The New York City Department of Education must include teachers’ names in the performance-data reports it provides to news outlets to fulfill open-records requests, a New York state court ruled last week.
The United Federation of Teachers had sued to redact teachers’ names from such requests in New York, saying that such a release would constitute an invasion of the teachers’ privacy. The move followed last year’s controversial Los Angeles Times project that linked teacher- and student-performance data from Los Angeles in a public database that rated teachers’ effectiveness in raising students’ test scores.
Judge Cynthia Kern ruled that the information “is of interest to parents, students, taxpayers, and the public generally. Although the teachers have an interest in these possibly flawed statistics remaining private, it was not arbitrary and capricious for the DOE to find that the privacy interest at issue is outweighed by the public’s interest in disclosure.”
UFT President Michael Mulgrew said the union would appeal.
