City releases charter schools' teachers' rankings
Last Updated:8:54 AM, February 29, 2012
Posted:2:12 AM, February 29, 2012
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| Superintendent Seth Andrew, with students Kevin Lassiter and Mbayang Kasse, at Democracy Prep. |
The city Department of Education released more data on teachers’ effectiveness in the classroom yesterday — this time ranking hundreds of teachers in charter schools and in the citywide special-education district.
The new ratings follow last week’s release of similar data for 18,000 public-school teachers in grades 4 through 8 — which came after The Post won a protracted legal battle to get the information under the Freedom of Information Law.
The data ranks teachers on a scale from 0 to 99 compared to their peers with similar experience, and is based on a complex formula designed to gauge a teacher’s ability to boost their students’ test scores on state math or reading tests.
The breakdown for 32 charter schools showed the high-performing Democracy Prep Charter School in Manhattan staffing the highest-rated teachers in 2010.
Eight of its 14 teachers — who work their classrooms in pairs — scored between 95 and 99, while not one instructor at the Harlem school ranked below a 60.
On the opposite end, not a single teacher at Sisulu-Walker Charter School, the oldest charter school in the state, ranked higher than “average.”
Teachers at the Harlem school, which was graded with a “C” by the city in 2010, were rated from a low of 3 to a high of just 48 based on a single year of data.
“It’s not good. You want your child to go to the best school. You want the teachers to be above average just like how they expect the students to be above average,” said Kevin Walters, whose 8-year-old son attends Sisulu-Walker. “I do expect better.”
Charter schools voluntarily participated in the ratings program, which launched as a pilot program in 2006 and then expanded citywide.
Comparing charter results to the rest of the city is difficult because relatively few charter teachers were rated. But one analysis shows that charters had the largest percentage of highly rated teachers — 39 percent scored a 75 or higher — than any community school district besides Brooklyn’s District 16.
The teachers union had fought the release of the ratings data in court for 17 months, charging that it was error-filled and based on faulty state tests.
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Indeed, the average margin of error for the rankings of charter-school teachers was 22 in math and 44 in English when multiple years of data were used, according to the DOE.
The formula for calculating charter-school rankings was slightly different from that of district schools because it excluded certain variables like student attendance and suspension rates, according to a spokesman.
As for individual instructors, former Harlem Children’s Zone Promise Academy I teacher Monica DeFabio scored the lowest among the two dozen teachers for whom there were multiple years of data.
She ranked in the 3rd percentile for fourth-grade math in 2010, but the error margin put her as high as in the 22nd. She also rated in the 5th percentile for fourth-grade English, but with an error range as high as 31 — which is considered average.
She has since moved to a Success Academy charter school, whose director, Eva Moskowitz, had nothing but praise for her.
“Monica DeFabio is one of the most talented teachers I’ve ever seen,” she said.
One of the few highly ranked teachers with more than one year of data plays the dual role of principal and instructor.
Joseph Negron, principal at KIPP Infinity Charter School in Harlem, ranked in the 99th percentile as a fifth-grade math teacher working in tandem with Angela Fascilla.
Additional reporting by Kevin Fasick
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