In an op-ed piece that appeared in the August 28 issue of the New York Daily News, well-known education scholar and author (and self-identified union critic) Frederick M. Hess blasted the recent decision by the New York state appellate court that will allow New York City to release student achievement data disaggregated on a teacher-by-teacher basis. Hess’ opinion supports that of United Federation of Teachers (UFT) president Michael Mulgrew, who has promised that UFT will challenge the ruling.
The data under dispute include stats on 12,000 fourth through eighth grade teachers whose students have taken the state reading and math assessments. Using a value-added model, “teachers across the system could theoretically be ranked, from first to last, based on student gains on the reading and math tests.” Several media organizations had sued for access to the individual teacher data, which was granted by the NY state court and held up in the recent appeal decision. The majority decision wrote,
“Balancing the privacy interests at stake against the public interest in disclosure of the information … we conclude that the requested reports should be disclosed. Indeed, the reports concern information of a type that is of compelling interest to the public, namely, the proficiency of public employees in the performance of their job duties.”
Hess disagrees with this analysis, for four reasons. First, there is no agreed-upon “right” way to create a value-added model, making the tool subjective. Second, in situations where students are pulled out for specialized instruction, value-added measures don’t accurately isolate and measure the impact of a specific teacher—the results can be affected by the quality of the specialized instructors, for better or for worse.
Third, Hess notes that in this case there is “a profound failure to recognize the difference between responsible management and this sort of public transparency.” He points out that it is important and makes sense for taxpayers to know where their money is going and that leaders receiving tax money should be reporting on organizational performance; however, it is not sensible to report to the public how many tickets a particular police officer issues or release the performance reviews of national guardsmen. The latter isn’t practiced because “we recognize that these data are imperfect, limited measures and that using them sensibly requires judgment. Sensible judgment becomes much more difficult when decisions are made in the glare of the media spotlight.
Finally, he acknowledges that NYC teachers have a right to be upset. When the Teacher Data Initiative (the project that began the data collection and reporting that is under consideration here) was launched in 2008 by former Chancellor Joel Klein, teachers were assured that the data collection was simply to help improve teacher performance and that the reports were “not to be used for evaluation purposes.” However, in 2010 Klein shifted positions and supported the idea that the reports, including teachers’ names, should be publicly available under the Freedom of Information Act. As Hess writes, “You can hardly blame teachers for feeling sucker-punched.”
To read the full article, please visit http://www.aei.org/article/104061
