In 1973, comedian George Carlin was arrested in Milwaukee for performing one of his most well-known bits — “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” — at a local theater.
If Carlin were alive today and working in a public school in New Rochelle he might have added an eighth to his routine — “APPR”.
APPR is an acronym for “Annual Professional Performance Review”, the process required by New York State in which public school teachers and principals are evaluated on a yearly basis. The New York State Education Department requires that all of New York’s 698 public-school entities have a plan for evaluating every educator in the state’s public school system. New Rochelle City School District’s Approved APPR Plans can be read on the NYSED web site.
One of the bigger battles over APPR is the public’s right to know the results.
There can be little doubt that public schools systems like New Rochelle want the public to know as little as possible about the APPR results for specific teachers and principals. In fact, if you look at how the District has “promoted” the availability of APPR data this year — and last — you would be hard-pressed to know that every parent and guardian has a right to review APPR data.
New Rochelle has complied with the base minimum requirements under New York State law by placing a small block, in the lower right corner, below the fold, on the lightly read NRED web site. There have been no notes sent home to parents, no robo-calls, no tweets, no mentions on Facebook, no press releases, just the tiny block at the bottom of the home page with a link to an ominous sounding form.
Even with the data parents can get — current teachers and principals — it does not do much to serve as a guide to differentiating between teachers or principals because as on the edges of the Minnesota prairie where “all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average” we live in a school district where all of the teachers are “effective” or “highly effective”.
In fact, in all of New Rochelle there is just one teacher that was found to be “ineffective” (and one other that needs “developing”).
In 2012, as New York State moved towards a new system for evaluating teachers and principals, Gov. Andrew Cuomo opposed making such evaluations available to the public, something education reform advocates demanded as part of a reforms then under discussion in Albany. Teacher unions, of course, opposed any sort of state evaluations so were, not surprisingly, opposed to releasing any of the data from those evaluations.
In the end, the Governor and the State Legislature split the difference — the data for specific teachers and principals would not be published on the NYSED web site or otherwise broadly distributed but parents could request the data for their children’s teachers and principals.