. If teachers themselves take action, they will set the tenor of the conversation. They will have the upper hand.

Right now, the union is doing teachers no favors, and in the age of Wikileaks and FourSquare it seems obvious that disclosure, not specious arguments about privacy, will eventually win out.

To come out ahead, teachers need to tell their version of events first, and tell it loudest.