On Friday the city released its controversial teacher evaluations with the caveat that "The purpose of these reports is not to look at any individual score in isolation ever." So naturally, that is exactly what everyone has done. Now, with a weekend to absorb the data, an interesting fact has emerged. Lady teachers rock.
Of the 18,000-plus fourth- through eighth-grade English and Math teacher evaluations released, just 15 teachers made absolute top marks and of those only one had a Y chromosome. That there would be more women at the top isn't shocking (men make up just 23.7 percent of the city's teacher corps) but it is interesting that the numbers are so skewed towards the ladies. Which gives us all a chance to talk about why many men simply feel uncompelled to teach. "When we do math-teacher studies," Bryan Nelson, of the national group MenTeach told the Post, "we found that the three main reasons men don’t enter or stay in the field is because of stereotypes that men can’t do the work, because of fears of false accusations of harming children and, lastly, low pay."
Meanwhile, after losing a long fight regarding the release of evaluations, the teachers union, the Department of Education and the Bloomberg administration are battening down and preparing for the next step in the fight: Figuring out how to tweak the city's evals to match the ones that Governor Cuomo wants (or risk losing $200 million in aid) before next January. For the union, that pretty much means getting ready for war. Over the weekend Michael Mulgrew, United Federation of Teachers president, told a reporter that "What I’m going to do now is to stop the mayor from doing any further damage to the children of New York City."
In another interview over the weekend, Mulgrew insisted the evaluations should be taken lightly because, y'know, they don't really mean anything to the people who might want to make something of them (as in parents): "The teacher data reports are completely unreliable. And that's one of the reasons we're out here today to show people that it's the schools that count, it's what the parents think and the principals think that counts. And they do not believe that these reports do anything to serve the teachers and their children well."
