Updated 02/24/2012 03:17 PM
DOE Releases Ratings For Thousands Of Public School Teachers
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Parents will soon know if their children's teachers have been earning passing grades, as the city's Department of Education released today the performance scores of tens of thousands of teachers later today.
A judge ordered the department to do so, despite resistance from the teachers' union.
The teacher data reports were compiled for three years, beginning with the 2007-2008 school year.
News organizations, including NY1, plan to publish the reports with the teachers' names on the Internet this afternoon.
Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott says he's conflicted since the evaluation data is old and in some cases inaccurate.
"My bottom line is to make sure that we have effective teachers in front of the classroom we have a comprehensive view of what those teachers are doing and taking a look at a variety of measures and variables to really share that information, but at the same time, I don't want our teachers denigrated, I don't want them stereotyped," said Walcott.
The teachers' union claims the scores are misleading and based on questionable data.
An initial look at the breakdown shows teachers are compared by their amount of experience and other classroom factors.
The numbers take into account gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic status - among other things - to try to show how like teachers in similar situations are helping students improve.
But even with the variables, the scores can have a huge margin of error.
The average margin of error for English teachers is 53 percent, and 35 percent for math.
The information is being made available after a freedom of information request from news organizations, including NY1.