Days after they released ratings for 18,000 public school teachers based on student test scores, New York City officials released numbers last week for a much smaller number of charter school teachers.
The so-called teacher-data reports for the charter schools showed a range of scores from low to high, as with the traditional public schools. Participation was optional for charter schools, and ratings were released for just 217 charter school teachers. There are more than 130 charter schools in New York City.
The ratings for math and English teachers in the 4th through 8th grades are based on student performance on state tests. Several news organizations filed Freedom of Information Act requests for the data in 2010, but the release was delayed by an unsuccessful United Federation of Teachers lawsuit.
District officials cautioned that there was a large margin of error in the data, which is from the 2009-2010 school year or before.
Of the 147 charter school teachers who participated in 2009-2010, five scored “low,” 35 “below average,” 51 “average,” 40 “above average,” and 16 “high.”
